Archives for May 2018

“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”

John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs

Thirty-one years ago, I was a senior editor at a magazine in New York, stuck (if that’s the word) in a job that didn’t satisfy me and not sure what to do about it. One morning I got a call from a man I didn’t know who said he’d like to talk to me about becoming an editorial writer for the New York Daily News. I’d never considered that line of work, but experience had taught me never to turn down a job offer without meeting the person who was making it, so I agreed to have lunch with Michael Pakenham, the editorial-page editor of the Daily News. I went to work for him a few weeks later, and continued to do so for the next six years.

Michael, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-five, was the last of my journalistic mentors, the older men who went out of their way to show me the ropes. He was, as they say, a character, a newspaperman who had started out as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune and was old enough to have put in a stretch at Chicago’s City News Bureau, where The Front Page is set. Not surprisingly, he loved to tell stories about the long-lost world of scoop-snatching beat reporting, about which he knew far more than most.

From the Tribune, he moved to the New York Herald Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Daily News, switching along the way from reporting to editing and, eventually, to putting out editorial pages for major metropolitan dailies. He believed devoutly that newspaper editorials make a difference, instructing everyone who worked for him to try to write pieces that housewives from Queens would clip out of the paper and post on the doors of their refrigerators. He hired me in part because he preferred working with men and women of broad culture who weren’t set in their journalistic ways, having figured out that it was easier to teach a novice how to write effective editorials than to un-teach a tired old wheelhorse who’d written too many ineffective ones.

Michael’s own culture was unusually broad. He was widely and proudly read, and knew almost as much about classical music as he did about literature. It was at his urging and in his company that I first saw what is now my favorite painting. No sooner did I go to work for the News than we became friends, in part because we shared so many interests but mostly because I found him impossible not to like. He treated me as a trusted protégé and, like the ideal patron he was, spread the word about my talents. Among countless other beneficences, he introduced me to Rebecca Sinkler, then the editor of the New York Times Book Review, for which I started writing in 1990, a coup that did much to set me up in the world of literary journalism.

Michael’s editorial page was my finishing school. He taught me how to write short, fast, and with the kind of crisp immediacy you don’t learn from reviewing the Kansas City Philharmonic. He insisted that everyone who worked for him do everything there was to be done, from knocking out two-inch quickies about the school board to putting together the daily letters-to-the-editor column, and I learned as much from rotating through my varied tasks as I did from watching him blue-pencil my copy. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, he actually sent me to Albany to cover the release of New York’s state budget, about which I knew only slightly more than nothing, and made damned sure I got my facts straight. Nor will I soon forget the weekend when he called me at home and said, “The Berlin Wall has fallen. Get in your car and drive into town—we’ve got to redo the editorial page right now.” So we did, with wonder and awe.

An immensely genial bon vivant, Michael was a superior cook and a comprehensively informed wine connoisseur. He claimed to have known everyone, or at least to have met them, and I was dazzled by his breadth of acquaintance. It was Bill Buckley who first told him about me, and his English relations included Lady Antonia Fraser and Lord Longford, his famously eccentric uncle. I knew him long enough to have heard the whole of his vast repertory of stories about the great and near-great, which glittered like a well-trimmed Christmas tree. On occasion I suspected him of anecdotal embroidery, especially when he had a sufficiency of Jameson under his belt: he swore, for example, that he had been in the room when Tallulah Bankhead, having just read Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, said to the rising young novelist, “So you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.” But he told his tales with such relish that I never had the heart to cross-examine him, and it wouldn’t have mattered in any case, for what he really did in the course of his forty-year career was so impressive that it needed no inflation.

It was dismayingly hard for Michael to find his footing when he left the Daily News. He was the first successful man I knew who had to struggle to jump-start his career in middle age, and it hurt me to watch him do it. I encouraged him to take time off and try his hand at writing a memoir, but his gifts didn’t run that way, and I wondered for a time whether he would ever right himself. Then, in 1995, he landed a new job as book-review editor of the Baltimore Sun, where I delighted in writing for him until he retired a decade later.

Michael spent his old age living in a country house in Pennsylvania that was too far from the beaten path to allow for easy commuting. My duties as a New York drama critic had become so all-consuming that it was all but impossible for me to visit him there, and our meetings, alas, became vanishingly rare, though he made the long trip into New York to give a toast at my wedding to Mrs. T. By then he had fallen in love and settled down with Rosalie, his beloved wife, who survives him. She will have no shortage of indelible memories to comfort her. Neither will I.

