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)
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, some 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)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes July 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, closes June 25, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Pacific Overtures (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Six Degrees of Separation (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”

Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

A.R. Gurney, universally known in the theater world as “Pete,” was that rarity of rarities, a WASP of country-club-Republican lineage who wrote witty, thoughtful plays, most of them about the fast-vanishing world of upper-middle-class privilege into which he was born eighty-six years ago. In 2003 I called him “the John P. Marquand of American theater,” which still seems to me wholly apt. Like all prolific artists, Marquand very much included, Gurney was uneven, but his best plays are eloquent and intensely elegiac portraits of a world that is on the edge of extinction, and at least one of them, The Dining Room, is by way of being a masterpiece.

As I wrote in my review of Mark Lamos’s Westport Country Playhouse 2013 revival of The Dining Room:

“The Dining Room” is a piece of virtuoso stagecraft, an extended one-act play in which six actors portray 57 characters, nearly all of whom are WASPs who live or have lived in the same old-fashioned house at various times between the 30’s and 70’s. We see them in youth and old age, joy and despair, assurance and confusion, but though they are almost always shown to us with a smile, we are never allowed to doubt that time has passed them by—and that it should have done so. It is that iron conviction which charges Mr. Gurney’s witty vignettes with the bite that keeps “The Dining Room” from dissolving into soft-centered charm.

The insularity of the community in which his characters live is nicely caught in this brief exchange: “I grew up here.” “Who didn’t?” But the play’s most telling lines are spoken by an outsider, a furniture repairman who inspects the underside of the now-rickety 1898 dining table that is the play’s visual centerpiece and describes it as follows: “It’s well made. It’s a solid, serviceable copy. Based on the English.” If you’re not listening closely, you might fail to notice that those lines have the chiseled ring of an epitaph…

Gurney never had any luck on Broadway, but his plays have long been off-Broadway and regional-theater staples, and I have no doubt that they will continue to be widely performed. While our paths never crossed, I had the good fortune to cover most of his New York premieres in the later years of his long life. I described him on one of the last of those occasions as “an American master, one of the best playwrights that we have.” I mourn his passing with all my heart.

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A.R. Gurney’s New York Times obituary is here.

Gurney talks about writing The Wayside Motor Inn in 1978:

Mrs. T and I are taking the next three days off. We’ll be hopping in the family car at midday and driving to an undisclosed location not far from the water’s edge. My Wall Street Journal assignments for the week are finished and there’s nothing I absolutely have to get done between now and the beginning of next week, so that’s my plan: to do as little as possible.

I’ve already uploaded my regular blog postings for the rest of the week, but if you should catch me on Twitter or Facebook, please be so kind as to remind me that I shouldn’t be there.

I’ll be back in business on Monday, when I plan to celebrate an important personal anniversary in this space. Till then…see you around.

It’s time once again for my annual appearance on Theater Talk, the weekly TV series hosted by Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel in which theatrical types talk about…theater. This week I’m part of a panel of drama critics discussing the spring season on Broadway. Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, Linda Winer, and I hold forth on the latest hit shows with great good humor, considerable disagreement, and a fair amount of acerbity (none of it mutual).

If you live in the New York area, our episode will air on WNET at 1:30 a.m. on Friday (or, to be exact, Saturday morning) and 11:30 a.m. on Sunday. As always, it will also be televised on other channels, and you’ll be able to view the episode on line next month by going here.

For more information on air dates and times, go here.

One more thing: we had so much fun that further excerpts from our conversation will be telecast next week as well! Watch this space for details.

Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Philharmonic perform the first movement of Bach’s D Minor Keyboard Concerto, preceded by a talk by Bernstein about the piece and interpretation. This performance, Gould’s U.S. television debut, was originally broadcast by CBS on January 31, 1960, as part of “The Creative Performer,” an episode of Ford Presents:

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

“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”

Randall Jarrell, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens”

Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” turns fifty years old next month, and we’re still listening to it—and talking about it. I was eleven years old when Gentry’s most famous record was released, and I have the strongest possible memories of the haunting impression that it made on me. I couldn’t hear it often enough. I still find it haunting a half-century later, albeit for somewhat different reasons.

Like everyone else who first heard “Ode to Billie Joe” on the radio when it was new, I was fascinated by its “puzzle” aspect. What was it that Billie Joe McAllister and the unnamed first-person narrator—presumably Gentry herself—threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did Billie Joe throw himself off the bridge shortly thereafter? (For what it’s worth, most of the people whom I knew back then took it for granted that the song had something to do with an unwanted pregnancy, an interpretation that I continue to find plausible.) Suicide was an utterly alien notion to me in those days, thus making the song all the more intriguing. In addition, “Ode to Billie Joe” is, like Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” a song that tells a story, a genre that rarely hits big but is always irresistible on the rare occasions when it does so.

For me, though, there was far more to the appeal of “Ode to Billie Joe” than its enigmatic story. To begin with, Gentry’s sultry mezzo voice was sexy, a quality that I had only just begun to appreciate, however vaguely, in 1967. It was also tinged with the rich, loamy colors of the blues, a music that would soon become infinitely important to me but of which I then knew nothing. Her singing was a glimpse of my future, the evidence of things unheard.

And now? I strolled into our living room the other night as Mrs. T was watching Rosanne Cash sing “Ode to Billie Joe” on TV, and found myself swept up anew into its mystery. This time, though, what struck me most forcibly was how redolent the song is of the lost world of my childhood.

To be sure, I didn’t grow up in Mississippi, but Smalltown, U.S.A., positioned as it is on the edge of the Deep South, was and is a place where people live and speak very differently than they do up north. Even when it’s sung by someone who doesn’t have the kind of southern accent that always fills me with intense nostalgia—and Rosanne Cash’s faded childhood accent reasserts itself whenever she sings the song—the lyrics are full of phrases that waft me back to the place where I was born: Child, what’s happened to your appetite? I’ve been cookin’ all morning and you haven’t touched a single bite….Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense. Pass the biscuits, please….Mama hollered out the back door, “Y’all remember to wipe your feet.” The only other song I know that has that effect on me is Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which reminds me no less powerfully of Sunday-afternoon visits to the invisibly tiny Missouri town where my mother grew up and her mother lived.

I’ve never met Bobbie Gentry, and never expect to. She withdrew from the world long ago, undoubtedly disillusioned by the realities of her brief taste of fame. But if I were ever to do so, I know what I’d do: I’d thank her for “Ode to Billie Joe,” a message in a musical bottle that will always remind me of what it felt like to be an eleven-year-old boy, peering across the ocean that separates childhood from the unimaginable future of maturity.

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Bobbie Gentry sings “Ode to Billie Joe” on the BBC in 1968. The string arrangement, also heard on the original recording, is by Jimmie Haskell:

Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal perform “Ode to Billie Joe” at MASS MoCA’s 2016 “FreshGrass” festival: