Archives for May 2017

“By all means, golubchik, finish the play. You feel that it is not turning out as you should like, but don’t trust your feeling, as it may deceive you. One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions.”

Anton Chekhov, letter to Maxim Gorky, September 24, 1900

Evelyn Teachout, my beloved mother, died five years ago this past weekend. Her death is still as vivid to me as if it had happened last night, no doubt in part because I wrote about it in detail not long after the fact. I can close my eyes and see every detail of the nursing-home room in which her long life drew to a close. Yet it really did happen not yesterday but in 2012—the same year, hard as it is for me to grasp, in which John Douglas Thompson first appeared in Satchmo at the Waldorf at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts.

That was quite a year. Among other things, Mrs. T and I drove that summer from San Francisco to San Diego on Highway 1, hitting the road a couple of days after my mother’s funeral. I also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, spent a month working on Satchmo and Duke at the MacDowell Colony, and wrote my five hundredth Wall Street Journal drama column. All these things were and are important to me—yet they are as nothing next to the irreducible, inescapable fact of my mother’s death. We were close my whole life long, and we talked on the phone two or three times each week until her final illness left her too frail to speak. Then, all at once, she was gone, never to return.

I wrote about her often, never more truly than in this 2010 posting about gratitude:

I haven’t mentioned her lately in this space, so perhaps it’s worth saying that my mother did everything right (other than failing to teach me how to cook). Evelyn Teachout, who turns eighty-one in June, mysteriously neglected to make any of the all-too-familiar mistakes that blight the lives of so many of the people I know. She showed me how to laugh, admired my achievements, brushed off my failures, assured me whenever necessary that pretty much anything I wanted to do in life would be fine with her, and never left me in the slightest doubt of her love. She embedded in me what Freud called “that confidence of success that often induces real success.” You can’t get much luckier than that.

A few days after she died, I received and posted this e-mail from a New York friend who sent flowers to her funeral:

I was the white roses, because your mother seemed like white roses to me. When I called the local florist, it was early Monday morning, nine a.m. I figured out where your mother might be from Google, and called around. When I got the flower shop that starts with P, I tried to explain who I was and what I wanted, and who the flowers were for. The woman who answered the phone asked for the family name, and when I told her she sucked in her breath: “Oh, she was a lovely woman, a wonderful woman.” And then in this little Midwestern way, she managed to tell me she was not claiming closeness, just declaring what was obvious. It was so touching, and we had a nice talk.

I couldn’t describe her any better than that kindly florist did in nine simple words.

The same friend asked me the other day to sum up my life. “I had a mother who believed I could do anything I wanted,” I replied. “Now I have a wife who believes the same thing. That’s the whole story, right there.” We make ourselves, but without the steadfast love of those two women, I’d be unimaginably different. Not many people get that lucky twice in a lifetime. I did, and so did my brother.

I miss you, Mom. I always will.

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William Warfield and Aaron Copland perform Copland’s arrangement of “At the River”:

A 1960 performance by New York City Ballet of George Balanchine’s Agon, originally telecast by the CBC. The pas de deux is danced by Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell, who created their roles. This ballet was made in 1957 to a score commissioned from Igor Stravinsky:

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

“The more I see of life, the more I prefer the world of the theater to the real world.”

Cedric Hardwicke, quoted in his obituary (New York Times, August 7, 1964)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an off-Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Here’s an excerpt.

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Whenever John Doyle stages a Stephen Sondheim musical, you can always count on being taken by surprise. Mr. Doyle, the new artistic director of Classic Stage Company, is best known in the U.S. for his influential small-scale revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s “Company,” “Passion” and “Sweeney Todd,” all of which gave us thrilling new ways of looking at three of the supreme theatrical masterpieces of the postwar era. Now he’s turned his hand to “Pacific Overtures,” the 1976 musical in which Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman told the story of the 1854 naval expedition led by Commodore Perry that opened Japan to the West—but did so from the point of view of the Japanese. As usual, Mr. Doyle has found his own way into “Pacific Overtures,” and those who know the show well are more than likely to quarrel with certain of his directorial notions. Yet the results are exciting all the same…

Even when played straight, “Pacific Overtures” is a problem show, one whose two halves fit together awkwardly. The first act is a parable-like meditation on the coming of modernity to an ancient culture, while the second act stoops to ugly-American satire that is razor-sharp but a bit too easy to be wholly persuasive. Mr. Doyle’s “solution” is to mount “Pacific Overtures” in a stripped-down manner that endeavors to underline its political aspect without compromising its subtle poetry. He’s also abridged and revised “Pacific Overtures” in collaboration with the authors, compressing a two-and-a-half-hour musical into an intermission-free 90-minute span.

