Archives for 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)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Mary Jane (drama, PG-13, extended through Oct. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN PHILADELPHIA:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN BOSTON:
• Merrily We Roll Along (Sondheim, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)
• The Madness of George III (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING TOMORROW IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Cyrano de Bergerac (verse drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A Flea in Her Ear (farce, PG-13/R, closes Oct. 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS.:
• God of Carnage (comedy, R, closes Oct. 8, reviewed here)

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Threatened”

The Julian Bream Consort performs John Dowland’s “The Earl of Essex’s Galliard” in an undated Japanese telecast:

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

“Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

I never bought an album by Tom Petty. He launched his career at the same moment that I stopped listening to pop music on the radio, and by the time it was in full swing, my artistic interests lay elsewhere. It was only long after the fact that I first heard him, and that was under unusual circumstances: he performed “I Won’t Back Down” on America: A Tribute to Heroes, a prime-time telethon-style benefit concert for the victims of and first responders to the attack on the World Trade Center that aired a couple of weeks after 9/11. The song hit me hard—I don’t see how it could possibly have had any other effect on a New Yorker—but I wasn’t exactly taking in new aesthetic data right then, and it never occurred to me to follow up on the music of the man who sang it that night.

Our Girl in Chicago had long since nudged me into starting to pay closer attention to contemporary pop, but Petty wasn’t on her radar—she’s younger than I am—and I came away with the impression that his music was a bit behind the times. (She’s more the David Bowie type.) So, I gather, it was, which is why it never occurred to me that Petty might in fact be precisely my kind of rocker, a latter-day John Fogerty whose unpretentious, straight-from-the-shoulder songs connected with the feelings of ordinary Americans in a manner similar to that of country music back in the days before it got slick.

The funny thing is that I heard a fair amount of Petty’s music throughout the next decade and a half, more often than not in cabs and rental cars. Once again, though, I didn’t know whose records I was hearing, and for some inexplicable reason, I never sought any of them out.

I thought at once of “I Won’t Back Down” when Petty died yesterday. Within a few hours I learned from the tributes posted on the social media that he’d meant a great deal to a great many people I know who’d never had occasion to mention his name to me. So I followed my nose and started downloading the songs that they singled out for special mention. Mere minutes later I realized that I’d been missing out on something, and someone, very special. Now I’m doing something about it.

One of the pieces about Petty that I’ve liked best, an essay by Mark Hemingway, ends with a passage that echoes what I’ve also been hearing from a number of other people:

America is grieving today for several reasons. And the shooting in Vegas is a tragedy that threatens to divide us along political lines. I’d like to think a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever. We simply can’t afford to lose our Tom Pettys.

That was pretty much how everybody I knew felt after 9/11. We drew together for a brief time, but we didn’t stay together, and I think it even less likely that we’ll do so now. Instead of joining in solidarity, Americans are choosing to hide behind the high walls of tribalism, talking to those who agree with them instead of listening to those who don’t. But if anything will knock a few bricks off the tops of those walls, it’s art.

I’ve had more than one occasion to quote in this space what C.S. Lewis said in the last paragraph of An Experiment in Criticism:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

I don’t know that it’s so very inappropriate to cite those words again in connection with Tom Petty. His songs speak to an extraordinarily wide range of people, not a few of whom seem to disagree on pretty much everything else. Yet they all love his music, and they miss him now that he’s gone. In that if nothing else, he brings them together and allows them to transcend themselves.

I haven’t any illusions about what lies in store for my beloved country. I expect it to fall apart, sooner rather than later. But I’m touched to the heart by our shared sorrow over a rock musician who wrote songs about emotions and experiences that we all feel and understand. I wish I’d discovered him sooner, but I don’t mind catching up with the rest of the world. You can’t stay on top of everything, and the perennial miracle of art is that it waits for you: if it’s good, it never grows stale. Somehow I doubt that Tom Petty will grow stale any time soon.

UPDATE: Our Girl in Chicago writes:

I’ve always liked Tom Petty! He was definitely part of the general soundtrack of my junior high and high school years, and someone who has been in my iTunes for some years. I don’t think liking him is incompatible with liking Bowie at all.

