Archives for 2018

Alec Guinness appears on Late Night with David Letterman. The occasion was the publication of Blessings in Disguise, Guinness’ autobiography. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on September 26, 1986:

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

“I’m very happy I’m an alcoholic—it’s a great gift, because wherever I go, the abyss follows me. It’s a volcanic anger you have, and it’s fuel. Rocket fuel. But of course it can rip you to pieces and kill you.

Anthony Hopkins (interviewed by Miranda Hopkins in The Guardian, May 26, 2018)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two noteworthy musical revivals, Bucks County Playhouse’s 42nd Street and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Here’s an excerpt.

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What’s the best of all possible summertime musicals? You could do a whole lot worse than “42nd Street,” the stage version of the 1933 movie musical that put the line “You’re going out a youngster—but you’ve got to come back a star!” into the English language. Having racked up two long runs on Broadway, in 1980 and again in 2001, “42nd Street” has since vanished from the stages of Manhattan, but it remains a staple of seemingly every regional theater in America capable of convening a stageful of halfway decent tap dancers. Now the Bucks County Playhouse is mounting it—but in a production to which the words “halfway decent” couldn’t be less relevant. Directed by Hunter Foster, whose 2015 Bucks County revival of “Company” marked him as an up-and-comer, this “42nd Street” is pure fun without a scintilla of cold-weather seriousness.

Mr. Foster’s staging is engagingly cast, and Tessa Grady and Monette McKay are especially winning as Peggy Sawyer, the sweet small-town girl who becomes an overnight smash, and “Anytime” Annie, her spunky sidekick. But “42nd Street” is an ensemble show first and foremost, and in order to produce a proscenium-stage spectacular on a smallish stage in a 409-seat house, every element must be identically persuasive. What is most striking about Mr. Foster’s “42nd Street” is not any individual performance but its total effect…

No major musical, not even “Candide,” is more incapacitatingly flawed than “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” The score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, is a gorgeous necklace on which two 50-carat diamonds, “Come Back to Me” and the title song, are strung. Alas, Lerner’s book, in which a psychiatrist falls in love with a patient who appears both to have ESP and to be the reincarnation of an 18th-century English society lady who drowned in a shipwreck, was an obsessive mess. As a result, the show closed in 1966 after an eight-month run and has never been successfully revived in its original form. The film version, which came out in 1970, didn’t do much better, while a 2011 Broadway revival, for which Peter Parnell wrote a brand-new book of the utmost ineptitude, was a well-deserved flop.

Enter Charlotte Moore, artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, who loves “On a Clear Day” but is fully aware of its problems and has endeavored to solve them in her new small-scale revival, in which she has revised Lerner’s book without altering it beyond recognition, ruthlessly scissoring away superfluous characters and dialogue…

The result of Ms. Moore’s handiwork is a miniature musical of tremendous charm whose plot suggests a cross between “Vertigo” and “Arcadia.” While the results aren’t perfect—some of the second-act plot points don’t land as clearly as they might—her “On a Clear Day” works much more than well enough to make the show viable at last, and every other aspect of the production is completely successful….

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To read my review of 42nd Street, go here.

To read my review of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, go here.

The trailer for the Irish Rep’s revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever:

Noël Coward appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?. John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Preston. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on January 12, 1964:

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

“Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.”

Mark Twain, “The Gorky Incident”

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced the names of its four Jazz Masters for 2019. One of the recipients of the award, the highest honor that the United States bestows on jazz artists, is my old friend Maria Schneider, whom I have known for more than a quarter of a century.

In addition to writing about Maria many times in this space and elsewhere, I contributed the liner notes to her second album, Coming About, which was originally released in 1996. They were based in part on a profile that I published in The Wall Street Journal two years earlier—the first piece, so far as I know, ever to written about Maria outside the jazz press. In it I said that she was “regarded by a rapidly growing number of insiders as one of the most promising young jazz composers in the world.” Now the whole world knows of her greatness, and I am proud beyond belief to have played a part in bringing her to the attention of the public at large.

To read that piece, go here.

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, all 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, virtually all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Carmen Jones (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 19, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Richard II (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 26, reviewed here)
• The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Conflict (drama, PG-13, closes July 21, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, alternating in repertory, virtually all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

“There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practised in the tricks and delusions of oratory.”

Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”