Archives for February 2018

“His imagination projected itself lovingly across the footlights, gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered accessories, and lost itself so effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however long, or however short, brought with it a kind of alarm, like a stoppage of his personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to the dramatic illusion.”

Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

From 2008:

I never saw Paul Scofield on stage. Few Americans did: he performed in this country only once, in the 1961 Broadway production of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. So his death last week failed to make much of an impression on me. On the other hand, I never saw John Gielgud, either, yet I felt a real sense of loss when he died. What accounts for the difference?…

Read the whole thing here.

“It occurs to me that writers don’t change much from the time they are thirty or thereabouts until they are laid away—permanently, I trust. As they grow older, they are apt to perform at somewhat greater length, age being garrulous, and their prose is perhaps a little more ornate, conceivably because they have so much time for the superfluous decoration on their hands; but the essence remains the same. An author is either competent or horrible in the beginning, and he stays that way to the end of his days, unless certain pressures force him into other and shadier occupations, like alcoholism or television.”

Wolcott Gibbs, More in Sorrow (courtesy of Thomas Vinciguerra)

Yesterday I spent eight long but gratifying hours at Houston’s Alley Theatre, rehearsing for the Texas premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf. Then I drove straight from the theater to the home of Lauren and Ryan Dukes, my niece and her husband, where I met Evelyn Grace, their first child, who was born a week and a half ago. When I first saw her picture, I wrote in this space that she looked like “an exquisitely wrought little thimble.” Having seen her in the flesh, I’d now say that she’s closer to the size of a partly used roll of paper towels, but I wouldn’t dream of taking back the word “exquisite.”

Believe it or not, I’d never held a newborn child before last night. Mrs. T, who has done so many times, told me in advance to be sure to sniff behind her ears. “There’s nothing in the world that smells nicer,” she said. I did so, and can confirm that if there is such a thing as the odor of sanctity, it must surely be not unlike the smell of a freshly hatched baby girl.

Mrs. T and I met too late in life to have children. Our only joint creation is our marriage, in which we have joined together to become something vastly bigger and better than either one of us. As for me, I didn’t make room in my youth for sons and daughters: I chose instead to pursue a writing career, and I know far better than to claim that the books and plays and opera libretti that have resulted from my decision to do so add up to anything remotely comparable in significance to the miracle of a family. That said, it does strike me that a playwright who directs his own play, as I’ve done once and am now doing a second time, is engaged in an enterprise not wholly unlike that of raising a child.

In my case, though, the “child” is in a sense an adopted one. I was very much present at the creation of Satchmo, having been heavily involved in all of its first half-dozen stagings, but those productions were directed by other hands. To be sure, my input was taken seriously by the directors in question, but I didn’t have the last word in any of the details of their productions. Now I do. At the same time, though, it’s also true that Satchmo, like a child, has a life of its own, one that in the present case is the product of my ongoing collaboration with Jerome Preston Bates, the star of the show, and the members of the design and production teams.

I feel strongly that the best and happiest stage productions are true collaborations, the kind whose director guides and enables his colleagues rather than trying to dominate them and goes well out of his way to respect their indispensable contributions to the process. I suppose you can get good results running a show with an iron hand if you’re a Jerome Robbins-type genius, but I’m nothing of the kind. I’m a craftsman, and the mere fact that I wrote the script doesn’t make me an absolute authority about the way it should be staged. To the contrary, there is no One Best Way to stage Satchmo. Indeed, the Alley Theatre’s production is radically different from the one I staged two years ago at Palm Beach Dramaworks. That’s what I like most about theater: it’s different every time.

So, too, are children as different as their fingerprints. Yes, Evelyn Grace looks quite a bit like her grandfather David did when he was my baby brother—but she is already her own person. Yes, she’ll be shaped by Lauren and Ryan and all those who play a part in her life-to-be—but she will ever and always be herself. Like an unproduced script, my great-niece is a bundle of potentiality, waiting to be finished by life in the same way that I am spending my days in Houston “finishing” Satchmo at the Waldorf anew.

I thought some of these thoughts as I held Evelyn Grace last night. It also occurred to me that I may live long enough for her to get to know me reasonably well—I will have just turned eighty-two when she turns twenty—and that I might possibly play a role of modest but real consequence in her future life. Or not: it’s at least as likely that she will know me only as the great-uncle she met no more than once or twice and remembers vaguely if at all. She belongs to the future, not to my past.

Still, I’d like to think that when Lauren and Ryan someday show her the picture that is reproduced at the top of this posting, they’ll be sure to tell her that I came to Houston that week to direct a play that I wrote about the life of a great man named Louis Armstrong, and that I made a special point of taking time out from rehearsals to hold her in my arms and marvel at her beauty and sweet-smelling innocence. For next to Evelyn Grace Dukes, Satchmo at the Waldorf, love and cherish it though I do, is just another show.

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Mandy Patinkin sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat” in a live performance of the original production of Sunday in the Park With George, directed by James Lapine:

Carla Bley and her band perform her “Boo to You Too” in an undated video clip from the Eighties. I reviewed a performance of this song being performed by the same band at the Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival in 1980:

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

“I would have practiced the piano and realized that playing the piano is not something you just do to the best of your abilities. Playing the piano is something where you have to pursue your level of ability for miles and miles before you are of any use to anyone else.”

Carla Bley, quoted in Amy C. Beal, “Carla Bley: The Girl Who Cried Champagne” (Keyboard, May 19, 2016, courtesy of Ethan Iverson)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the U.S. premiere of Hangmen, Martin McDonagh’s most recent play. Here’s an excerpt.

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Talk about lucky: “Hangmen,” Martin McDonagh’s latest play, has opened off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company at the same moment that “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” his latest film, is stirring up heated Oscar talk. But unlike “Three Billboards,” which is peppered with grotesque humor but whose tone is not essentially comic, “Hangmen” is a galvanizingly black farce about a subject—capital punishment—that few view as a laughing matter. Such is Mr. McDonagh’s way: He is never more serious than when playing the clown, and “Hangmen” is a deadly serious play that is also (forgive me) chokingly funny. In this respect it recalls Joe Orton’s “Entertaining Mr. Sloane,” the difference being that Mr. Orton’s first audiences were far more shockable. Back in 1965, “Sloane” closed on Broadway after just 13 performances. “Hangmen,” by contrast, is selling out every show, and I expect it would continue to do so were this glitteringly well-staged version, a remount of the play’s 2015 London premiere, to move uptown to a Broadway house—as it absolutely should.

Like much of Mr. McDonagh’s other work, “Three Billboards” very much included, “Hangmen” is both a snapshot of provincial life at its most claustrophobic and a secular parable about the corrupting effects of vengefulness on the human soul….

“Hangmen,” like “Three Billboards,” scrupulously avoids in-your-face point-making, demanding instead that the audience connect the dots without prompting and insisting on a moral ambiguity that will doubtless discomfit viewers who prefer always to know exactly who’s wearing the black hat and who the white. That’s the idea: Mr. McDonagh wants you to think, and it is his genius to do so by first making you laugh yourself silly….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the HD theatrical telecast of the original London production of Hangmen:

Igor Stravinsky leads the NHK Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the 1945 version of his Firebird Suite, performed at the Osaka International Festival on May 1, 1959:

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