I happily stand corrected.

* * *

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform “I Won’t Back Down” on America: A Tribute to Heroes, telecast by all four broadcast networks on September 21, 2001:

From 2007:

My mother’s life, in short, is a bridge between two prfoundly, almost unimaginably different worlds. A child of the Great Depression, she was raised on a farm and baptized in a river, and has lived long enough to watch me talk on a computer screen, though she’s never owned a computer of her own. Cake mixes and air conditioning are more her speed. The most recent inventions of any significance that she embraced wholeheartedly were the answering machine, the ATM, and the VCR. (She has a DVD player but never uses it.)
I suppose we all reach a moment in our lives when we lose interest in the new, and I suspect that moment comes sooner for technology than for art….

Read the whole thing here.

“Time is the most precious gift in our possession, for it is the most irrevocable.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

I’ve been on the road too much of late to do much blogging. Now that Mrs. T and I are home again, I have time to do some catching-up before the fall theater season gets going in earnest. On Friday I announced the debut of Three on the Aisle, the new podcast about theater in America that Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I launched last week. Here are a few other things that I want to share with you:

• Mrs. T and I took two days off in between shows, went up to New Hampshire, and spent an afternoon driving up and down the Mount Washington Auto Road, a seven-and-a-half-mile-long road built in 1861 that goes all the way up to the summit of Mount Washington, whose altitude is 6,145 feet. Even in September, it’s cold and windy up there—sixty-seven miles an hour on the day we made the ascent—and the drive is, shall we say, a bit nerve-racking. A sign at the entrance to the road accurately describe it as “a steep, narrow mountain road without guardrails. If you have a fear of heights, you may not appreciate this driving experience.” That’s putting it softly, but we found the experience thrilling, though the two of us agreed when it was over that we’d settle for the guided tour on our next visit.

• We also made time to see a new movie, Dunkirk, from which we came away with sharply mixed feelings. It’s a technically impressive piece of work, and Mark Rylance gives a noteworthy performance, but the film as a whole struck me as little more than an unintelligent exercise in pure, context-free sensation, the real-life counterpart of the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley portrayed in Brave New World. As such, it’s a perfectly logical extension of the tendencies in modern big-budget filmmaking that can be traced all the way back to Jaws.

It also reminded me of what G.K. Chesterton said to the American friends who showed him for the first time the lights of Broadway:

I had looked, not without joy, at that long kaleidoscope of coloured lights arranged in large letters and sprawling trade-marks, advertising everything, from pork to pianos, through the agency of the two most vivid and most mystical of the gifts of God; colour and fire. I said to them, in my simplicity, “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read.”

We still haven’t seen The Big Sick, but we’re planning to fix that in the next day or two. Watch this space for details.

• I was tickled by a photo sent to me by a friend who found it in a newspaper interview with Martin Amis. The photo shows Amis sitting in front of one of his bookcases. If you look closely, you can see The Skeptic, my H.L. Mencken biography, on the bottom shelf, right above Amis’ right knee. I hope he liked it!

• I kept a close eye from a distance at Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, both of which briefly threatened to affect my life as a playwright.

The Alley Theatre, which is producing Satchmo at the Waldorf this season, was hit hard by Harvey, which flooded the company’s downstairs performance space, forcing the Alley to resechedule its season. Satchmo will now be running there from February 23 to March 18.

As for Billy and Me, my new play, it will be premiered by Palm Beach Dramaworks, whose downtown theater was briefly threatened by similar devastation. Fortunately, Irma changed course at the last minute, the theater remained unscathed, and Billy and Me is set to open on schedule on December 8.

• Speaking of Satchmo at the Waldorf and its celebrated subject, I recently read an interview with Bill Frisell, the great jazz guitarist. Asked to recommend books for “someone who wants to learn more about music,” Frisell mentioned Pops, my Louis Armstrong biography: “Armstrong was such an amazing guy, and this book does him justice.” I’m proud of that.