Archives for May 2017

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the overture to Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the 1954 Salzburg Festival. This is an excerpt from a film of the complete performance, directed by Paul Czinner:

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

“In theory the audience is a solid slab, provided with a single pair of enormous ears, which listen, and with a pair of hands, which clap. Actually it is that elusive scattering flight of winged creatures, darting around, and spending much of its time where it shouldn’t, thinking now ‘how lovely!’, now ‘my foot’s gone to sleep,’ and passing in the beat of a bar from ‘there’s Beethoven back in C minor again!’ to ‘did I turn the gas off?’ Beethoven does not flicker, Beethoven plays himself through. Applause. The piano is closed, the instruments re-enter their cases, the audience disperses more widely, the concert is over.”

E.M. Forster, “From the Audience”

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I report on the world premiere in Chicago of Tracy Letts’ Linda Vista. Here’s an excerpt.

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Tracy Letts, the author of “August: Osage County,” has now given us a three-hour-long comedy about a freshly divorced 50-year-old misanthrope who is wrestling in vain with a suppuratingly malignant midlife crisis. While that topic will likely strike you as less than promising, prepare yourself for a surprise: “Linda Vista,” which has just been given its world premiere by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, might be Mr. Letts’ best play yet….

Wheeler (Ian Barford), Mr. Letts’ antihero, is a hyper-opinionated blowhard, a liberal Archie Bunker with culturally conservative tastes who defines himself by his dislikes (Donald Trump, CGI, karaoke) and thinks the world would be better off if everyone in it conformed at all times to his views on all subjects (“Loyalty to an idea is better than loyalty to people”). As the play gets underway, he is moving into a sterile-looking apartment in suburban San Diego, having smashed up a perfectly good marriage by cheating on his long-suffering wife. He’s not without charm, and it soon becomes evident that a churning reservoir of self-doubt lies just beneath his bullying manner (he gave up a career as a portrait photographer to become a camera repairman after deciding that he wasn’t gifted enough to make the grade). Paul (Tim Hopper), Wheeler’s oldest friend, sets him up with Jules (Cora Vander Brock), a younger “life coach” with a master’s degree in “happiness” who believes that “it’s more fun to like things” and sees through his noisy bluster to the fearful, vulnerable man within. It appears that he may be on the road to reclamation, but then he meets Minnie (Kahyun Kim), an even younger Vietnamese-American “rockabilly girl” whose heavily tattooed arms and dismissive surface manner (“God, white people are so sad”) conceal a closely similar degree of vulnerability, and…well, you can probably guess some of the rest….

Mr. Barford and his six colleagues constitute a true ensemble cast (four of them, in fact, are members of Steppenwolf’s semi-permanent ensemble). Even the minor characters are realized with telling exactitude, and Mr. Barford never lets Wheeler’s charm obscure the blunt unpleasantness of his touch-me-not manner….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Linda Vista:

Jascha Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein, and Gregor Piatigorsky play the first movement of Schubert’s B-Flat Piano Trio in the living room of Rubinstein’s Los Angeles home in 1953:

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

“The old know what they want; the young are sad and bewildered.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, Last Words (courtesy of Patrick J. Kurp)

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, 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)
• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, PG-13/R, closes July 16, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, 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 NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Vanity Fair (serious comedy, PG-13, newly extended through May 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN NEW HAVEN, CONN.:
• Mary Jane (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“There are readers and I am one of them whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, “Montaigne” (courtesy of Patrick J. Kurp)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet plays Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” This performance was originally telecast as part of an episode of Playboy’s Penthouse that aired on October 16, 1960. In addition to Brubeck, the members of the group are Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morello on drums:

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