No one did more than Michael Pakenham to shape my career, or to make me the writer I am today. I have tried my best to do for others what he did for me. I bless his name.

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UPDATE: Michael’s Philadelphia Inquirer obituary is here.

Michael talks about Frank Rizzo, the Philadelphia mayor whom he covered during his tenure at the Philadelphia Inquirer:

I read this on Twitter:

I wonder what it’s like to be part of a generation that sees a single, fixed place as home throughout their life. There are so many stories in our culture about “returning home,” about missing “home.” And I have no concept of “home” as a specific place. Lived in five different places by 17. My university apartment lasted me longer than any place prior. The closest to “home’” for me is, I guess, my family: my mother and sister. And now my wife. But we’re all separated now, my extended family across the earth, looking for work.

My mother had that expectation, and so does my brother, a baby boomer who lives in the house where he and I grew up, and where both of our parents lived from 1961 until they died. For me, too, the idea of “home” is inextricably bound up with that modest three-bedroom ranch house, and with my warm memories of the tightly knit nuclear family into which I was born.

Even more important to me, though, is the now-remarkable fact that my mother and father got married in 1947 and stayed that way. It would be an understatement to say that they didn’t always get along—they actually separated briefly the year before I was born—but by the time my brother and I were old enough to understand the meaning of the word “divorce,” it was taken for granted that they would never get one. They were in it for better or worse, and the longer they lived, the clearer it became to all who knew them that they’d been wise beyond their years to ride out the storms in the home that they’d made for one another, and for us.

Needless to say, I know the world isn’t like that anymore, though the way it was back then lives forever in my bones. Perhaps more to the point, my own life hasn’t been like that for a long time now: I graduated from high school in 1974 and have since lived in eight apartments in five cities, not counting dorm rooms. Unlike my brother, who put down deep roots in Smalltown, U.S.A., I’ve lived the wanderer’s life, rooted only in my memories.

As I wrote in this space seven years ago:

I always figured I’d find a job in town, marry a Smalltown girl, start a family, and become a pillar of the community. My brother did those things, but I pulled up stakes and became a rambling man, moving from city to city in search of an identity that it took me the better part of a lifetime to find, insofar as I can be said to have found it. At various times in my life I expected to become a concert violinist, a lawyer, a high school teacher, and a psychotherapist, none of which I ended up doing. Instead I’ve paid the rent by working as a bank teller, a jazz bassist, a magazine editor, an editorial writer, a biographer, and a drama critic….

While I’ve never been one to repine, it’s hard not to spend a fair amount of time playing the what-if game once you get to be my age. Fortunately for me, I’m much more than happy enough with What-Is not to lose sleep over What-If, though anyone who read what I wrote about Local Hero the other day will know that there are plenty of times when I look out the windows of trains and ask myself what I missed by not getting off at Willoughby, looking around, and saying to myself, “Here I stay.”

But what if I had? Then I would have missed out on Mrs. T and Our Girl in Chicago, on The Letter and Satchmo at the Waldorf and Billy and Me, on a list of other extraordinary experiences so long and implausible-sounding that merely to read it out loud is to be dumbfounded by my good fortune.

I don’t think I have a restless nature. I remember how struck I was when I ran across the following sentence: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” That comes from an essay by Michael Oakeshott, and it describes me—up to a point. I’m good at appreciating things as they are, and I’m pretty sure I would have been content to be a small-town teacher or lawyer. Yet I chose a restless life, the kind Ry Cooder sings about in “Boomer’s Story”: Just dig my grave beside the railroad/So I can hear the trains go by.

I suppose, like most people, I wanted it both ways, and to a surprising extent I’ve gotten what I wanted. The catch is that while it’s sometimes possible to have it all, it’s almost always impossible to have it all at the same time. You usually have to settle for memories.

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Ry Cooder sings “Boomer’s Story,” written by Carson Robison:

The opening of “A Stop at Willoughby,” a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone written by Rod Serling and directed by Robert Parrish:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the dire state of the large-scale Broadway musical. Here’s an excerpt.

