Archives for 2018

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two of the Hudson Valley Shakepeare Festival’s new productions, Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew. Here’s an excerpt.

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Seven years ago, it was still inherently newsy when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival put on a “Julius Caesar” whose title role was played by a woman, Vilma Silva. Nowadays, though, gender-bending revivals of the classics have become all but commonplace, and what makes Davis McCallum’s Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of “Richard II” noteworthy is not that Julia Coffey has been cast as Shakespeare’s unhappy king, or even that her performance is so distinctive: It is, rather, Mr. McCallum’s staging. As crisp, legible and full of import as a well-written headline, his “Richard II” cuts straight to the heart of a play that has never been as popular as its historical companion pieces…

Ms. Coffey, who first came to my attention when she appeared in Mr. McCallum’s 2014 Mint Theater revival of John Van Druten’s “London Wall,” is at home with both aspects of Richard II’s cloven personality, pivoting from arrogance to desperation so smoothly as to suggest that both qualities are opposite sides of the same coin of character….

In the #MeToo moment, how can “The Taming of the Shrew” be staged without setting off alarm bells of political incorrectness? The best way, it strikes me, is to play it the way Shakespeare wrote it, as a slapstick comedy in which a proto-feminist hellion gets her comeuppance at the hands of an arrogant man, and let the audience draw its own conclusions about what it’s seeing. This is more or less the way Shana Cooper approaches the play in her Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival directorial debut, and the results are consistently satisfying—the best “Shrew” I’ve ever reviewed, in fact.

Ms. Cooper, a newish face on the theatrical scene, has written a program note that bristles with up-to-the-minute notions (“The world of ‘Taming’ is one…in which women are judged and punished for not adhering to the rules of the game as dictated by a patriarchal society”). But whatever her production really “means,” Ms. Cooper’s “Shrew” plays as a riotously bawdy baggy-pants farce, one whose director is unafraid to opt for broad comic gestures and whose cast is more than happy to oblige her….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Richard II:

The trailer for The Taming of the Shrew:

Manhatta, a 1921 silent film documentary about New York City photographed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. The titles are drawn from the poetry of Walt Whitman. To read more about the film, go here:

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

“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826

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, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Carmen Jones (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 19, reviewed here)
• Conflict (drama, PG-13, closes July 21, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, alternating in repertory, closes July 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:
• The Royal Family of Broadway (musical, G, reviewed here)

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

John Adams, Letters to John Taylor

Mrs. T and I are spending the week at one of our favorite vacation retreats, the riverside inn where we honeymooned a decade and a half ago and to which we have returned at regular intervals ever since.

To be sure, all is not quite unbroken peace and tranquility. I wrote a drama column yesterday morning, and we saw a show last night that I’ll be reviewing next week in The Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, though, we’re staying out of the heat, eating other people’s cooking, watching old movies and reading good books, and generally doing as little as possible in a place that is beautiful and cozy beyond belief.

Without such oases of peace, the soul shrivels. To quote a remark by Josef Pieper that every busy city dweller should keep firmly in mind: “Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.”

We return home on Saturday, and life will return to normal come Monday. For now, though, we’re in the blessed state of being on holiday. Here’s hoping that you, too, are taking time off this week.

Memory is the great blessing of a happy life. I have nothing but pleasant memories of my mother’s family’s Fourth of July cookouts, which rank among the highlights of my small-town youth. Those picnics are part of the distant past now, and my parents and all but one of my mother’s siblings are dead. My brother and sister-in-law (bless them!) brought the remaining members of our family together three years ago for a reunion that was joyous almost beyond belief, but nothing can quite measure up to the remembered pleasures of childhood. Fortunately, I have enough of those to last me the rest of my days.

In 1991, a quarter of a century ago, I published a memoir in which, among many other things, I described those Fourth of July cookouts. This is part of what I wrote. I posted it in this space two years ago, and it still gives me pleasure to read. I hope you feel the same way.

