Archives for 2017

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about Fences and Manchester by the Sea, and what those two films teach us about the differences between writing for the stage and the screen. Here’s an excerpt.

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Denzel Washington’s “Fences” and Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea,” which both received best-picture Oscar nominations this week, have deep roots in live theater. “Fences,” of course, is the long-awaited screen version of August Wilson’s 1983 play. Not only did Wilson, who died almost 12 years ago, leave behind a draft of the script that has since been posthumously revised by Tony Kushner, but five cast members, including Mr. Washington (who doubled as the film’s director), Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson, starred together in the play’s 2010 Broadway revival. As for “Manchester by the Sea,” it was written and directed by Mr. Lonergan, whose “You Can Count on Me” and “Margaret” are among the finest films of the past quarter-century—yet Mr. Lonergan, like Wilson and Mr. Kushner, is also a playwright, one of the best we have.

None of this would have been stop-press news a generation ago. It used to be taken for granted that audiences across America would flock to big-screen versions of hit plays like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Odd Couple” that they weren’t able to see on stage. But times have changed, and while such major plays as “August: Osage County” and “Doubt” are still turned into films on occasion, it’s been years since any of them made more than a minor box-office splash.

Will “Fences” break that losing streak? Any director who seeks to turn a first-rate play into a movie of equal quality, after all, faces formidable obstacles going in, the biggest of which is that film, unlike live theater, is a fundamentally visual medium. A movie that is scrupulously faithful to the play on which it’s based can end up being visually unadventurous and stiff-jointed. If, on the other hand, the screenplay departs significantly from its source material, you may end up with a distortion, even a perversion, of what the playwright meant.

The problem with this argument is that many film critics wrongly elevate it to the status of an incontrovertible principle….

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Read the whole thing here.

James Earl Jones and Courtney B. Vance perform a scene from the first Broadway production of August Wilson’s Fences, directed by Lloyd Richards, on the 1987 Tony Awards telecast:

Denzel Washington and Chris Chalk perform the same scene from the 2010 Broadway revival of Fences, directed by Kenny Leon:

The trailer for the 2016 film version of Fences, which opens with an excerpt from the same scene. The role of Washington’s younger son is played by Jovan Adepo:

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)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

IN PRINCETON, N.J.:
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (Shakespeare and Shaw, PG-13, remounting in rotating repertory of 2012 and 2013 off-Broadway productions, closes Feb. 12, original productions reviewed here and here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Finian’s Rainbow (small-scale musical revival, G, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

“Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.”

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

In an interview released by the Criterion Collection as part of its home-video version of Jean Renoir’s The River, Martin Scorsese talks about seeing the film for the first time:

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

“I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism, historically sources of incredible destructiveness, are only differing manifestations of evil.”

Edward Teller (quoted in Philip L. Berman, The Courage of Conviction)

In today’s online Wall Street Journal I review a revival of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson in Sarasota, Florida. Here’s an excerpt.

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This is August Wilson’s year. Not only is Denzel Washington’s film version of “Fences” showing in theaters all over the U.S., but “Jitney,” the first installment in Wilson’s “American Century Cycle,” has finally made it to Broadway 35 years after its premiere. On the other hand, it’s always Wilson’s year in regional theater, where his 10 plays about the black experience in America are regularly produced from coast to coast. At the same time that “Jitney” is drawing crowds in New York, “The Piano Lesson” is being performed to magnificent effect by Sarasota’s Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, which worked wonders last season with Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and has done even better by this play…

Named after a painting by Romare Bearden and first performed in 1987, “The Piano Lesson” is a domestic drama with supernatural overtones—you might call it a kitchen-sink ghost story. At its heart are two siblings who are at odds over a family heirloom, an elaborately decorated piano whose beauty memorializes the shedding of blood and the enslaving of men and women. Boy Willie (Earley Dean) wants to sell it to a white dealer so that he can buy a farm back home in Mississippi, but Berniece (Noelle Strong) believes that to do so would be disloyal to their ancestors…

Chuck Smith, the director, says in his program note that Wilson “is to the American theater what Dr. Martin Luther King was to American civil rights.” That’s an apt comparison, though it also brings a more specifically theatrical analogy to mind: Wilson is also America’s Brian Friel, a genius of language who turned the common speech of his people into rough-hewn poetry. Nowhere is that gift better displayed than in “The Piano Lesson,” the most operatic of Wilson’s plays, which consists in the main of a series of aria-like monologues in which the six principal characters tell tales illustrative of their varying points of view.

Such an approach necessarily runs the risk of becoming discursive and unwieldy: “The Piano Lesson” is three hours long, and in a less-than-ideal performance you can feel every minute ticking by. But Mr. Smith has paced his staging carefully and filled it with sharp contrast, and he has also encouraged his actors to give big, broad, passionately extroverted performances that march up to the line of exaggeration without once stepping over it….

Ms. Strong, a new face on the regional scene, makes the most of her part, giving a precisely shaded performance that encompasses everything from stoic loneliness to deadly determination….

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Read the whole thing here.

A TV version of The Piano Lesson, adapted by the author and directed by Lloyd Richards. The cast includes Charles S. Dutton as Boy Willie and Alfre Woodard as Berniece. This version, based on and featuring most of the members of the cast of the 1990 Broadway production, was originally telecast on Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1995:

From 2007:

I have a sneaking suspicion that my main contribution to the sum total of human happiness is the fact that I go well out of my way to provide a traceable source for this blog’s daily almanac entry. Cyberspace is cluttered with millions of pithy quotations, most of which are unsourced and thus unreliable. Not infrequently a bit of sophisticated surfing will allow you to pin down their sources, but too often they remain firmly rooted in the realm of conjecture.

Off the top of my head I can think of only two favorite quotations that I’ve never been able to trace to their original sources…

Read the whole thing here.

“For a European long immersed in all the rotten stuff of past event, past hatreds, past habits, past glories and past diseases which compose a sort of overwhelming historical heredity, the first contact with America is thus liable to produce a sort of intoxication, a delight in a new-born freedom, as if the old burden of historical necessities were suddenly put aside. It seemed that everything is possible to human freedom.”

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America