Archives for April 2017

My “Sightings” column, which appears in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, is about TCM Big Screen Classics, which showed North by Northwest in U.S. multiplex cinemas last week. Here’s an excerpt.

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Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel that shows uncut, uncolorized classic films around the clock, has done more to improve the lives of movie buffs than anything or anyone since Thomas Edison. TCM’s latest venture, though, is worthy of special note: TCM Big Screen Classics, undertaken in collaboration with Fathom Events, screens classic films each month in multiplexes throughout the U.S. Now that the revival houses that used to show such films on a regular basis are on the way to extinction, most people “know” old movies solely from watching them on TV, or on hand-held devices. Thanks to TCM, you can see them the way they’re supposed to be seen….

Well into the ’60s, movies were normally shown in auditoriums equipped with screens up to 100 feet wide that held between 250 and 1,000 viewers (New York’s Radio City Music Hall seats 6,000). Golden-age directors took it for granted that their work would be seen on such screens, and when Hollywood embraced wide-screen filming in the ’50s to compete with TV, big-theater projection became even more central to the moviegoing experience.

All this started to change with the introduction of multiplex cinemas. Projection screens started shrinking, and theaters that continued to show older films increasingly did so in houses holding no more than 100 viewers. These miniaturized theaters were incapable of providing the eye-popping experience of viewing a classic film on a full-sized screen—and when the same films were reformatted to fit the TV screens of the ’60s and ‘70s, it became even harder for younger viewers to fully appreciate them….

That’s why I made a point of going to a Big Screen Classics showing of “North by Northwest.” This was the first time that I’d seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece of suspense in a theater, and I can’t begin to tell you how many subtle details that typically go unnoticed in your living room all but exploded off the large screen on which I watched the film. Always the most visually minded of golden-age directors, Hitchcock took full advantage of VistaVision, not just in the climactic Mount Rushmore chase scene but throughout the picture. One of the most striking moments in the film comes when Cary Grant and a mysterious stranger stare suspiciously at one another from across a deserted rural highway. Hitchcock places them at the extreme left and right sides of the screen, and when you watch the scene in a theater, the dusty road that separates the two men looks as wide as a canyon.

For me, though, it was even more instructive to watch “North by Northwest” in the company of a theater full of other people, many of whom were clearly seeing the film for the first time. When you’re watching it by yourself, it’s easy to forget that “North by Northwest” is less a cloak-and-dagger adventure story than a high romantic comedy with a light glaze of thriller sauce. Why is this the case? Because most of us tend not to laugh out loud when we’re alone. Not so the audience with whom I saw it last week. Instead of sitting somberly like a bunch of grim-faced graduate students, we all hooted at Ernest Lehman’s fizzy, flawlessly timed one- and two-liners…

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from North by Northwest:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes July 2, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, most shows sold out last week, original production reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes June 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Price (drama, G, too long and serious for children, virtually all shows sold out last week, extended through May 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Vanity Fair (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Come Back, Little Sheba/Picnic (dramas, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, reviewed here)

“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.”

Igor Stravinsky (interviewed in The New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1964)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new musical version of Groundhog Day. Here’s an excerpt.

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Andy Karl’s worst dream came painfully, horrifically true last Friday night: He took a show-stopping fall and injured his left knee 10 minutes before the end of “Groundhog Day,” the new musical based on the 1993 movie. To everyone’s astonishment, Mr. Karl came back out and finished the last scene on a crutch—but he canceled out of Saturday’s shows, the final previews before “Groundhog Day” opened on Monday….

Mr. Karl returned to “Groundhog Day” on Monday, wearing a black knee brace but showing no other visible sign of his agonizing ordeal—and as they say in show business, he killed. A good-looking, magnetically charismatic fellow with a rich singing voice and the effortless moves of an old-time hoofer, Mr. Karl did the impossible: He made you forget about Bill Murray, the star of Harold Ramis’ screen comedy about Phil Connors, a jaded TV weatherman who inexplicably gets stuck in a “Twilight Zone”-like cosmic loop and is forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over again until he learns the meaning of true love. Instead of aping Mr. Murray’s inimitably cynical performance, Mr. Karl did it his way, playing Connors as a naturally likable guy who has been pickled in the bitter brine of frustration—and he made it work….

Danny Rubin, the co-author of the original screenplay, and Tim Minchin, who wrote the score for “Matilda the Musical,” are jointly responsible for turning “Groundhog Day” into a stage musical, and they’ve done a smart, mostly solid job of it. Likewise Matthew Warchus, who staged “Matilda” with cleverness and verve and has done no less well this time around. I won’t try to tell you, however, that “Groundhog Day: The Musical” is a great show. In truth, it’s an entertaining but fundamentally ill-conceived attempt to do the impossible. Stephen Sondheim, who once gave serious thought to turning Mr. Ramis’ much-loved film into a musical, later explained in an interview why he changed his mind: “It cannot be improved. It’s perfect the way it is.” Bull’s-eye….

So why bother going to see to a musical that fails by definition to improve on perfection? Because it’s safe. It costs more than ever to see a Broadway show, and the number of people who are prepared to drop $149 on a musical about which they know nothing is shrinking accordingly. Fortunately, “Groundhog Day” is much, much better than the usual run of what I call “commodity musicals,” in which hit movies like “Legally Blonde,” “Sister Act” or “Young Frankenstein” are retrofitted with songs and dances but otherwise stick like superglue to their source material….

Sure, “Groundhog Day” is still a gussied-up commodity musical at bottom, in addition to which it lacks a memorable score. Most of Mr. Minchin’s songs are lively but facelessly eclectic, and his overstuffed, ill-crafted lyrics (somebody really should have told him that “erection” and “reception” don’t rhyme) never tell us anything about the characters that we haven’t already learned from the dialogue. What’s more, the first act is so noisy and hectic that the underlying romantic yearning of Phil and Rita (charmingly played by Barrett Doss), the TV producer whom he falls for, gets lost in the clatter. But “Groundhog Day” calms down and finds its emotional footing in the second act, in which Mr. Minchin gives his stars a truly fine ballad, “Seeing You,” that allows them to express their new love with the open-hearted warmth for which you’ve been waiting all night long….

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Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from the stage version of Groundhog Day:

Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck play a duet version of “Balcony Rock” at a 1976 concert in Boston:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, notebook entry, The Crack-Up

From 2007:

Anybody who knows anything about American theater knows that George M. Cohan, Broadway’s very own Yankee Doodle Dandy, starred in the original 1933 Broadway production of Ah, Wilderness! It was the first time Cohan had ever acted in a straight play of any significance, and by all accounts he was terrific—but he wasn’t the only star of the show. Who played his sixteen-year-old son, the painfully earnest writer-in-the-making that O’Neill based on himself when young?…

Read the whole thing here.

“Without intending it, women in the midst of a successful marriage always conveyed a sort of rebuke to other people, implying that if they could do it why couldn’t everyone else.”

John P. Marquand, B.F.’s Daughter