Archives for January 2019

Two episodes of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, became available on line for listening or downloading during my semi-hiatus from this blog.

In the first episode, which dropped on December 14, we took various questions from our listeners, discussed political theater, and talked about To Kill a Mockingbird, the Washington production of Indecent, and From Broadway to Main Street, Laurence Maslon’s new book about how America discovered the Broadway musical.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

On December 27, we dropped our best-and-worst-of-the-year episode, in which we talked about a variety of specific shows and also discussed such trends as the rise of women playwrights and the growing number of straight plays that opened on Broadway in 2018.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

“There is one thing that 99 percent of all critics share with one another: they are failures. I don’t mean failures as critics—my God, that’s understood. I don’t even mean they are failures as people; I mean something more painful by far: These people are failures in life. 

“It’s a second-rate job, folks. Being a drama critic on Broadway wouldn’t keep a decent mind occupied 10% of the time. So you don’t even get second-raters. You get the dregs, the stage-struck but untalented neurotic who eventually drifts into criticism as a means of clinging peripherally to the arts. And most of your cruel critics come this way: they are getting their own back.”

William Goldman, <I>The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway</I> (courtesy of Jason Zinoman)

In addition to my regular drama columns, I published three other pieces in The Wall Street Journal during my recent semi-hiatus from this blog.

The first one, which ran on December 12, was a “Sightings” column about what happens when creative artists of importance draw up lists of works of art that they like:

A film buff recently posted on Twitter the 10 films listed by Whit Stillman, the writer and director of “The Last Days of Disco” and “Love & Friendship,” when he was asked to participate in the 2012 poll in which Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, invited 358 prominent directors to name the 10 greatest movies of all time. Since Mr. Stillman’s mind is as full of surprises as his films, it stands to reason that he should have come up with his fair share of unexpected picks…
 
Ask any artist of stature to draw up a similar list of preferences and you’ll almost certainly learn something just as valuable about him or her. Why? Because the making of lists, in Dr. Johnson’s oft-quoted phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. In 1955, Langston Hughes published a volume called “The First Book of Jazz” in which he included a list called “100 of My Favorite Recordings of Jazz, Blues, Folk Songs, and Jazz-Influenced Performances.” To be sure, it contains a fair number of the records that turn up on most such lists, among them Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” and Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul.” But Hughes, like Mr. Stillman, did his own thinking, and his list also includes politically incorrect picks…

To read the complete piece, go here.

The second one, which ran on December 20, was a “Saturday essay” called “How the Movies Invented Christmas”:

It is a well-attested historical fact that the publication of “A Christmas Carol,” the best-loved book by the best-selling English-language novelist of the 19th century, had the unintended consequence of reintroducing Christmas to countless Britons and Americans who had stopped observing the holiday. And its influence continues to be felt: Dickens’s 1843 novella has been adapted more than three dozen times for film and television since 1901 (Bennett Miller is currently working on a new screen version with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard). Moreover, the vast majority of America’s most popular Christmas films contain plot twists that are derived, at one or more removes, from “A Christmas Carol.”
 
What explains its enduring appeal to filmmakers? It is, first and foremost, a rattling good story. But it is also a secular story, one that offers skeptics a nonreligious route to spiritual renewal….

To read the complete piece, go here.

Finally, I published another “Sightings” column last Thursday, this one about Green Book and the reasons, good and bad, for its mixed critical reception.

It happens that I saw Don Shirley, one of the film’s real-life subjects, play a concert in my once-segregated Missouri home town in 1969, an experience that gave me a special slant on the film:

The sharks of Hollywood are gnawing on “Green Book,” Peter Farrelly’s biopic about Don Shirley, a black pianist who hired Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a white nightclub bouncer, to be his chauffeur-bodyguard on a 1962 tour of the Deep South, through which blacks traveled by car at their own risk. (The title refers to the Negro Motorist Green-Book published between 1936 and 1966 that told black travelers where they could eat and sleep without fear of “embarrassment.”) Once it would have been a cinch at the Oscars, but times have changed, and “Green Book” is instead drawing heavy critical fire. Many contend that its characterizations and storytelling are quaintly sentimental, factually suspect and—worst of all—unenlightened….
 
“Green Book” has been compared to “Driving Miss Daisy,” but it’s really “In the Heat of the Night” played for laughs. Norman Jewison’s 1967 film, in which a black detective from Philadelphia (famously played by Sidney Poitier) gets caught up in a Mississippi murder case and befriends the racist local police chief, was once thought daring, but now it feels dated. “Green Book” has a similarly old-fashioned air that will strike many millennials as alien, though it will more likely fill you with nostalgia for the way movies used to be if you’re 50 or older. Either way, it’s a solidly traditional piece of storytelling, and Mr. Farrelly’s portrait of the ugly realities of segregation will surely seem believable—as well it should—to viewers of all ages.
 
