Archives for 2017

“The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as ‘That’s really a very pleasant little water color you have there.’”

Russell Lynes, Snobs: A Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues and Yourself

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on the new Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! Here’s an excerpt.

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Bette Midler is playing in “Hello, Dolly!” on Broadway. As far as most people are concerned, this review could end right here. The box office at the Shubert Theatre has been printing money by the carload ever since previews for the show started in March, and no matter what I or anybody else has to say, it will continue to do so as long as Ms. Midler doesn’t slip and fracture a tibia. She is what she is, “Hello, Dolly!” is what it is, and putting the two together is as close as show business gets to a no-brainer: “Dolly” won’t work without a superstar in the title role and Patti LuPone is otherwise occupied, so casting Ms. Midler as Dolly Gallagher Levi, the matchmaker with a big heart and an empty purse who longs for a rich husband to ease her life, makes perfect sense. That’s the theory, anyway, and judging by the show-stopping shrieks of joy that greeted Ms. Midler when she made her first entrance on Wednesday night, her fans are going to love this revival….

Perhaps critics ought not to dash cold water on such displays of collective affection, but the producers of “Hello, Dolly!” are charging $169 for an orchestra seat, for which reason it seems to me that I have an obligation to report honestly on what I saw and heard. So here goes: Ms. Midler’s singing voice is in a desperate, sometimes shocking state of disrepair. If you remember what Ethel Merman sounded like in her last years, you’ll know exactly how she sounded in “Before the Parade Passes By.” I’m not sure whether she’s suffering from an acute case of laryngitis (her speaking voice was hoarse as well) or the inescapable effects of age (she is 71). Whatever the reason, her singing suggested that she’d have trouble making it through the curtain calls, much less the run of a show as demanding as “Dolly.” As for the rest of the performance, Ms. Midler doesn’t even bother to act: She simply comes on stage and plays her familiar self…

Jerry Zaks and Warren Carlyle, the director and choreographer, have staged this revival in a cartoonish manner. That’s appropriate in a way, since “Hello, Dolly!” is a cartoon version of Thornton Wilder’s “The Matchmaker,” the enduringly winning 1955 farce from which it was adapted by Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart in 1964. Nevertheless, it’s possible to perform “Dolly” with the same unforced sweetness and underlying emotional seriousness that make “The Matchmaker” so satisfying a romantic comedy, and that’s what’s wrong with Mr. Zaks’ staging: It’s totally unfelt. Every supporting performance is a grotesque caricature…

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Read the whole thing here.

Carol Channing sings “Before the Parade Passes By” on the 1971 Tony Awards telecast:

“A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky,” an episode of Wisdom originally telecast by NBC on November 17, 1957. Robert Craft, Stravinsky’s assistant and amanuensis, is also seen in the program. The piece played by the two men at the beginning of the film is the conclusion of the “Pas de quatre” from Stravinsky’s Agon:

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

“I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.”

Igor Stravinsky (interviewed in the Evening Standard, October 29, 1969)

My “Sightings” column, which appears in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, is about TCM Big Screen Classics, which showed North by Northwest in U.S. multiplex cinemas last week. Here’s an excerpt.

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Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel that shows uncut, uncolorized classic films around the clock, has done more to improve the lives of movie buffs than anything or anyone since Thomas Edison. TCM’s latest venture, though, is worthy of special note: TCM Big Screen Classics, undertaken in collaboration with Fathom Events, screens classic films each month in multiplexes throughout the U.S. Now that the revival houses that used to show such films on a regular basis are on the way to extinction, most people “know” old movies solely from watching them on TV, or on hand-held devices. Thanks to TCM, you can see them the way they’re supposed to be seen….

Well into the ’60s, movies were normally shown in auditoriums equipped with screens up to 100 feet wide that held between 250 and 1,000 viewers (New York’s Radio City Music Hall seats 6,000). Golden-age directors took it for granted that their work would be seen on such screens, and when Hollywood embraced wide-screen filming in the ’50s to compete with TV, big-theater projection became even more central to the moviegoing experience.

All this started to change with the introduction of multiplex cinemas. Projection screens started shrinking, and theaters that continued to show older films increasingly did so in houses holding no more than 100 viewers. These miniaturized theaters were incapable of providing the eye-popping experience of viewing a classic film on a full-sized screen—and when the same films were reformatted to fit the TV screens of the ’60s and ‘70s, it became even harder for younger viewers to fully appreciate them….