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Each May, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle votes on the best play, foreign play and musical of the season. This year it chose not to give a best-musical award. What’s more, the NYDCC (of which I am a member) made the same call in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2010. To be sure, nearly all of the 19 members loved “The Band’s Visit,” but it won last year’s best-musical award after opening off Broadway in 2016. As for this year’s shows, only two Broadway musicals got any support, “Mean Girls” (one vote) and “SpongeBob SquarePants” (two votes)….

In addition to “The Band’s Visit,” my 15-year tenure as the Journal’s drama critic has seen the arrival on Broadway of such memorable shows as “Avenue Q,” “Dear Evan Hansen,” “Fun Home,” “Hamilton,” “The Light in the Piazza” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” But all of them, even “Hamilton,” are small-to-smallish-scale musicals that either originated off Broadway or were developed at regional theaters elsewhere in America. What I’m not seeing are any considerable number of first-rate large-scale Broadway musicals, the modern-day counterparts of such beloved golden-age shows as “Oklahoma!” and “Guys and Dolls.” Instead, we’re getting more and more of what I call “commodity musicals,” unchallenging confections like “Mean Girls,” “Frozen” and “School of Rock” that are more or less slavishly adapted from Hollywood hits of the past…

When I last wrote about the decline of the Broadway musical in this space nine years ago, I cited the growing dominance of the commodity musical as the number-one problem facing the genre. I still see these shows as roadblocks that stand in the way of fresh creative thinking. But I now regard them as a symptom, not a cause. The real problem goes deeper.

Broadway musicals were central to American pop culture well into the Sixties. Their songs were played on the radio and performed on top-rated TV variety shows, and in due course the best of these shows were turned into hit movies. But their popularity was contingent on the existence of what could be broadly described as a common culture that was shared by Americans of all kinds. Back then, everybody from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Ray Charles sang show tunes….

Once our common culture started cracking up, it was inevitable that the Broadway musical would lose its creative footing….

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Read the whole thing here.

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:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, alternating in repertory, closes July 15, reviewed here)
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• 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)
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes July 1, reviewed here)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Saint Joan (drama, PG-13, closes June 10, reviewed here)
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes June 24, reviewed here)
• Travesties (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• A Brief History of Women (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 27, reviewed here)
• Mlima’s Tale (drama, PG-13, closes June 3, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes July 15, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, remounting of Two River Theater Company production, closes June 24, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes May 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Miss You Like Hell (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

John Updike, “Confessions of a Wild Bore”

Mrs. T and I recently watched Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, a comedy of great sweetness and charm. It tells the story of Mac MacIntyre, a high-flying oil-company junior executive from Houston (perfectly played by Peter Riegert) who travels to Ferness, a sleepy, slow-moving coastal village in Scotland, to make a deal that will transform the place beyond recognition, finds to his surprise that he loves the town exactly as it is, then returns to Houston and realizes that the brief but idyllic time he spent in Ferness has caused his everyday life to lose its savor.

You’ve seen that plot before, of course—the same thing, more or less, happens in Doc Hollywood, another of my favorite movies—but part of what makes Local Hero so good is that it doesn’t let MacIntyre off the hook. We know at film’s end that he has seen paradise but could not walk through the door, and that he will spend the rest of his life rueing his inability to turn his back on an existence that no longer has anything to offer him but loneliness.

Might it be that I’m stuck on a similar hook? I moved to New York at the age of twenty-nine, having grown up in a small town and lived for a time on the outskirts of a medium-sized city, and I’ve been here ever since. Once it excited me, then it started irritating me, but at no point along the way did I ever give serious thought to leaving. To be sure, I’ve entertained myself on multiple occasions with the idle fantasy of pulling up stakes, but I’m far too tightly tied to my job, which requires me to see one or two shows on or near Broadway most weeks save in the summer, when I go to shows in other parts of the country.

It’s a treadmill of sorts, but a benign and stimulating one, and my employers give me a safety valve by letting me go elsewhere from time to time to work on the plays and opera libretti that I started writing a few years ago. What with that freedom, the extended reviewing trips to Florida that Mrs. T and I make every winter, and the commonplace comforts of the rural farmhouse in Connecticut where we spend much of our time when I’m not on the aisle in Manhattan, it would be churlish for me to complain about the shape that my life has taken in middle age. Nobody has to tell me that most people have it a whole lot harder.

Alas, one of the legs of my satisfying existence has lately been knocked out from under me. Mrs. T’s doctors ordered her last fall to hang up her traveling shoes until further notice, and I followed suit because…well, because I no longer much care to be where she isn’t. As a result, we spent the first month of 2018 not on Florida’s Sanibel Island, our wintertime home away from home for the past seven years, but in New York and Connecticut. Again, it could have been worse—the weather up north was surprisingly mild—but it turns out that I’ve grown accustomed to sunshine in January, and losing it got me down.

My unexpected stint in Houston staging Satchmo at the Waldorf at the Alley Theatre was a wonderfully fulfilling distraction, but no sooner did I come back home than the snow started to fall and I was thereby plunged into a bit more reality than I was quite ready to stomach. Without going into any great detail, suffice it to say that the past couple of months have been rife with widely varied difficulties, enough so to occasionally put to the test my ability to cope.

Nothing finite is intolerable, and under normal circumstances I’d now be packing my bags for a trip to Chicago or Wisconsin or Oregon or Niagara-on-the-Lake, secure in the knowledge that a change of scene usually leads to a change of mind. This summer, though, Mrs. T and I won’t be visiting any theaters that are much more than three hours from New York by car, and we’ll be keeping our overnight stays away from home to the barest possible minimum.

If I sound like I’m complaining, then I’m giving the wrong impression. The fact is that I’ve done rather too much traveling in the past few years, and I’ve had to do too much of it without Mrs. T. But we, too, have our Fernesses, and both of us miss them. “I promise you that we’ll be back here again,” I told her at the end of our first visit to Sanibel Island. Sure enough, we went back a year later, and stayed even longer. I’ve kept that promise ever since—until now.

I don’t know when Mrs. T and I will be back in Sanibel again, or when we’ll ride the Coast Starlight, spend a night in Seth Peterson Cottage, or set sail on Schooner Grace Bailey, to mention only three of the most exciting things we’ve done together since we got married a decade ago. It may well be that our days of far-flung adventure are over, and that we’ll henceforth have to settle for less ambitious pleasures. It could also be that I’ll spend the rest of my life shuttling between Upper Manhattan and rural Connecticut, never again to shut off my phone (if people still do that) and load up the moving van.

And would that really matter if it came to pass? I don’t think so. What does matter—more than anything—is that wherever I end up spending the rest of my life, I won’t be spending it alone. Unlike Mac MacIntyre, who missed his chance to be happy, I seized the greater hope and walked through the door, never doubting for a moment that I was doing the right thing.

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The last scene of Local Hero:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the U.S. premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s A Brief History of Women. Here’s an excerpt.

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Alan Ayckbourn’s 81st full-length play recently opened off Broadway. His 82nd full-length play will open in England in September. Given that he is 79 years old and shows no signs of slowing down, I assume that he has at least another dozen or so in him—and that they’ll all be good….

Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, which Mr. Ayckbourn ran from 1972 to 2009 and where he continues to stage his own work, remounts one or two of his productions every couple of seasons as part of 59E59 Theatres’ annual “Brits Off Broadway” festival. This time it’s Play No. 81, “A Brief History of Women,” in which he uses the seemingly dull life of a fellow who started out as a footman and ended up as a hotelier as a lens through which we view the changing place of women in 20th-century English society.

As usual with Mr. Ayckbourn, “A Brief History of Women” arises from an ingenious structural premise: All four scenes take place on the ground floor of the same country house at 20-year intervals, the first in 1925 and the last in 1985. In the first scene, Anthony Spates (played by Antony Eden), the only character who appears throughout the play, is a part-time servant to the owners of Kirkbridge Manor, an aristocratic couple who are on the outs. In 1945 the manor has been turned into a prep school where Anthony teaches, contriving to get himself fired for engaging in hanky-panky with a colleague. By 1965 it’s become an arts center that he runs—not very well, one gathers, though he does find a wife there—and in the last part, the great house has been done over as a hotel of which Anthony is the part-time manager and where he meets a 97-year-old guest who once upon a time was the unhappy lady of Kirkbridge Manor.

Such is the stuff miniseries are made of, but Mr. Ayckbourn doesn’t think that way. Instead, he compresses each “episode” of his complex plot into a single scene that plays out in something close to real time, thereby intensifying its emotional impact. A few of the plot lines are explicitly farce-flavored, but shadows of melancholy are rarely far from view…

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Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the original Stephen Joseph Theatre production of A Brief History of Women: