Archives for May 2017

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 SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Vanity Fair (serious comedy, PG-13, newly extended through May 27, reviewed here)

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

Thou art but gone before,
Whither the world must follow.

Ben Jonson, “Epitaph on Sir John Roe”

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I report on the premiere of The Antipodes, Annie Baker’s new play. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Annie Baker, who won a Pulitzer Prize three years ago for “The Flick,” is one of America’s most highly praised young playwrights. Nevertheless, I had problems with “The Flick” and “John,” her last two plays, and bigger ones with “The Antipodes,” in which she plunges into the Sea of Confusion. Not that it’s hard to figure out what “The Antipodes” is about—we’ll get to that shortly—but its meaning is swaddled in thick layers of obscurantism which seem to exist, as is Ms. Baker’s wont, to reassure the audience that something important is happening on stage….

“The Antipodes” takes place in an anonymous corporate conference room around whose central table eight of the play’s characters sit. Sarah (Nicole Rodenburg), the ninth character, is an air-headed secretary who flits in and out at odd intervals, changing her jumpsuit for each entrance. Cases of LaCroix Sparkling Water, the trendy flavored seltzer, are stacked against one wall of the room, signaling that its occupants are hip. Sandy (Will Patton), the boss, is an aging businessman-hipster who wears (what else?) a baseball cap….

We are, it emerges, present at a Hollywood-style story conference, although this one also bears a strong resemblance to a group-therapy session. At Sandy’s discreetly threatening we’re-all-just-friends-here behest, the active participants (one person is in the room solely to take notes) swap “embarrassing stories” about their sex lives, the goal being to come up with raw material for…a movie? A miniseries? A video game? That’s never spelled out, although Sandy makes clear that the project is a big, big deal…

This is a potentially interesting situation, but Ms. Baker enacts it in her now-familiar stop-and-go minimalist manner, sprinkling the characters’ monologues with portentous pauses designed to give her deliberately banal dialogue the awkward feel of real-life conversation: “When I was sixteen I kind of uh…I put like half of it in this girl on a camping trip.” As a result, “The Antipodes,” like “The Flick” and “John” before it, proceeds at a glacial pace that seems to grow slower and slower as the play goes on and on…

In due course Sandy is called away to deal with a crisis whose dire-sounding details are vague and self-contradictory, asssuring his subordinates that what they’re doing matters: “These are dark times. Stories are a little bit of light that we can cup in our palms like votive candles to show us the way out of the forest.” No sooner does he leave than increasingly bizarre things start happening to the people in the room. Finally he returns, sans baseball cap and visibly shaken, and tells everybody that that they should go home and “think about going into a different line of work…Like maybe this is actually the worst possible time in the history of the world to be telling stories.”

Got it yet? If not, permit me to direct you to an interview posted on Signature Theatre’s website in which Ms. Baker informs us that “the election has made me think a lot about theatre, and my responsibilities as an artist, and, you know, the point of it all….In November I felt like maybe I didn’t want to make theatre anymore. Now I want to make it more than ever. It’s hard to figure out. The play reflects some of this.” What we have here, in other words, is an apocalyptic fantasy in which Donald Trump is the monster under the bed, lying in wait to gobble up all the gallant storytellers….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, hosted by Charles Collingwood, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and originally telecast by CBS and NBC on February 14, 1962:

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

“To act with common sense, according to the moment, is the best wisdom I know; and the best philosophy, to do one’s duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one’s lot, bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it, whatever it is, and despise affectation.”

Horace Walpole, letter to Sir Horace Mann (27 May 1776)

Of all the Tony Award nominations that were announced today, the one that means the most to me went to John Douglas Thompson for his performance in the Broadway revival of August Wilson’s Jitney. Needless to say, John has also appeared—and will continue to appear—in my own Satchmo at the Waldorf, performing the demanding triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis, for which he won the Outer Critics Circle and Drama Desk Awards when Satchmo ran off Broadway in 2014.

Congratulations, friend and colleague. I hope you’ll have another statuette to put on your mantelpiece come June 11.

A change, they say, is as good as a rest, so on the morning after I filed my last Wall Street Journal drama column of the 2016-17 season, I hopped on a train and headed for Philadephia to take a long-deferred look at American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent, an exhibition of 175 watercolors on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through May 14.

This show has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed, with good reason—it’s the most ambitious exhibition of its kind ever to be mounted—and this smart review, published by Barrymore Laurence Scherer in my own Wall Street Journal, conveys much of what I thought about it.

I do, however, want to make two additional observations:

• It’s long seemed to me—as it does, I gather, to Kathleen A. Foster, the organizer of the exhibition—that one of the most crucially important aspects of the emergence of American watercolor painting was that it opened the door to a looser, freer style of execution which led directly to the emergence of a specifically American mode of modernism.

Many, perhaps most American artists of the pre-impressionist era were inclined to a tightness of handling that bespoke a certain emotional inhibition. Watercolor doesn’t lend itself to that kind of inhibition: it enforces an improvisational approach. To look in chronological sequence at the works by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent on display in Philadelphia is to watch both men coming to life, not only visually but (so to speak) spiritually as well.

• What struck me most forcibly about “American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent” was the large number of first-class watercolors by artists whose names were unfamiliar to me.

It goes without saying that I’ve seen a lot of Homer and Sargent, and I’m also closely familiar with the work of, among others, Childe Hassam (who is well represented in the Teachout Museum) and Maurice Prendergast, both of whom figure prominently in the show. But outside of the big names, my favorite watercolors on display in Philadelphia, all of which are reproduced here, were James Hamilton’s Turneresque Beach Scene at Sunset, J. Frank Currier’s arrestingly proto-modern “White Beeches,” and Bruce Crane’s Snow Scene, the last of which is on loan from the Metropolitan Museum, though I’ve never seen it on view there. All three of these artists were new to me, and I intend to learn much more about them.

“American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent” isn’t a perfect show, not least because it stops a bit too soon. The great American watercolorists of the first part of the twentieth century, John Marin and Charles Demuth in particular, are hastily fobbed off as afterthoughts rather than being presented as the culmination of a major line of artistic development. Nevertheless, this is an immensely important and satisfying exhibition, and since it won’t be traveling beyond Philadelphia, you should make every possible effort to see it while you can.

From 2007:

Though the metaphor embodied in its nickname is long dead, everyone in the world understands that a “movie” consists of “moving pictures,” and it is in the nature of a picture–a photograph–that we take for granted its unfaked reality. A century ago, our great-grandparents were scared out of their wits when one of the villains in The Great Train Robbery pointed his gun at the audience and fired it. Nowadays we’re more sophisticated than that, but most of us still cling to the belief that a film is in some attenuated but still meaningful sense a record of something that actually happened, if only on a soundstage.

Will our children feel this way about film? I doubt it….

Read the whole thing here.