Archives for 2017

Mrs. T and I got married ten years ago today. We’d met a couple of years earlier and fallen in love at first sight—such things really do happen—and we’ve been together ever since.

Our wedding took place on a chartered yacht called (I swear) the Romantica. We cruised around the island of Manhattan that night with several dozen friends and family members. I’ve never seen so many joyous-looking people in one place at one time, starting with the bride and groom, both of whom were about as delighted as it’s possible for two people to be. We still are.

I’ve had a lot to say in this space since then about my beloved wife. Our life together has been exciting, exhausting, and complicated. We’ve shared adventures of all kinds all over the country. The best ones, I think, have been on Florida’s Sanibel Island, our home away from home, but it’d be hard to single out any specific occasion as uniquely special. (O.K., maybe this one.) Yet we always return with undiminished pleasure to our art-filled apartment in New York and our scruffy little farmhouse in rural Connecticut, where we sit together on the couch night after night, watching double and triple features on TCM and talking about everything under the sun. Our tastes, aesthetic and otherwise, are largely in common, our opinions less so, which keeps the talk lively, as does Mrs. T’s naughty tendency to puncture whatever conversational balloon I may be feeling inclined to inflate. (This little vignette will give you some idea of what our evenings at home are like.)

To marry in middle age is an adventure in and of itself. Mrs. T and I are both stubborn, settled creatures of long-established habit, and though we quickly made room for each other in our lives, it wasn’t always easy for us to get along. Yet that never seemed to matter, and still doesn’t: I know that from the night we met, I’ve never wanted to share my life with anyone else. She has opened doors in my heart and soul that I didn’t even know existed. Among many, many other things, I have no doubt whatsoever that had we not met, I wouldn’t have found it within myself to start writing for the stage. When I took my first curtain call, she was in the audience, cheering loudly and proudly. She’s been there ever since.

It is a miraculous thing to suddenly find yourself living with a smart, funny, indomitably gallant woman, an everyday miracle that is far too easily taken for granted. I know I do that sometimes, and I hate myself for it, but far more often than not, I’m intensely aware of how lucky I am to have met Mrs. T, and how much luckier I am that she was willing to settle down with me.

When, eleven years ago, the then-future Mrs. T and I trimmed our first Christmas tree together in Connecticut, I made the following observation: “To be happy, not in memory but in the moment, is the shining star on the tree of life.” That is what I am, and she is the person to whom I owe it. Our marriage is the best thing to have happened to me in a life overflowing with good fortune. May it go on and on.

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Tony Bennett and Bill Evans perform “Lucky to Be Me,” by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. This song was sung by Mary Foster Conklin at our wedding:

Yvonne de Carlo sings Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Here” (from Follies) on Hollywood’s Diamond Jubilee, originally telecast by CBS on November 11, 1978. She first performed the song, which was specifically written for her, in the show’s original 1971 Broadway production:

“Marriage as a long conversation. — When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human (trans. R.J. Hollingdale)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review a Vermont revival of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound and an off-Broadway production of As You Like It. Here’s an excerpt.

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Neil Simon has disappeared from Broadway, a street that he used to own. Only one of his plays, the 2005 Nathan Lane-Matthew Broderick revival of “The Odd Couple,” has had a successful run there in the past decade and a half. For this reason, I’ve spent the past few seasons seeking out regional revivals of Mr. Simon’s plays in an attempt to learn how they’re holding up now that fashions in comedy have changed. That’s what brought me to Vermont last week to see “Broadway Bound,” whose David Cromer-directed 2009 Broadway revival was canceled due to lack of interest—and you know what? It turns out to be a very strong piece of work, one of the most impressive of the more-or-less autobiographical plays in which Mr. Simon portrayed the splendors and miseries of his youth with a potent blend of harsh candor and honest sentiment.

Oldcastle Theatre Company, a 46-year-old troupe headquartered in a 120-seat theater in downtown Bennington, is giving “Broadway Bound” an unusually effective staging, one that profits from the presence of a rock-solid cast. All six members are wholly believable in the roles of Eugene (Anthony J. Ingargiola), Simon’s fictional alter ego, and the extended family with which he lived in deepest Brooklyn. Best of all—if only by an inch or two—is Sarah Corey, who plays Eugene’s mother, a once-lively Jewish hausfrau whose spirit has been battered by the slow crumbling of her marriage to an angry, dark-souled husband (Jason Asprey) who is seeing another woman on the side. But everyone in this production is distinguished…

Classic Stage Company, one of New York’s most admired off-Broadway theaters, has launched its fiftieth season with an “As You Like It” directed by John Doyle, who become CSC’s artistic director last year. Mr. Doyle, who specializes in spare small-scale stagings of musicals, hasn’t done much Shakespeare, and this production, a 100-minute-long minimalist version of Shakespeare’s comedy, is very much in the now-familiar style of his CSC revivals of Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” and “Passion.” The set, which he designed himself, is as close to a bare stage as you can get, and the actors, as is also Mr. Doyle’s wont, supply their own instrumental accompaniment for the agreeable Broadway-style songs, set to Shakespeare’s words by Stephen Schwartz, with which the show is sprinkled.

Perhaps in part because the first song doesn’t come along until a half-hour into the proceedings, Mr. Doyle’s “As You Like It” gets off to a slowish, oddly unspecific start. It feels as if we are meant to see Ellen Burstyn, who is dressed in drag as Jaques and spends much of the first part of the play sitting on a trunk reading along with a script that she holds in her lap, as the director—or possibly not. Truth to tell, I never really thought that Mr. Doyle’s underlying concept for the production registered with full clarity…

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To read my review of Broadway Bound, go here.

