Archives for 2017

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

I still can’t quite get used to the fact that theater companies around America are performing Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, without my being there to see it happen. On Thursday, for example, Satchmo opens in Portland, Oregon, for a month-long run at Triangle Productions, a company about which I know nothing save that it exists. Nor am I familiar with the work of Salim Sanchez, the actor who’ll be playing the triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis. Not only will I not be in Portland this week—I’m busy covering shows in New York and on the East Coast—but nobody in Portland has gotten in touch with me about the production. It’s as if I were a Famous Dead Playwright, the author of a dusty classic, instead of a non-famous, undead guy who’s hard at work on Play No. 2.

Dramatists Play Service, Inc., the publisher of and licensing agent for Satchmo, assures me that it’s normal, or at least not uncommon, for regional theaters to produce plays by non-famous, undead playwrights without reaching out to their authors. Once the papers are signed and the show licensed, the company is on its own, and in most cases it simply doesn’t occur to the director or actor to check in with the playwright: they do their thing, and that’s that.

I’m just fine with all this. Like a full-grown child, Satchmo now has a life of its own, and it doesn’t require my presence to flourish. That’s a good thing, an outcome of which I once dreamed and which has, to my amazement and delight, come to pass. Nevertheless, it feels more than a little bit funny to know that my brainchild is being put on stage without me, in the same way that someone might check one of my books out of a library and read it. What will Triangle Productions’ staging look like? What kind of accent will Salim Sanchez use when he plays Glaser? Will the citizens of Portland laugh in the usual places—or at all? I’ll never know.

It turns out that Salim is on Facebook, so I sent him a note last week wishing him the very best of luck (and no, I didn’t use that jinx-making phrase!). He wrote back at once and as follows: “I am so honored to be a part of this amazing piece! I will do my best to do it all the justice it deserves. Once I get in the zone, I’m gonna kill it!” That touched me greatly. I’m sure he will, and I hope that everyone in Portland who comes to see Satchmo enjoys watching him do so. But it’s a purely theoretical hope, for only in the most tenuous sense can you sincerely wish good luck to people you don’t know. This, too, is part of the mystery of being a modestly successful playwright. You write a show, other people in other places put it on stage, and…that’s that.

The mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel once told this story about Paul Hindemith:

Hindemith, after he wrote a piece, wasn’t interested in it anymore. He never came to hear my Marianleben; although he knew I do it very well, he said he’s not interested to hear it—he’s written it.

No doubt such detachment is a becoming thing in an artist, and perhaps I’ll acquire it if I live long enough. I don’t have it yet, though, and somehow I doubt that a time will ever come when I’m not interested in seeing what other people do with Satchmo at the Waldorf. It’s my baby, all grown up.

Rod Serling’s “The Comedian,” directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Mickey Rooney, Edmond O’Brien, Kim Hunter, and Mel Tormé. This teleplay was originally broadcast by CBS as an episode of Playhouse 90. It aired on February 14, 1957:

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

“The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking, and a dangerous tendency is becoming manifest to take ourselves with undue seriousness. The enemy of humor is fear and this, alas, is an age of fear. As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limits that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it.”

Malcolm Muggeridge “America Needs a Punch” (Esquire, April 1958, courtesy of Thomas Vinciguerra)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway premiere of A Doll’s House, Part 2. Here’s an excerpt.

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Hugh Kenner defined conceptual art as that which, once described, need not be experienced. Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” comes perilously close to filling that bill. Staged with ostentatious austerity by Sam Gold, it’s a sequel to the celebrated 1879 play by Henrik Ibsen in which Nora Helmer, a mother of three, walks out on her children and her emotionally null marriage to seek personal fulfillment elsewhere, famously slamming the front door behind her as she departs. In Mr. Hnath’s play, Nora (Laurie Metcalf) returns to her former home 15 years later, having written a best-selling memoir about the evils of bourgeois wedlock that has made her rich and famous. While she has certain residual problems that require 90 melodramatic minutes to work out, she assures her estranged husband (Chris Cooper) in an end-of-show speech that she will soldier on nobly in the hope of making life better for All Women Everywhere: “I know that someday everything will be different, and everyone will be free—freer than they are now.” Curtain. Standing ovation. I just saved you $147….

“A Doll’s House, Part 2” is tensionless: We know going in what we’re supposed to think of Nora, and we know we won’t be asked to change our minds about her. That’s why it’s being performed on Broadway by Ms. Metcalf, Mr. Cooper, Jayne Houdyshell and Condola Rashad instead of in a black-box theater by nobody in particular….

It’s hard to imagine that more than a smallish subset of the people who came to the John Golden Theatre on Wednesday had read “A Doll’s House,” much less seen it produced. They came for the cast, or because of the buzz (Mr. Hnath is very fashionable). If it was the cast that lured the crowd, they got their money’s worth, especially from Mr. Cooper. He is one of the finest character actors we have, a latter-day Spencer Tracy whose unmannered, understated strength and simplicity always impress, and it is a joy to see him make something plausible out of the role of Torvald Helmer, the benighted mansplainer who finally sees the light….

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Read the whole thing here.

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Bandstand, a new musical. Here’s an excerpt.

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What does it take to lift a Broadway show from mediocrity to adequacy? I found myself pondering this question as I watched “Bandstand,” a new musical about a group of troubled World War II vets who return home to Cleveland, join forces to start a swing band and live happily ever after, or at least until the curtain falls. The first act is straight off the rack, a concatenation of bone-tired clichés strung together on an unexpectedly interesting premise. The second act isn’t any more original, but it’s more agreeable, and you’ll likely feel that you’ve been sufficiently entertained by the time the curtain falls….

What makes “Bandstand” interesting is that the principal characters are all suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—the bass player, for instance, helped to liberate Dachau—and their singer is a war widow. “Bandstand” is, in other words, a variation on “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which is a great idea for a serious-minded musical, so much so that it’s surprising nobody’s ever tried it. (Are you listening, Michael John LaChiusa?)

What makes the first act mediocre is that the show’s authors, Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor, fail to do anything remotely original with their idea. The members of the band are all central-casting types (the spacey drummer, the boozed-up wisecracker, the school-of-Felix-Unger neat freak) whose PTSD-related suffering is stated ad infinitum but left unshown save in the cornballiest ways possible (they have combat flashbacks every five minutes or so). The show is set in motion by a plot point—a contest to write a song honoring the troops—that’s straight out of an old-fashioned hey-Judy-let’s-put-on-a-show movie. And the original songs, while perfectly professional, are also perfectly forgettable….

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Read the whole thing here.

Jonathan Winters and Art Carney improvise on The Jonathan Winters Show, originally telecast by CBS on February 28, 1968:

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

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

Albert Einstein, interviewed by George Sylvester Viereck (Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929)