Archives for 2018

From 2008:

Mrs. T and I just returned from a much-needed holiday at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, our favorite retreat. One of the books that I brought along with me to read was Some Buried Caesar, the sixth of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, published in 1939. In it Archie Goodwin makes the following remark about Lily Rowan, his on-again-off-again girlfriend: “I was wondering which would be more satisfactory, to slap her and then kiss her, or to kiss her and then slap her.” I must have read the book a dozen times over the years, but never until now had that line caught my eye.

Suddenly a coin dropped in my head and I remembered another line…

Read the whole thing here.

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.”

Raymond Chandler, “A Qualified Farewell”

The leaves are falling in Connecticut. Mrs. T brought a box of Mallomars home from the grocery store on Friday afternoon. Autumn, it seems, is here. It slipped up behind us while we were otherwise occupied, and suddenly another summer was gone, never to return.

It was exactly a year ago that the two of us ate fresh-picked corn and tomatoes for three nights in a row, a glorious occasion that nonetheless filled me with night thoughts:

For those who, like Mrs. T and I, have crossed the sixtieth meridian, it’s hard not to wonder come October how many more seasons remain for us to feast on the fruits of the field….In other words, memento mori! Yet there are many possible responses to that dark imperative, not all of them drably penitential. We have it on good authority that it is man’s part to rejoice in the fruits of the earth and the fullness thereof, which strikes me as an impeccable reason to eat all the fresh corn and tomatoes that are going for as long as is humanly possible.

Would that we’d done the same thing this year, but circumstances kept us far from our Connecticut farmhouse for most of the past two months, and we were forced more often than not to make do with institutional cuisine and mediocre takeout. That’s why we were determined to get out of town as soon as my reviewing duties would allow. But it took longer than usual for us to get from New York to Storrs, and by the time we pulled into our driveway, the sun had long since set. I got up the next day to run errands and saw when I opened the front door that our rental car was covered with a blanket of crumbly brown leaves. I sighed deeply, then brushed off the windshield and headed for the laundry.

The good news is that if you like fall foliage, as we both do, there aren’t many places in the world that are prettier than Connecticut come mid-October. In the meantime, and seeing as how yesterday was our eleventh anniversary, we decided to treat ourselves to a mini-vacation, our previous attempt to do so having crashed and burned beyond recognition. We started out by going to a revival of The Drowsy Chaperone that I’m reviewing for The Wall Street Journal. Then we drove to a nearby hotel whose very nice rooms look out on Long Island Sound, where we plan to gaze at the water, eat seafood, and do as little as possible. I’ve brought along a couple of books about which I’m not writing, and I also expect to spend a fair amount of time soaking in what the hotel website describes as a “therapeutic whirlpool.” If all this doesn’t put me back on a somewhat more even keel, I don’t know what will.

I was about to say that we’ve earned our little holiday, but on reflection I’m not so sure that’s true, save in the general sense that (as Annie Savoy says in Bull Durham) “we all deserve to wear white.” Yes, we’ve been through the wringer, but nobody has to tell me that there are plenty of people who’ve been wrung far more thoroughly than either of us, yet lack the time and resources to shut down the shop for a couple of days and go eat lobster. The truth is that even at our worst, we’re luckier than most. The older I grow, the more conscious I am that the world is full of pain and suffering next to which our troubles are as nothing.

Be that as it may, it’s true that Mrs. T and I have just weathered a rough patch, rough enough that my eyes filled with tears as I listened the other night to the lines that Sonya speaks at the end of Uncle Vanya, the Chekhov play that I love best and about which I recently wrote in the Journal::

We’ll live, Uncle Vanya. We’ll live through a long, long string of days, of drawn-out evenings; we’ll patiently endure the trials destiny sends us; we’ll work for others now and in our old age, knowing no peace, and when our hour comes, we’ll obediently die, and there, beyond the grave, we’ll say that we suffered, that we wept, that it was bitter for us, and God’ll take pity on us, and you and I, uncle, dear uncle, we’ll see a bright, beautiful, refined life, we’ll rejoice, and we’ll look back at our present misfortunes with tenderness, with a smile—and we’ll rest.

I wonder whether my mother felt like that at the end of her life, when she was suffering in a way that I can’t even begin to imagine, much less understand—or accept. I wonder, too, whether I’ll meet my own latter end with anything like her courage and dignity when the time comes for me to do so. Probably not: it is, after all, a truth universally acknowledged that men are whiners, and I make no claim to being an exception to the rule.

Nor is it possible to store up present laughter in preparation for a time when it’s in short supply. Would that it were, but all you can do is take life as it comes, and that’s what Mrs. T and I are going to do this week. Mere days from now, there’ll be gaudy sunbursts of red, yellow, and orange wherever we look, followed as sure as the turning of the earth by bare branches. The leaves are falling and the clock is ticking, and we mean to revel in our good luck while it lasts.

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Frank Sinatra sings “Autumn Leaves” at London’s Royal Festival Hall on June 1, 1962, accompanied by Harry Klee on flute and Al Viola on guitar. The English-language lyric is by Johnny Mercer:

I’ve been too preoccupied of late to mention it here, but Satchmo at the Waldorf opened last week at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre in a brand-new production directed by Maxwell Williams and starring Barry Shabaka Henley, who previously appeared in Satchmo at Chicago’s Court Theatre and Palm Beach Dramaworks. I first worked with Shabaka in Chicago and directed him in Palm Beach, and on both occasions I was dazzled and delighted by his performance of the demanding triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis.

It hardly seems possible that this is the seventeenth production of Satchmo at the Waldorf to be mounted to date. This isn’t the first time that it’s been performed in Louisiana—Satchmo was seen in Baton Rouge last September—but it means a lot to me that my play about New Orleans’ most famous son should finally be receiving a production in his home town. Regular readers of this blog will know why I’m up north instead of down in the land of dreams, but a little piece of my heart is with Shabaka and his colleagues.

Satchmo runs at Le Petit Theatre through October 21. To purchase tickets or for more information, go here.

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To read the New Orleans Times-Picayune’s review of Le Petit Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, go here.

To read Broadway World’s review, go here.

The trailer for Le Petit Theatre’s production:

An excerpt from Antony Tudor’s The Leaves Are Fading, a 1975 ballet set to the music of Dvořák, danced by Altynai Asylmuratova and Konstantin Zaklinsky of St. Petersburg’s Kirov Ballet at London’s Covent Garden in 1992:

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

“I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed.”

V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two closely related off-Broadway productions, Bedlam’s Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet and the Hunter Theater Project’s Uncle Vanya. Here’s an excerpt.

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Bedlam’s “Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet,” directed by Eric Tucker, billed as a “mash-up” of “Vanya” and “Romeo and Juliet” and performed by a five-person ensemble, is altogether startling. Ivo van Hove never did anything more radical to a classic—except that his I-know-better-than-the-author revivals are at all times smotheringly self-regarding, whereas Mr. Tucker’s “Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet,” like even the most avant-garde of his shows, is both unpretentious and enormous fun.

What Mr. Tucker has done to the two plays out of which “Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet” has been cobbled together is easier to enjoy than it is to describe. Bits and pieces of “Vanya” and “Romeo” alternate without warning throughout the evening, juxtaposed in a way that is more than a little bit surrealistic…

A strong actor who doubles here as a member of his own ensemble, Mr. Tucker always casts his productions with the same imaginative flair that he brings to their staging. That said, he’s brought off a coup by casting Zuzanna Szadkowski in the double role of Shakespeare’s Juliet and Chekhov’s Yelena. In a traditional “Romeo and Juliet,” Ms. Szadkowski would likely have been cast to play Juliet’s nurse. No doubt she’d do it well, too, but what she does here is flat-out astonishing: Her Juliet and Yelena, both of them sardonic and sexually knowing to a breathtaking degree, add up to the most thrilling performance by an actor previously unknown to me that I’ve seen on a New York stage since Nina Arianda made her professional debut…

No less striking in its purposefully undemonstrative way, though, is the New York premiere of Richard Nelson’s adaptation of “Uncle Vanya,” the auspicious inaugural production of Hunter College’s new Hunter Theater Project, in which professional productions are to be mounted under the aegis of the school’s drama department. This tightened-up version (it runs for 105 intermission-free minutes) is performed in modern dress and modern English (Mr. Nelson, who is also the director, translated the play in collaboration with Richard Pevear and Larissa Vokokhonsky). The goal is to make “Vanya” more intimate and conversational, with 12 area mikes used to subtly boost the volume…

The results are successful in every way, so much so that I can wholeheartedly recommend this production to Chekhov novices and connoisseurs alike. “Vanya” is, after all, the quintessentially Russian story of a group of people who suddenly realize that they’ve frittered away their lives. Such terrible tales are best told in an understated way, and Mr. Nelson’s actors hardly ever raise their voices, whether figuratively or literally. Instead, they let you listen in as they watch the sun set on their bleak little world….

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Read the whole thing here.

Felix Weingartner and the Paris Symphony Orchestra perform the overture from Weber’s Der Freischütz in 1933. The principal flutist in the orchestra is Marcel Moyse:

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