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We would pull into my grandmother’s driveway early in the afternoon. My parents would go inside to sit with the old people and take part in the slow, steady talk that holds a large family together. (I thought of my aunts and uncles as “the old people,” though they were no older than I am now.) I went inside to say hello, too, but I slipped away as quickly as I could, for there were better things to do on a summer day than sitting around listening to the old people talk. Sometimes I played softball with Mike, Bob, and Gary, my older cousins, in the empty lot next to Uncle Marshall’s garage. Sometimes I shinnied up the low-slung mimosa tree next to my grandmother’s house. Sometimes I walked down the road to Uncle Albert’s house or across the street to Dot and Marshall’s to gaze jealously at a new toy. Sometimes I hid out in Dot and Marshall’s living room and spent the day reading about Huckleberry Finn or Captain Ahab.

Later in the day, the older cousins would start dipping into their private stashes of small-bore fireworks suitable for daytime use. Gary favored tiny cylinders that swelled into long, wormy spirals of ash that left huge gray-and-black smears on the front porch; Bob preferred little pellets that exploded with an ear-shattering crack when thrown at the nearest rock. Mike usually had a bag full of smoke bombs, and I liked those best. You put a little cardboard sphere in the middle of a dirt road, lit the fuse, and watched it belch forth clouds of foul green smoke. I had no fireworks of my own, for my parents were certain that it would be crazy to turn me loose with them, and they were probably right. So I watched and waited and tried from time to time to talk Mike into letting me touch the glowing end of a piece of punk to the stubby fuse of one of his smoke bombs.

After the last firecracker was lit and tossed, I crawled into the wooden swing on the crumbling front porch of my grandmother’s house and rocked into the breeze. Once in a while I brought a book with me, for there are few things as pleasant as reading a good book while sitting in a porch swing on a breezy summer day. More often, though, I left my book in the car, especially after my spindly legs grew long enough to reach the concrete floor of the porch. Then I would sit at the very edge of the broad wooden seat, kick as hard as I could and push the swing higher and higher into the air, high enough that the soles of my sneakers scraped the ceiling and the heavy chains of the swing gave off a scary thump every time I fell back to earth. The higher I swung, the surer I was that the rusty bolts would gradually work their way out of the rotten wood of the ceiling, sending me flying through the air to a bloody but glorious death. Before long, one of the old people always came stomping out of the house and told me to cut it out before I cracked my fool head open.

In the middle of the long afternoon, the whole family gathered on the front porch to make ice cream. The older cousins took turns cranking the old wooden freezer. After half an hour of steady cranking, Uncle Albert unscrewed the lid of the freezer and scooped out rich, grainy, colder-than-cold bowls of pale yellow custard. I ate mine in silence, nursing an ice-cream headache. Then the aunts retired to the kitchen and the uncles set up charcoal grills in the front yard and build roaring fires. Dinner was served as the sun began to set. We wolfed down hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecued pork steaks, potato salad, creamed corn, hot rolls, and my mother’s spicy baked beans. Then we cleared away the dishes and ate more ice cream and sat and talked until the last light had died away and it was time to cross the dirt road to the empty lot and shoot fireworks.

The old people gave each child a silver sparkler and a skinny brown stick of punk that filled the air with an incenselike smell when lit. As we waved our sparklers, Uncle Albert placed a squat, five-barreled cardboard cylinder on the ground. Mike approached it slowly and ceremonially, punk in hand, the other cousins looking on from a safe distance. We held our breath as he cautiously touched the fuse at the bace of the cylinder with the smoldering stick of punk. Nothing happened. He touched it again. Was this one a dud? Then the fuse caught fire with a loud, rasping fizz and Mike darted away as a dozen red and green and blue fireballs shot into the air and exploded into a million golden dots of short-lived flame.

My father liked Roman candles, and I remember the first Fourth of July that he let me hold one on my own. First came the warning: “This isn’t a toy, son. You could put somebody’s eye out with it. Point it up and away and whatever you do, don’t aim it at anybody. Do you understand?” I nodded, my heart racing with excitement. Then he lit the top end and handed me the slim cardboard tube. I pointed it up and away, but I knew that it was aimed at somebody, though I told no one that I was actually a mighty warrior locked in single combat with the evil forces of darkness. I shouted every time the sizzling tube went crump and lit up the sky with gaudy bursts of lightning, each one aimed squarely at the forehead of a giant monster from outer space. I dreamed of blue fireballs for weeks.

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Dawn Upshaw, David Zinman and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s perform Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The text is by James Agee:

Marc-André Hamelin plays Debussy’s Feux d’artifice (Fireworks) in concert at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 2007:

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