Archives for August 2018

A scene from David Mamet’s Oleanna, written in 1992 and revived in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum in 2009, starring Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles and directed by Doug Hughes:

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

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

I am, needless to say, greatly preoccupied these days with Mrs. T’s health, for the moment to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Nevertheless, life goes on, and so does Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which has now reached the stage in the life of a successful show when it starts to be scheduled for production without my knowledge by theater companies of which I know nothing. Satchmo is, in other words, all grown up, and it pleases me to watch from a distance as it goes its merry way.

I only just found out in recent weeks about two upcoming 2018-19 productions of Satchmo. The first one is by New Orleans’ Le Petit Théâtre du Vieux Carré, which has been performing in its present theater, located in the city’s French Quarter, since 1922, This production, directed by Maxwell Williams, Le Petit Théâtre’s artistic director, opens on October 5 and runs through October 21. For more information, go here.

The second production, by Actors’ Warehouse of Gainesville, Florida, opens next June 21 and run through July 7. For more information, go here.

To everyone at Le Petit Théâtre and Actors’ Warehouse: I hope all goes well with your stagings of Satchmo. Drop me a line sometime and let me know how you’re doing!

From 2005:

I don’t spend too many evenings by myself: I’m in the company of friends far more often than not, watching performances or just hanging out. Sometimes I find myself hungering for solitude, and there are occasions when I’m almost painfully grateful to spend a night with my prints, my CDs, my iBook, and my trusty TV, watching What’s My Line?, keeping my own counsel, and staying up as late as I like. I’ve recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I even like vacationing alone. At the same time, I’m no hermit, and like most singletons, I find there are other times when being alone is no fun at all. One is when you finish watching a really good movie and, instead of chatting about it over a drink with a friend, retire to an empty hotel room in a city far from home….

Read the whole thing here.

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”

Francis Bacon, “On Friendship”

After a hiatus caused by Mrs. T’s illness, I resume my Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column today with a tribute to Neil Simon. Here’s an excerpt.

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All comedy dates, and every pure comedian sooner or later becomes passé—even one as beloved as Neil Simon, who died on Sunday at the age of 91. Not only did Mr. Simon have a quarter-century run as America’s most popular playwright, but “Lost in Yonkers,” his 20th and best play, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. The Pulitzer jurors described it as “a mature work by an enduring (and often undervalued) American playwright,” and pretty much everybody agreed by then that he had evolved into something other than a joke merchant. But Mr. Simon would never again write a full-fledged box-office smash, and none of his plays has since been successfully revived on Broadway save as a star vehicle….

Nonetheless, it’s just as noteworthy that Mr. Simon suited the tastes of American audiences so well for such an extraordinarily long time. His one-two-here-comes-the-punchline style of comedy, which took shape in the Fifties during his tenure as a writer of sketches for “Your Show of Shows,” Sid Caesar’s classic TV series, continued to come across with freshness and immediacy throughout the Sixties and Seventies, even as the culture around him was changing in ways that were radical in every sense of the word. And as Mr. Simon grew older, he chafed at its limitations and started turning out stage comedies like “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” (1971) and screenplays like “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972) that were tougher than their predecessors….

Alas, Mr. Simon was unable to build on the artistic success of “Lost in Yonkers.” This stands to reason: Playwriting tends to be a young man’s game, and his creative flame had dimmed after three decades of exhaustingly hard use. Perhaps he had by then simply said what he had to say. In any case, American comedy in the Nineties was giving way to newer, less specifically joke-based approaches, and what had once seemed fresh and immediate increasingly sounded old-fashioned. Whatever the reason, Mr. Simon would never again ring the gong of unequivocal box-office success on Broadway….

All this notwithstanding, I’ve come to feel in recent years that Mr. Simon’s best plays are worthy of revival—if they’re directed in a way that brings out their seriousness instead of going for too-easy laughs….

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Read the whole thing here.

Johnny Carson interviews Neil Simon on The Tonight Show. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on June 26, 1980:

If you’re keeping up with Mrs. T’s recent medical travails, you’ll want to know that she was transferred on Saturday night from the intensive-care unit of New York-Presbyterian Hospital to the cardiology floor. Her immediate problem is that the blood transfusions she received last week in Cape May as a result of her unexpected gastrointestinal bleeding have weakened her heart muscle. This puts her at risk of right-ventricle failure—a common development for those suffering, as does Mrs. T, from pulmonary hypertension. That’s why she was in the ICU, where her condition could be monitored around the clock.

The good news is that while Mrs. T isn’t anywhere close to being out of the woods, she does appear to be on the mend, albeit slowly. To be sure, she’s still in great need of a double lung transplant, but the doctors at New York-Presbyterian hope to stabilize her condition to the point that she can wait for the Big Call at home (our upper Manhattan apartment is very close to the hospital). To that hopeful end, she’s now being watched over by the hospital’s cardiology team.

No visitors or calls yet—Mrs. T is still too frail to entertain guests. I’ve been passing on your messages of love and support, though, and they’ve done wonders for her spirits. Mine, too. As I said the other day, I can’t tell you how much it means to know how much you care.

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One more thing: don’t call or text me unless you have an urgent reason to do so. I have to keep my cellphone going 24/7 in case I get an emergency call from the hospital, and I’m keeping unusually late hours these days so that I can sit up with Mrs. T, who is (like most people with pulmonary disease) an insomniac. Should you call me at ten a.m., it’s way better than even money that you’ll wake me up. If you need to get in touch with me, please do so via e-mail or through the social media.

Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, and Pearl Bailey sing a medley of “Side by Side by Side” and “What Would We Do Without You?” (from Stephen Sondheim’s Company) on Bing Crosby and His Friends, originally telecast by NBC on February 27, 1972:

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