Archives for October 2018

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:
• 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)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Girl from the North Country (jukebox musical, PG-13, closes Dec. 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 28, reviewed here)
• Uncle Vanya (drama, G, not suitable for children, extended through Oct. 28, reviewed here)

“In the war of ideas, it is the crudest and the most simplified ideology that wins. During our own lifetimes we have seen spectacular examples of this. We have seen great and highly civilized countries becoming infected by epidemics of ideological insanity, and whole populations being destroyed for the sake of some irrational slogan.”

Christopher Dawson, The Movement of World Revolution

Life, I’m told, is supposed to slow down as you grow older, but the opposite has happened to me. Instead, it’s become more hectic—and more fulfilling. I spent a few minutes the other day scribbling down some notes about what’s happened to me in the past decade and a half. Here are some of the high points:

• In 2003, I became the Journal’s drama critic and launched this blog.

• In 2005, I fell in love at first sight with the future Mrs. T and, a month later, nearly died of congestive heart failure.

• In 2006, I turned fifty.

• In 2007, Mrs. T and I got married.

• In 2009, The Letter, my first operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, was premiered in Santa Fe. A few weeks after that, Pops, my Louis Armstrong biography, was published.

• In 2010, I started writing my first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf.

• In 2011, Satchmo was premiered in Florida.

• In 2012, I received a Guggenheim Fellowship. A month later, my mother died. I then spent six weeks working on Satchmo and Duke, my Duke Ellington biography, at the MacDowell Colony, after which Satchmo received its first major productions in Massachusetts and Philadelphia.

• In 2013, Duke was published.

• In 2014, Satchmo was produced off Broadway.

• In 2016, I turned sixty and made my professional debut as a stage director.

• In 2017, Billy and Me, my second play, was premiered.

I’m sixty-two years old. I wonder what will happen to me between now and 2033?

* * *

Jimmy Durante sings “September Song,” by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson, on TV in 1955, the year before I was born:

“Man Against the World,” the first episode of My World…and Welcome to It, a sitcom in which William Windom played John Monroe, a writer modeled after James Thurber. The designers of the show made use of animated drawings based on Thurber’s New Yorker cartoons, and the scripts were inspired by Thurber’s stories. This episode, written and directed by Melville Shavelson, was originally telecast by NBC on September 15, 1969:

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

“I think the worst woman that ever existed would have made a man of very passable reputation—they are all better than us—& their faults such as they are must originate with ourselves.”

Lord Byron, letter to Annabella Milbanke, September 6, 1813

From 2008:

Time: near the end of a leisurely dinner. Place: Restaurant 15 Main, Narrowsburg, New York. Frank Sinatra’s recording of “Thanks for the Memory” is playing in the background.

SHE I never liked that song.

HE Well—

SHE Don’t say it—I already know what you’re going to say. “Well, I like it.” Of course you like it. You’re got more in common with your parents’ generation than with ours.

HE What do you mean? I know twice as much about rock and roll as you do.

SHE Yeah, but you never hung out in bars and danced with girls when you were in high school….

Read the whole thing here.

“I don’t do autobiographical. I don’t really approve of that. I never thought about it until young people started getting onstage, and it’s supposed to be a dance concert and they kept telling us about their horrible mother or what a hard time they had and all of this true stuff, and I went: Oh, keep it to yourself. No, I don’t do that. I make up dreams.”

Paul Taylor (quoted in Gia Kourlas, “Inside the Wild Mind of Paul Taylor,” New York Times, September 4, 2018)

I mentioned in this space the other day that Satchmo at the Waldorf is currently being performed down in New Orleans. A friend sent me a photo taken after Saturday’s show in which Barry Shabaka Henley, the star of this and two previous productions of Satchmo, is seen chatting with a group of audience members. They were, my friend said, members of the Karnofsky family. As I looked at their happy faces, my eyes filled with tears.

If you’ve seen Satchmo or read Pops, my Armstrong biography, I expect that name will ring a bell. Among other things, the Karnofskys figure prominently in one of my favorite scenes from Satchmo:

Here, now, looka this.

He reaches into his shirt and pulls out a Star of David hanging on a pendant around his neck.

Star of David. Jewish star. Mr. Glaser, he done give it to me. (As if revealing a secret) He Jewish, you know. I wear it every day cause the Jews, they been so good to me. Maybe that’s why I trusted Mr. Glaser.

Down in New Orleans there was this Jewish family, the Karnofskys. They was junk peddlers done come over from Russia. I worked for them when I was seven years old. Did odd jobs. And they didn’t treat me like no butler or nothing. Pat me on my head, tell me I’m a good boy, treat me warm and kind. Like family. Use to sit at they table like I was one of they own. Eat that good Jewish food, teach me them pretty Jewish songs….

We’d bring the junk wagon in and they’d say, “Little Louis, you worked hard today, gonna be too late for you to get your supper when you get home, so you just sit right down here and eat with us.”

A pause.

They even loaned me the money to buy my first horn. Beat-up little cornet down at the pawn shop. Thought it was the prettiest thing I ever saw.

Back in 2009, shortly after Pops was published, I met a Karnofsky at my first book-tour appearance in Boston, and was deeply touched by the encounter. Nevertheless, it means even more to me—more than mere words can begin to say—to know that another group of Karnofskys saw Satchmo at the Waldorf in Armstrong’s home town (and that other family members will be seeing the show later in the run). I like to think that Satchmo himself would have been touched to learn that the descendants of the Jewish immigrants who treated him “like family” more than a century ago continue to revere his blessed memory, as he did theirs to the very end of his long and beautiful life.

* * *

To see rare period photographs of the Karnofskys and read a piece by Alan Smason about their relationship with Louis Armstrong, go here.

Armstrong and the All Stars perform Irving Berlin’s “Russian Lullaby” in 1950. The band includes Cozy Cole on drums:

Armstrong and the All Stars perform “Basin Street Blues” on The Bell Telephone Hour in 1964: