Archives for 2018

“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.

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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:

A scene from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company 2009 revival of David Mamet’s American Buffalo, directed by Amy Morton and starring Francis Guinan, Tracy Letts, and Patrick Andrews:

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

“Now every last thing stunned him into immobility: if it was better to light a cigarette or not, or have a cup of coffee, or go to the office, or leave the office. He remembered being able to decide these things, but not being unconscious of the choice.”

David Mamet, Chicago: A Novel

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the American premiere of Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country. Here’s an excerpt.

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Conor McPherson is Ireland’s greatest living playwright, give or take Martin McDonagh. Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan. On paper they look like the oddest of couples, but the notion of Mr. McPherson’s writing a jukebox musical based on Mr. Dylan’s songs is just crazy enough to be brilliant.

“Girl from the North Country,” which has transferred to the Public Theater after successful runs at London’s Old Vic and in the West End, is a musical as powerful and unsettling as any of Mr. McPherson’s plays. It adds a rich new layer of meaning to the songs, some familiar (“I Want You”) and others obscure (“Slow Train”), that he has woven into its theatrical fabric. It won’t send you home happy—it’s not meant to—and the results are far from perfect. But the show’s flaws are as forgivable as its originality is profound…

“Girl from the North Country” is an “Our Town”-like group portrait of the tenants of a Depression-era boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, Mr. Dylan’s birthplace (though no other obvious reference is made to the songwriter’s life). The dozen-odd characters have all been wounded in ways that no New Deal could ever hope to heal, above all Elizabeth (Mare Winningham), the wife of the boarding-house proprietor (Stephen Bogardus), who appears to be suffering from dementia but soon proves to be Mr. McPherson’s Shakespearean fool. She utters his bleakest truths with the absolute conviction that only terrible suffering can supply…

Mr. McPherson has made no attempt to choose songs that fit neatly into his dramatic scheme, the customary modus operandi of the jukebox musical. Instead, he’s followed the lead of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth in “Company,” a series of related but mostly free-standing sketches about a group of friends in which the songs typically comment on the sketches instead of propelling the dramatic action of the show….

What Mr. McPherson does with Mr. Dylan’s songs is infallibly right. I’m not so sure, though, about the way that the songs themselves are sung and played by the cast and onstage band. While some of the actors, Ms. Winningham and Luba Mason in particular, sing with an appropriately raw edge, most of the others sound too smoothly theatrical…

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the London production of Girl from the North Country: