Archives for 2018

“So much of the research on musical expertise has looked for accomplishment in the wrong place, in the facility of fingers rather than the expressiveness of emotion.”

Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band. Here’s a review.

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Fifty years ago, “The Boys in the Band,” Mart Crowley’s blacker-than-black comedy about a group of gay friends who spend an evening clawing at one another’s scabs, opened off Broadway and became the talk of Manhattan. After running for 1,001 performances, it was turned by William Friedkin into a movie that starred the entire original cast, one of the finest films ever made of a contemporary play. But many members of the rising generation of young gay people thought it impolitic for Mr. Crowley to have dramatized the self-hatred felt by those older gay men who had internalized the wounding disapproval of the straight world (“Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse”). As a result, “The Boys in the Band” failed to transfer to Broadway and vanished from American stages shortly thereafter….

So why is the golden anniversary of the premiere of “The Boys in the Band” being celebrated with a Broadway production, a budget-buster starring Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto and directed by Joe Mantello (“Three Tall Women”)? Because the Broadway productions of such gay-themed shows as “Angels in America,” “Falsettos,” “Mothers and Sons” and “The Normal Heart” have proved popular enough to suggest that this one would do at least as well. I wish I were more enthusiastic about the results, but there isn’t much to like about this emotionally evasive revival, which disserves Mr. Crowley’s beautifully, fearlessly wrought play in so many ways that I went home not merely disappointed but angry….

While the first half of “The Boys in the Band” is scabrously and for the most part unprintably funny, everyone at Michael’s party is skating on thin psychic ice, a fact that must be immediately evident to the audience if the play is to come off. This is especially true of the host, which is where Mr. Mantello’s production first goes wrong. Michael’s desperate self-loathing—he talks like a man who is squeezing a naked razor blade in his bare hand—is alien to Mr. Parsons, who has no trouble with the play’s comic moments but is at a loss when the emotional weather grows heavier in the second half. This throws everything else out of balance, as does the bland acting of most of the other cast members…

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Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the Broadway revival of The Boys in the Band:

The theatrical trailer for the 1970 film version of The Boys in the Band:

From 2008:

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle, of which I am a member, was founded in 1935. Six years later Al Hirschfeld drew the then-current membership, portraying them in camera at the Algonquin Hotel….

Read the whole thing here.

“Drama critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they see the tricks done every night, they know how it’s done, but they can’t do it themselves.”

Brendan Behan, quoted in “Notes by Sage of Nonsense” (Toronto Globe and Mail, March 18, 1961)

One problem with working at home and setting your own schedule, especially for writers, is that it can prove to be quite hard to shut the shop down and take time off. Even if a piece isn’t due, it often forces itself into your unwilling consciousness and insists on being written right now. I ran into this problem last Friday, a day on which I had no show to see and no deadlines to hit. Having spent far too much of the first part of the week driving from Connecticut to New York and back again in order to see a Broadway play, I had every intention of taking the whole day off. That worked pretty well for a couple of hours, but then I realized that I’d started writing the first paragraph of my review of the play in question in my head.

One might call this a Happy Person’s Problem: I know it’s churlish to complain about a life that I find so profoundly fulfilling. I remember what it was like to have a nine-to-five job, and I give thanks each and every day for no longer having to live that way. But it is not in man’s nature, I suspect, to rejoice evermore and give thanks without ceasing, Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians notwithstanding. We accept good fortune as quickly as we grow used to the taking of opiates, and no sooner do we do so than we seek to increase the dosage. Having written a successful play and directed it no less successfully, did I fall down on my knees in gratitude for being so implausibly lucky in my late middle age? No, I sat down at my desk and wrote another one, and now I grow restive because nobody has asked me to direct another show.

Inappropriate discontent is surely a fundamental part of human nature, a compulsion against which the wise person wars ceaselessly, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it had much to do with how hard I find it to close my laptop, walk away from the writer’s life, and immerse myself in unprofitable pursuits. When I woke up this morning, I saw a stack of unread books by my bed, none of which is likely to issue in an essay, article, or review: I want to read them simply for my pleasure, and I fully expect to be pleased once I get around to doing so. So why have some of them been sitting there for a month or more? Why on earth, for that matter, am I writing this posting instead of diving headfirst into Jeffrey C. Stewart’s The New Negro or Christopher Bonanos’ Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous?

I know, I know: the solution to my problem is to solve it. I need to shut down my MacBook Air, do the dishes that I promised Mrs. T I’d do first thing this morning, shave and shower, and open up a book or put on a piece of music. Or both. But instead I sit here and write for no good reason, even though I finished writing this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column last night and needn’t step up to the plate again until Tuesday, and I have no better excuse than the one the scorpion gave to the frog after stinging him: it’s my nature.

The good news is that I’ve now finished saying what I meant to say, and that I need to get those dishes done at some point in the next half-hour, at which point Mrs. T is scheduled to emerge from her bedroom. And the bad news? I’ll get back to you on that.

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Diana Krall sings Nat Cole’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right” at the 1996 Montreal Jazz Festival:

“The Mellotron: A Keyboard with the Power of an Orchestra,” a 1965 British Pathé featurette featuring Eric Robinson and David Nixon. Invented in 1963, the mellotron was subsequently used by the Beatles, David Bowie, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Radiohead, and Tangerine Dream:

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

“But the great John Huston also helped enormously. He managed to consolidate my character for me in just one sentence. I’d been shooting for about two days and Huston said, ‘Cut! Michael,’ he said, ‘speak faster; he’s an honest man.’ Because I was speaking slowly, it seemed as though I was trying to figure out what effect I was making. Huston’s observation was spot on. Honest men speak fast because they don’t need time to calculate.”

Michael Caine, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making (courtesy of Quinn Sutherland)