Archives for November 2017

Sallie Wilson and American Ballet Theatre perform Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire, preceded by a featurette in which Tudor and Agnes de Mille talk about Tudor’s choreography. The score is Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. This performance was originally telecast on PBS as part of a 1973 documentary called American Ballet Theatre: A Close-Up in Time:

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

“Liffey did not like to display weakness: and weakness admitted is the very stuff of good friendship.”

Fay Weldon, Puffball (courtesy of Sara Kramer)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of The Band’s Visit. Here’s an excerpt.

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The best musical of the year has made it to Broadway. After a successful but far too short off-Broadway run at the Atlantic Theater, “The Band’s Visit” has moved uptown with all of its wondrous charm and warmth intact. Directed with supreme finesse by David Cromer and performed by the best cast imaginable, this small-scale show is fine enough to fill you with fresh hope for a genre that has lately been running on fumes….

Adapted for the stage by Itamar Moses and David Yazbek from Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film, “The Band’s Visit” is the story of a fictional occurrence that was, as one of the characters readily admits, “not very important.” The eight members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, it seems, have traveled to Israel from Egypt in order to perform at an Arab cultural center located in the city of Petah Tikva. Such, at any rate, is their intention, but they’re sidetracked en route by a mispronounced consonant: Since there is no “p” sound in Arabic, most English-speaking Egyptians automatically replace that consonant with “b.” Slightly fractured English being the lingua franca of the modern-day Middle East, the musicians inadvertently find themselves in Bet Hatikva, a hopelessly provincial desert village whose cultural attractions consist of two restaurants, a roller rink, and a concrete “park” devoid of grass or trees.

In less knowing hands, this mishap might easily have been played for farce and nothing more. But while “The Band’s Visit” gets plenty of well-deserved laughs in its opening scenes, Messrs. Moses and Yazbek are hunting bigger game. We soon discover that the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra and the bored residents of Bet Hatikva who spend their days “waiting for something to happen” all have something in common: They long for their little lives to be enlarged by love.

Some of the rest you can guess for yourself, but part of what makes “The Band’s Visit” so special is that it steers clear of the obvious….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Band’s Visit:

The trailer for the original film version of The Band’s Visit:

Thelonious Monk plays a solo version of “Just a Gigolo,” by Irving Caesar and Leonello Casucci. This performance was originally telecast on Japanese television on May 23, 1963:

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

“People get embarrassed when they watch Fawlty Towers. I was in a therapy group once with a judge; when he joined the group he had no idea who I was. Most of the other people in England at that time would have some idea but he didn’t. When I told him what I did for a living, he said he’d watch Fawlty Towers. When I saw him next he said he’d started to watch it and had become so embarrassed by everybody’s behavior that he had to leave the room. The vicarious embarrassment was too much for him. I thought that was just perfectly funny.”

John Cleese, quoted in David Marchese, In Conversation: John Cleese (Vulture, September 12, 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)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Portuguese Kid (comedy, PG-13, extended through Dec. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• After the Blast (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 19, reviewed here)
• The Home Place (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:
• Shakespeare in Love (historical romcom, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Jesus is said to have never laughed in the Bible, and I think it’s because laughter contains an element of surprise—something about the human condition that you haven’t spotted yet—and Jesus was rarely surprised. I still laugh, but many of the things that would have made me laugh 30 years ago—paradoxes about human nature—wouldn’t make me laugh anymore because I just believe them to be true. They’re not revelations.”

John Cleese, quoted in David Marchese, In Conversation: John Cleese (Vulture, September 12, 2017)

I spent much of Tuesday sitting in an upstairs studio at Palm Beach Dramaworks, rehearsing Billy and Me, my second play, which opens there on December 8. The plan was simply to read through the play from start to finish, but we ended up taking a searching look at the second act, as a result of which I went straight home after rehearsal and spent the evening doing rewrites.

These weren’t the kind of scared-to-death rewrites that you do when it’s obvious to everyone in the room that a show simply isn’t working. They were aimed at taking an act that was already strong and making it smoother and clearer. I know this because the half-dozen new speeches that I wrote last night gushed out of me like water from a fire hose. Pretty much the same thing happened at the first rehearsal of Shakespeare & Company’s 2012 production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, at which Gordon Edelstein and John Douglas Thompson cheerfully informed me that they both thought I ought to write a new character, Miles Davis, into the show, preferably that same night. I gulped a couple of times, then went home, rolled up my sleeves, set to work, and showed up at the rehearsal hall the following morning with the job all done. That’s more or less how things went yesterday.

Bill Hayes, the artistic director of Palm Beach Dramaworks and the director of Billy and Me, and Nicholas Richberg and Tom Wahl, who are playing the parts of Tennessee Williams and William Inge, are friends and colleagues of long standing, so it was no surprise that the four of us got along so famously. What made me even happier was that I made the acquaintance yesterday of Cliff Burgess, who is playing three smaller parts, and Debi Marcucci, Katie Pyne, and Stefanie Anarumo, the stage manager, assistant stage manager, and assistant to the director, all of whom were new to me. I can already tell that Cliff, the newest member of the cast, is going to do a terrific job. As for Debi, Katie, and Stefanie, I love working with women—virtually all of my best friends are women—and I knew within seconds of saying hello to them that Bill had put together a fabulous team.

I figure we’ll probably start off today’s rehearsal by reading the new speeches that I wrote last night and discovering how they sound when spoken out loud by first-class actors. I’m sure I’ll be doing a certain amount of topping and tailing after that, but I already feel good about our first day’s work.