That’s why I made a point of going to a Big Screen Classics showing of “North by Northwest.” This was the first time that I’d seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece of suspense in a theater, and I can’t begin to tell you how many subtle details that typically go unnoticed in your living room all but exploded off the large screen on which I watched the film. Always the most visually minded of golden-age directors, Hitchcock took full advantage of VistaVision, not just in the climactic Mount Rushmore chase scene but throughout the picture. One of the most striking moments in the film comes when Cary Grant and a mysterious stranger stare suspiciously at one another from across a deserted rural highway. Hitchcock places them at the extreme left and right sides of the screen, and when you watch the scene in a theater, the dusty road that separates the two men looks as wide as a canyon.

For me, though, it was even more instructive to watch “North by Northwest” in the company of a theater full of other people, many of whom were clearly seeing the film for the first time. When you’re watching it by yourself, it’s easy to forget that “North by Northwest” is less a cloak-and-dagger adventure story than a high romantic comedy with a light glaze of thriller sauce. Why is this the case? Because most of us tend not to laugh out loud when we’re alone. Not so the audience with whom I saw it last week. Instead of sitting somberly like a bunch of grim-faced graduate students, we all hooted at Ernest Lehman’s fizzy, flawlessly timed one- and two-liners…

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from North by Northwest:

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, nearly 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)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes July 2, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, most shows sold out last week, original production reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes June 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Price (drama, G, too long and serious for children, virtually all shows sold out last week, extended through May 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Vanity Fair (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Come Back, Little Sheba/Picnic (dramas, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, reviewed here)

“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.”

Igor Stravinsky (interviewed in The New York Times Magazine, September 27, 1964)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new musical version of Groundhog Day. Here’s an excerpt.

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Andy Karl’s worst dream came painfully, horrifically true last Friday night: He took a show-stopping fall and injured his left knee 10 minutes before the end of “Groundhog Day,” the new musical based on the 1993 movie. To everyone’s astonishment, Mr. Karl came back out and finished the last scene on a crutch—but he canceled out of Saturday’s shows, the final previews before “Groundhog Day” opened on Monday….

Mr. Karl returned to “Groundhog Day” on Monday, wearing a black knee brace but showing no other visible sign of his agonizing ordeal—and as they say in show business, he killed. A good-looking, magnetically charismatic fellow with a rich singing voice and the effortless moves of an old-time hoofer, Mr. Karl did the impossible: He made you forget about Bill Murray, the star of Harold Ramis’ screen comedy about Phil Connors, a jaded TV weatherman who inexplicably gets stuck in a “Twilight Zone”-like cosmic loop and is forced to relive Groundhog Day over and over again until he learns the meaning of true love. Instead of aping Mr. Murray’s inimitably cynical performance, Mr. Karl did it his way, playing Connors as a naturally likable guy who has been pickled in the bitter brine of frustration—and he made it work….

Danny Rubin, the co-author of the original screenplay, and Tim Minchin, who wrote the score for “Matilda the Musical,” are jointly responsible for turning “Groundhog Day” into a stage musical, and they’ve done a smart, mostly solid job of it. Likewise Matthew Warchus, who staged “Matilda” with cleverness and verve and has done no less well this time around. I won’t try to tell you, however, that “Groundhog Day: The Musical” is a great show. In truth, it’s an entertaining but fundamentally ill-conceived attempt to do the impossible. Stephen Sondheim, who once gave serious thought to turning Mr. Ramis’ much-loved film into a musical, later explained in an interview why he changed his mind: “It cannot be improved. It’s perfect the way it is.” Bull’s-eye….

So why bother going to see to a musical that fails by definition to improve on perfection? Because it’s safe. It costs more than ever to see a Broadway show, and the number of people who are prepared to drop $149 on a musical about which they know nothing is shrinking accordingly. Fortunately, “Groundhog Day” is much, much better than the usual run of what I call “commodity musicals,” in which hit movies like “Legally Blonde,” “Sister Act” or “Young Frankenstein” are retrofitted with songs and dances but otherwise stick like superglue to their source material….

Sure, “Groundhog Day” is still a gussied-up commodity musical at bottom, in addition to which it lacks a memorable score. Most of Mr. Minchin’s songs are lively but facelessly eclectic, and his overstuffed, ill-crafted lyrics (somebody really should have told him that “erection” and “reception” don’t rhyme) never tell us anything about the characters that we haven’t already learned from the dialogue. What’s more, the first act is so noisy and hectic that the underlying romantic yearning of Phil and Rita (charmingly played by Barrett Doss), the TV producer whom he falls for, gets lost in the clatter. But “Groundhog Day” calms down and finds its emotional footing in the second act, in which Mr. Minchin gives his stars a truly fine ballad, “Seeing You,” that allows them to express their new love with the open-hearted warmth for which you’ve been waiting all night long….

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Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from the stage version of Groundhog Day: