Archives for February 2018

The Alley Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play and second professional directing assignment, opens tonight in Houston. We’ve had four gratifyingly smooth previews in a row, the last of which went so well that I canceled this afternoon’s final rehearsal and told everybody to stay home and sleep late. Nobody complained, either, least of all me.

Incredible as it may sound, this will be my second opening night in two months. That’s a sentence I never imagined I’d have occasion to write! It certainly didn’t occur to me when Paul Moravec and I took our bows after the premiere of The Letter in 2009 that I was taking my first step down the surprisingly short road that would lead me to a parallel career as an opera librettist and playwright—and, now, a stage director. These past nine years have been a hell of a ride, and I’ve loved every minute of it. My only regret is that my beloved Mrs. T couldn’t come to Texas to share in the fun. She’ll be here in spirit, though, and in my heart.

In preparation for the big night, I present—as I always do before my first nights—the following clip, which I first saw on TV as a child and which in recent years has become increasingly and improbably relevant to my life.

Break a leg, everybody:

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UPDATE: This is my favorite moment in the production, exquisitely lit by Kevin Adams. I only wish you could hear John Gromada’s music for this scene!

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I take a look at recent pushback against the #MeToo movement. Here’s an excerpt.

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Peter Martins, the longtime boss of New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, abruptly retired in December in the wake of allegations that he had subjected dancers to sexual harassment and verbal and physical abuse. Two weeks ago, NYCB and SAB announced that an investigation conducted by an outside lawyer “did not corroborate the allegations,” which Mr. Martins had already denied. Several dancers claim that the investigation was biased in his favor, and the lawyer’s report will not be made public. In any event, Mr. Martins is not returning to his posts, and NYCB and SAB have since put into place measures meant to make it easier for their employees to report inappropriate conduct.

What effect will all this have on the #MeToo movement? Over the past six months, the #MeToo-ers have exposed the entertainment industry as a stinking sewer of predation, in the process changing for the better our collective standards for acceptable behavior in the workplace. But a pushback has begun, and Mr. Martins’ ambiguous exoneration may increase its momentum.

The most prominent critics of the #MeToo movement think that to insist on always “believing the victim,” one of its tenets, necessarily puts the principle of due process at risk. One of them is President Trump—himself an alleged abuser—who tweeted as follows: “People[‘]s lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation.” Other, less controversial critics like Emily Yoffe contend that casual workplace remarks with ill-judged sexual overtones are being treated in a zero-tolerance manner inappropriate to the gravity of the offense, and that it may be wrong to judge older offenders by new standards of conduct without making allowance for their age.

For my part, I believe that the effects of #MeToo have been hugely salutary. Given what we’ve learned about the disgusting behavior of the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K. and other offenders whom the movement has helped to bring low, how can anyone think otherwise? Still, it’s one thing to give credit where it’s due and another to assume that all accusers can do no wrong….

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Read the whole thing here.

Louis Armstrong and His All Stars perform “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Muskrat Ramble,” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street” on Timex All-Star Show #2, originally telecast live by CBS on April 30, 1958. The band includes Edmond Hall on clarinet, Trummy Young on trombone, Billy Kyle on piano, Mort Herbert on bass, and Danny Barcelona on drums. The host is Garry Moore. This kinescope has been digitally restored by LiveFeed Video Imaging:

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

“The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.”

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

From 2008:

Last week Paul Moravec and I spent four days preparing a workshop performance of the first six scenes of The Letter, our Somerset Maugham opera-in-progress, at a midtown rehearsal studio. On Wednesday morning we recorded all six scenes at the New York headquarters of the Santa Fe Opera, after which we performed them for a small invited audience of opera and theater professionals. Then, on Thursday evening, we gave a second performance, this time at an Upper East Side cocktail party thrown on behalf of Santa Fe Opera by two longtime friends of the company who live in the biggest townhouse I’ve ever seen. (It looks like the set of Holiday, only in color.) We presented twenty minutes’ worth of excerpts from The Letter to an audience of a hundred-odd well-heeled opera buffs, augmented by a sprinkling of singers and other music-business types…

Read the whole thing here.

“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, and Other Aphorisms

A rare kinescope of an abridged TV version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, starring Maurice Evans and Dame Judith Anderson and directed by George Schaefer. This performance was originally telecast live by NBC on November 28, 1954, as an episode of Hallmark Hall of Fame:

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

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Signature Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s At Home at the Zoo. Here’s an excerpt.

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Edward Albee hit the theatrical jackpot on his first try with “The Zoo Story,” a two-man one-act play that opened off Broadway in 1960, ran for a year and a half and made its 32-year-old author famous overnight. But Albee was never quite satisfied with it, and in 2004 he wrote “Homelife,” a “prequel” to “The Zoo Story,” later deciding that the two plays could henceforth only be produced together with the omnibus title of “At Home at the Zoo.” First seen in New York in 2007, “At Home at the Zoo” is back in town again, this time at the Signature Theatre, which has a long history of distinguished Albee stagings. Lila Neugebauer’s new production ranks among their number—it is, like all of her work, masterly in its visual clarity and psychological acuity—though it cannot cover up the fact that Albee made a bad mistake when he wrote “Homelife” and an even worse one when he yoked it to “The Zoo Story.”…

The mystery of “The Zoo Story” lies in the absence of context for the violent encounter of Peter and Jerry, about whom we know nothing save what they tell us. Not that it’s hard to figure out what their meeting means: “The Zoo Story” was the first of Albee’s exercises in theatrical bourgeois-baiting, a snapshot of a meaningless middle-class life that is disrupted by a man who, crazy as he seems, is nonetheless fully in touch with the instinctual world to which the emotionally constricted Peter has no access…

Why, then, did Albee make the mistake of writing “Homelife,” which takes place earlier in the day in Peter’s Upper East Side apartment and in which his very nice wife (Katie Finneran) reveals from out of nowhere that she is no longer satisfied with the “smooth voyage on a safe ship” that is their married life? That fact, after all, is implicit in every line of “The Zoo Story.” Hence there is no point in Albee’s telling us what he will show us after intermission…

Since Ms. Neugebauer is stuck with “Homelife,” her only choice is to make the most of it. To this end, she has set the play in a wide, empty playing area designed by Andriew Lieberman whose white walls are decorated with Cy Twombly-style scribbles, planting Mr. Leonard in a comfy chair and moving Ms. Finneran back and forth across a vast horizontal expanse that symbolizes the emotional distance separating them. Ms. Finneran’s performance, by turns fey and desperately sad, is instantaneously involving, while Mr. Leonard brings off the wire-walking feat of being dull in an interesting way. He does the same thing in “The Zoo Story,” spending most of his time reacting to Mr. Sparks, a logorrheic connoisseur of chaos…

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for At Home at the Zoo:

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the bimonthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

In this episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I start off by paying tribute to a great American actress, Jan Maxwell, who died in New York on Feb. 11 at the age of sixty-one. Then we take up the subject of what Peter calls “Not Again! Syndrome,” the persistent tendency of producers and theater companies to keep coming back to the same familiar plays over and over again. Says the Three on the Aisle web page:

With the frequent reviving of certain well-known plays and musicals, when, they wonder, is it time to say enough is enough? Is the recycling of classic plays an indication that American theatres have become too risk-averse? That they lack the requisite programming imagination? Each critic has the opportunity to sink their teeth into the topic, naming some of the plays they’ve seen too many times. Does this mean some famous works should go into temporary retirement?

We wrap up the episode by talking about plays and musicals that we’ve seen in recent weeks, some of which get thumbs up and some…well, the other thing.

To listen, download the seventh episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any of the first six episodes, you’ll find them all here.