Poetry is a process of subtraction, and Mr. Doyle’s genius—a word I use advisedly—lies in his ability to pare down a script to its essence. Doubling as director and designer, he has given us a “Pacific Overtures” that unfolds on a bare stage (the only set piece is a single wooden stool) which suggests a giant Japanese scroll, with the audience seated on both sides of the central playing area. The ten actors wear casual modern clothes, using scarves for visual accentuation, and move in a stylized manner redolent of the Noh theater on whose narrative devices Mr. Weidman drew in writing his book. The tone and scale of the production are enthrallingly intimate…

Mr. Doyle has omitted, among other things, “Chrysanthemum Tea,” the witty first-act scena in which the Shogun of Japan is poisoned by his scheming mother when he declines to meet with Commodore Perry. According to Mr. Doyle, this musical number gives “Pacific Overtures” “a slight tendency for comedy to thrive at the expense of the Japanese.” If that sounds like a bow to political correctness, I’d say you’re right—and cutting it is also, dramaturgically speaking, a big mistake. The double-edged satire of “Pacific Overtures” is intended to dramatize the myriad ways in which two cultures can misunderstand one another. Omitting “Chrysanthemum Tea” throws the show out of balance…

Whatever its flaws, “Pacific Overtures” didn’t need to be cut by an hour, much less subjected to a politically tendentious rewrite. Amon Miyamoto’s entrancingly beautiful 2004 Roundabout Theatre Company revival managed quite well without that kind of directorial interference. If you’ve never seen the show, though, you won’t suspect that anything is missing, and this revised version works superlatively well in its own way….

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Read the whole thing here.

“Someone in a Tree,” a song from Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. This video, which features James Dybas and Gedde Watanabe, is drawn from a telecast of a live stage performance of the original Broadway production, directed by Harold Prince and designed by Boris Aronson. It was filmed on June 9, 1976:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about a new book on film music. Here’s an excerpt.

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Because I’m a trained musician, I always notice film music, in much the same way that a painter notices frames. I often tweet about the movies I watch on TV, and I usually say something about their scores when I do so. I’m struck by how many of my readers are surprised by—and interested in—this habit. It’s my impression that they’d like to know more about what film composers do. Where should they go to find out? Until now, I’ve been unable to recommend a good introductory book about the fascinating art of film music. To be sure, there are lots of worthy books on the subject, but they either presuppose a fair amount of musical knowledge on the part of the reader or, as in the case of Kathryn Kalinak’s otherwise fine “Film Music: A Very Short Introduction,” take a theoretical tack from which novices will likely shy away.

Not so Kenneth LaFave’s Experiencing Film Music: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield), a nuts-and-bolts introduction to the topic aimed at people who know nothing about music other than that they like the way it sounds. Mr. LaFave, a critic who also composes, has gone to great trouble to write simply, and he takes nothing for granted, explaining how composers synchronize their music to on-screen action, who decides where to put musical cues (it’s almost always the director—the process is called “spotting”) and other things that film buffs know but of which laymen are unaware….

Most important of all, though, is the clarity with which he explains the dramatic function of film music. He starts right up front by discussing Max Steiner’s score for the original 1933 version of “King Kong,” the first full-scale film score and one that influenced a generation of Hollywood composers. “King Kong,” as it happens, isn’t a very good movie, and that’s why Steiner’s emotionally evocative score was essential to its success. In Mr. LaFave’s well-chosen words, the music “tells the audience what to feel when the screen is filled with empty images and limp dialogue.” When, on the other hand, good composers score high-quality films, they focus and intensify the feelings already present on screen, as Nino Rota did in the baptism scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather.” Again, Mr. LaFave hits the target: “As one after the other of the dons falls to [Michael Corleone’s] plan, the camera goes back and forth between their deaths and Michael’s hypocritical presence at the church, and as this happens, the organ music grows from blessed to damned….”

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Read the whole thing here.

The baptism scene from The Godfather:

The opening sequence of the original TV version of Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg, telecast live by CBS on Playhouse 90 on April 16, 1959. The performance, directed by George Roy Hill, stars Claude Rains, Paul Lukas, Maximilian Schell, and Melvyn Douglas and is introduced by Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the real-life Nuremberg war-crimes trials. Mann’s teleplay was subsequently adapted for the screen in a version directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Spencer Tracy:

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

The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, “The Mower”