Archives for November 2018

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Here’s an excerpt.

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You needn’t believe in historical inevitability to have predicted that the election of Donald Trump would lead in short order to a New York revival of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.” Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, in which Adolf Hitler becomes a Depression-era Chicago gangster who is out to corner the local cauliflower trade by hook, crook or tommy gun, has a way of getting produced whenever the White House happens to be occupied by a president who rings the gong of backstage outrage. “If we’re not screaming and shouting now, when are we ever going to do it?” asks John Doyle, the director of Classic Stage Company’s new production….

As fine an artist as Mr. Doyle is, and as excited as I was by the prospect of seeing Raúl Esparza in the title role, I was more than a little bit apprehensive about this production going in. “Arturo Ui,” after all, isn’t one of Brecht’s masterpieces—its satire is too cartoonish—and I’ve seen a fair number of shows in recent months whose claims to artistic seriousness were undercut by the willingness of their makers to stoop to over-obvious anti-Trump pandering. But Mr. Doyle mostly avoids blatant point-making, instead giving us an electrifyingly coarse and colloquial show into which Mr. Esparza’s complex performance fits with surprising neatness….

Not only is the action of the play, which unfolds in a fluorescent-lit warehouse, grotesquely comic in tone, but Mr. Esparza turns Ui-Hitler into a figure of fun (his whiny, nasal voice reminded me of Jerry Lewis). At the same time, though, he also plays the dictator as a man given to startling outbursts of self-pity and doubt, a quality remarked on by many people who knew Hitler personally…

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Read the whole thing here.

Listen to a commercial recording of Aimee Semple McPherson, the Los Angeles-based evangelist, singing “I Ain’t-a Gonna Grieve (A Negro Spiritual)” in 1926:

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

“With each new trauma, ideology replaces emotion a little more.”

Christopher Shinn, Twitter (Oct. 28, 2018)

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write in praise of Sondheim Sublime, a new album by Melissa Errico. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stephen Sondheim is America’s greatest living theatrical songwriter—but he’s not popular, and never has been. Part of the problem is that his songs are too lyrically and harmonically complex to suit the tastes of the average listener, in addition to which they tend to lack a clear-cut emotional profile. The look-both-ways-before-crossing ambivalence of a lyric like “Sorry/Grateful” (“You’re always wondering what might have been/Then she walks in”) is worlds away from the whole-hearted view of romantic love that has traditionally been the stuff of pop-music success.

Just as important, though, is the fact that Mr. Sondheim is and has always been a theatrical composer, not a creator of free-standing songs. His own songs exist to drive the plots and deepen the characterizations of the shows for which they are written, so much so that their meanings are often not fully clear when they’re performed outside the dramatic contexts of those shows….

Taken together, these aspects of Mr. Sondheim’s work go a long way toward explaining why so few recitals of his songs have been recorded by top-tier pop and jazz performers. Judy Collins’ “A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim,” Jackie & Roy’s “A Stephen Sondheim Collection,” Cleo Laine’s “Cleo Sings Sondheim” and “Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim” come to mind, but after that, the choices grow thin on the ground. That’s why the release this month of Melissa Errico’s “Sondheim Sublime” (Ghostlight) is big news to those, myself among them, for whom his work has long spoken with the force of revelation. Not to put too fine a point on it, “Sondheim Sublime” is the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded, a program of 15 songs in which radiantly warm singing and sensitive, intelligent interpretation are tightly and inseparably entwined. Even if you’ve never felt at ease with Mr. Sondheim’s cool embrace of ambivalence, this CD, accompanied with like sensitivity by Tedd Firth, will show you what you’ve been missing….

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Read the whole thing here.

Melissa Errico sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Children and Art” (from Sunday in the Park with George at Feinstein’s/54 Below:

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, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Ferryman (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of London production, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Lifespan of a Fact (comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 13, reviewed here)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Prom (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• The Waverly Gallery (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 27, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Girl from the North Country (jukebox musical, PG-13, closes Dec. 23, reviewed here)
• The Hard Problem (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)
• Mother of the Maid (drama, PG-13, closes Dec. 23, reviewed here)

“Music, he’ll tell anyone who asks over the next fifty years, doesn’t mean things. It is things.”

Richard Powers, Orfeo

Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong sing a medley of “Let’s Sing Like a Dixieland Band” and “Muskrat Ramble” on The Hollywood Palace. This episode was originally telecast by ABC on April 1, 1967:

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

“The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.”

Charles Buxton, Notes of Thought

From 2008:

Of course it’s perfectly possible to hold the attention of an audience for much longer than an hour and a half—Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County plays for three and a half hours—but since so many modern operas have been both overlong and musically uninviting, it struck us that we might do well to surprise everyone by making our first opera as short and accessible as a classic Hollywood movie….

Read the whole thing here.

“Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.”

Bertrand Russell, “The Best Answer to Fanaticism—Liberalism,” The New York Times Magazine (December 16, 1951)