The catch is that Hollywood’s time-honored by-the-book formulas don’t mesh well with today’s heightened racial sensitivities….

To read the complete piece, go here.

“Examine any work of art down to its bone and you find cliché.”

William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (courtesy of Jason Zinoman)

My Wall Street Journal best-theater-of-2018 list appeared in the paper two weeks ago. Here are some excerpts. You can read the whole thing by going here.

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• Best new play. Lincoln Center Theater’s off-Broadway premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “The Hard Problem” proved its 81-year-old author to be the Shaw of our time.

• Best new musical. “Miss You Like Hell,” in which Quiara Alegría Hudes and Erin McKeown tell the tale of an undocumented immigrant and her long-estranged daughter, was premiered by the Public Theater to powerfully moving effect.

•Directors of the year.Lila Neugebauer, who staged “At Home at the Zoo” and “Mary Page Marlowe” off Broadway and “The Waverly Gallery” on Broadway, is an erstwhile up-and-comer who now ranks among our top stage directors. As for Hunter Foster,who directed “The Drowsy Chaperone” for Goodspeed Musicals (about which more below) and “42^ndStreet” for Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse, he’s a wonder-worker who belongs on Broadway.

•Company of the year. No company in America mounts more satisfying musical-comedy revivals than Goodspeed Musicalsof East Haddam, Conn., which gave us superb stagings of “The Drowsy Chaperone,” “Oliver!” and “The Will Rogers Follies” by Mr. Foster, Rob Ruggiero and Don Stephenson. 

•Playwright of the year. After going two decades without a Broadway production, Kenneth Lonergan hit the bull’s-eye twice in a row with unforgettable revivals of “Lobby Hero” and “The Waverly Gallery.” May “The Starry Messenger,” his best play to date, follow them there soon!

One of the finest new plays of the year just past, Heather Raffo’s Noura, opened off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons a couple of days after I had to send in my Wall Street Journal best-theater-of-2018 column. Even though it has since closed, I wanted to make sure that you got to see what I said about Noura, so here’s an excerpt.

You can read the complete review here.

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Identity is the hottest topic in American theater these days, just as immigration is the hottest topic in American politics. But Heather Raffo’s “Noura,” a drama about a family of Iraqi Catholics who have fled to America to escape the “medieval madmen” (as one character calls them) who now rule their native land, is nothing like the issue-driven, stridently politicized plays about these subjects with which our stages are currently clogged. While “Noura” is palpably political, it preaches no sermons, nor will it send you home inspired to do anything in particular. Instead, Ms. Raffo has given us a humandrama, the searing story of five people who find themselves caught between the pulverizing grindstones of politics and religion. If it’s propaganda you seek, go elsewhere—but should you do so, you’ll miss one of the finest new plays I’ve ever reviewed in this space.

“Noura” takes place at Christmas in the New York apartment where the title character (played with attention-seizing magnetism by Ms. Raffo) lives with Tim (Nabil Elouahabi) and Alex (Liam Campora), her husband and young son. Having given up everything to free themselves from the brutal tyranny of ISIS, including their upper-middle-class careers, Noura and her family are now American citizens who are determined, in Tim’s hopeful words, to “reinvent ourselves” in “a place [where] we can forget,” so much so that Tim and Alex have changed their names from Tareq and Yazen. At home, they speak only English so that Alex “won’t grow up sounding like a foreigner,” and the Christmas tree that is the only visible touch of warmth in their austerely contemporary-looking flat (“It’s empty—I mean modern”) is also a symbol of their determination to flourish in a strange land. But Tim is kidding himself when he says that “I feel safe for the first time in my life”: Nothing can be truly safe from the effects of Western modernity, least of all a family of Iraqi émigrés, and the arrival of two visitors from home (Dahlia Azama and Matthew David) touches off a train of powder that by play’s end will blow up their seemingly settled lives….

Ms. Raffo first came to my attention in 2005 with “Nine Parts of Desire,” a one-woman play of the highest quality in which she portrayed nine refugees from Iraq whose real-life models she had interviewed and whom she brought to life with startling precision. Since then, though, I’d neither seen nor heard anything of her, and it is a joy to report that “Noura” is as fine as its predecessor….