To read my review of As You Like It, go here.

Linda Lavin and Jonathan Silverman perform a scene from the original production of Broadway Bound on the 1987 Tony Awards telecast. They are introduced by Angela Lansbury:

I wrote a Wall Street Journal column about Roman Polanski in 2009. In it, I made prominent and invidious mention of Harvey Weinstein. This is what I said about him eight years ago.

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Nowadays you practically have to kill somebody to get blacklisted in Hollywood. Mere rape, by contrast, scarcely jiggles the needle of outrage. Producer Harvey Weinstein actually went so far as to describe Mr. Polanski’s odious conduct as a “so-called crime.” The names of such noted filmmakers as [Woody] Allen, Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, Sam Mendes, Mike Nichols, Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderbergh can be found on an international petition whose 100-plus signers “demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.”…

On Thursday [Weinstein] gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times that will live long in the annals of arrogance. Not only does Mr. Weinstein believe that Mr. Polanski should be set free at once, but he claims that “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion. We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” That’s the voice of a man who spends his days listening to toadies—and who knows nothing of the deeply felt beliefs of the ordinary people who pay their hard-earned money to see his pictures. I wonder how many of them will henceforth be inclined to steer by the compass of anyone who thinks that rape is a “so-called crime.”

Mr. Weinstein is, of course, a moral idiot. But why did so many of Mr. Polanski’s artistic peers rush to defend him? Is it really because “Chinatown” is so good? Perhaps, though I suspect it’s at least as likely that certain of the people who signed the “Free Polanski” petition are also thinking of the skeletons in their own well-filled closets. Rich and famous people, after all, are accustomed to having their own way, no matter what it is or whom it hurts. (Ask David Letterman.) When one of their own gets caught in the act, their instinct is to circle the wagons.

The unseemly rapidity with which Mr. Polanski’s friends lined up to support him is also a demonstration of the extent to which Hollywood is isolated from the rest of the world. It’s a company town, a place where the powerful can go for months at a time without hearing anyone disagree with them about anything. It was no joke when Mel Gussow gave the title “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking” to his 1971 biography of Darryl F. Zanuck. Anyone who lives in a tightly sealed echo chamber of self-congratulation, surrounded by yes-men who are dedicated to doing what he wants, is bound to lose touch with reality sooner or later. Can there be any doubt that this is what has happened to the signers of the Polanski petition? Like Mr. Weinstein, they sincerely believe that whatever they think, say, do or want is right. In fact, I’m sure that most of them will be staggered to learn (assuming that their flunkies have the nerve to tell them) that when it comes to preying on teenage girls, most people think otherwise….

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Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE: Harvey Weinstein called me up after this piece was originally published in the Journal. Instead of yelling at me, he told me how much he liked my biography of Louis Armstrong. I was astonished, polite—and suspicious. I never heard from him again, nor did I want to. But having read the recent stories about him, I now realize that it was part of his modus operandi. Had my piece been more than a sideswipe—or if I’d had occasion to write about him again—I expect he would have called a second time and dangled a quid-pro-quo bribe of some kind (i.e., offering to option one of my books). I never made that mental connection, though, until yesterday.

I guess I’m just not cynical enough.

Chester Gould, the creator of the Dick Tracy comic strip, appears as the first guest on To Tell the Truth. Bud Collyer is the host and the panelists are Orson Bean, Kitty Carlisle, Peggy Cass, and Tom Poston. This episode was originally telecast on October 4, 1965:

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

“All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.”

Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I reflect on The Jazz Singer, which was released ninety years ago tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt.

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Ninety years ago this week, a New York audience saw—and heard—Al Jolson step in front of a camera and say “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Those 11 words changed the world. Jolson’s signature line, spoken in “The Jazz Singer,” was the first lip-synchronized speech heard in a feature-length film. Before then, feature films were “silent.” When actors moved their lips, their dialogue was printed on title cards flashed on the screen. All you heard was background music played live by a pianist, an organist or a pit orchestra. “The Jazz Singer” changed that forever. Within two years of its release, Hollywood stopped making silent movies. In a single dazzling stroke of innovation, the “talkies,” as sound films were initially known, had made them obsolete….

Writing a few weeks after its release, Robert E. Sherwood, a movie critic who later became one of America’s top playwrights, found it to be “fraught with tremendous significance,” but not for its artistry. “I for one suddenly realized that the end of the silent drama is in sight,” he wrote. Sherwood may have been the first writer to fully grasp the culture-changing power of “The Jazz Singer”: Not only did it introduce a new storytelling medium, but it killed off an old one.

By 1927, silent film had produced a considerable number of works of art that are—or should be—as watchable today as they were then Thanks to TCM, it’s possible for contemporary audiences to view Buster Keaton’s “The General,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” and see how much a movie without words can say. But the existence of these masterpieces made no difference to ordinary moviegoers, then or now. They preferred the talkies, and the film industry, both here and abroad, unhesitatingly gave them what they wanted….

Is this a bad thing? I suppose so, though I’m more inclined to see it as an example of what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.” He believed that capitalism “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” That’s more or less what happened to silent film: It was destroyed by a technological innovation that was instantaneously embraced by vast numbers of people. As a result, the careers of many gifted artists dried up and blew away—but without it, we’d still be reading sketchy fragments of dialogue off title cards instead of hearing for ourselves the unforgettable sound of Humphrey Bogart growling “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine” in “Casablanca.” So who made out on the deal? We all did.

What I find most interesting about this radical transformation of mass taste, however, is that it is nearly unique in the history of art….

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Read the whole thing here.

Al Jolson’s first dialogue scene in The Jazz Singer: