Archives for June 2017

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Connecicut revival of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. Here’s an excerpt.

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A year after his death, Peter Shaffer has receded into the shadows of forgotten fame. It scarcely seems possible that the playwright who gave us “Amadeus” and “Equus,” two of the biggest theatrical hits of the postwar era, should now be so ill-remembered on this side of the Atlantic, but it makes unhappy sense of a sort. Most of his plays are big machines that require large and costly casts to bring off, which makes them dicey for Broadway and riskier still for even the most ambitious regional theaters. In any case, his old-fashioned brand of serious middlebrow theater has fallen from favor: “Amadeus” and “Equus” are the only major plays by Mr. Shaffer ever to have been revived on Broadway, and neither revival was more than modestly successful. So it’s great news that “Lettice and Lovage,” Mr. Shaffer’s last hit, is now being performed by Westport Country Playhouse. Written in 1987 as a vehicle for Maggie Smith, it’s a chokingly funny farce enriched by a savory touch of seriousness, and Mark Lamos’ smart staging never puts a foot wrong.

In “Lettice and Lovage,” we make the acquaintance of Charlotte (Mia Dillon), an imperious bureaucrat whose shell of melancholy prissiness is smashed to bits when she makes the acquaintance of Lettice (Kandis Chappell), a splendidly flamboyant tour guide whose job it is to tell bored tourists about “the dullest house in England.” Instead of sticking to the colorless story of Fustian House, Lettice starts rolling her own anecdotes, the wilder the better, and Charlotte, her supervisor, is forced to fire her. Naturally, the two women become friends, and this being a farce, their friendship soon attracts the attention of the police….

The role of Lettice, created by Dame Maggie, is the plummiest of plum parts, and Ms. Chappell wears it like a perfectly tailored, fabulously elaborate period costume. It’s pure pleasure to catch the loony glint in her eye as she elaborates with quick-rising implausibility on the dull history of Fustian House. Ms. Chappell was forced to step into the part a week before the show opened when the actor originally hired by Mr. Lamos fell ill, but you wouldn’t have known it from her opening-night performance, which was totally assured. As for Ms. Dillon, she’s nothing short of ideal as Charlotte…

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Read the whole thing here.

Dame Maggie Smith and Margaret Tyzack appear in an excerpt from the 1990 Broadway production of Lettice and Lovage, originally telecast as part of that season’s Tony Awards show:

Jonathan Winters leads a platoon of eight Marine recruiting sergeants in close-order drill on I’ve Got a Secret. (He had served as a Marine in World War II.) This episode, hosted by Garry Moore, was originally telecast by CBS on April 16, 1962. The panelists are Merv Griffin, Henry Morgan, Bess Myerson, and Betsy Palmer:

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

“He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.”

Don DeLillo, White Noise

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, most 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, closes August 20, 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Pacific Overtures (musical, PG-13, closes June 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN HARTFORD, CONN.:
• Heartbreak House (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Am I claiming, you ask, never to use living people as models in my writing? Oh no. I use people. I use myself, which means that I use everything I find in my brain—experiences, impressions, memories, reading matter by other writers—everything, including the people who surround me and impinge on my awareness. Sometimes I am asked, ‘Do you think it’s nice of you?’ and I reply honestly, ‘I don’t know. It isn’t a question in my mind of being nice or not nice. I can’t help it any more than I can help breathing. I am not apologizing or defending myself: there it is. I do it and I will always do it as long as I write, and it’s no use trying to bring in the ethical aspects of writing. People who mind should stay away from writers. I think that they do, on the whole. People who don’t mind but say they do will go on talking to me, and they are happy, so I don’t worry about them.”

Emily Hahn, China to Me: A Partial Autobiography

Louis Armstrong performs on Disneyland’s Mark Twain Riverboat, accompanied by Kid Ory on trombone and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, both of whom played with Armstrong in the Twenties on his original Hot Five recordings. This film clip was originally telecast by NBC on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on April 15, 1962:

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

“What I learnt from studying with Nadia Boulanger was that personal style was a special case of technique, the predilection one has to voice chords or manipulate instrumentation in certain ways. But this predilection lies within a larger framework of technique, and I tell young composers that without learning technique, they’ll never have a style.”

Philip Glass, interviewed by Jed Distler (Gramophone, February 20, 2017)