Archives for March 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King and the Broadway transfer of Girl From the North Country. Here’s an excerpt.

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Katori Hall’s plays remind me of a sign I once saw over the front door of an unpretentious little restaurant: “NOT FANCY, BUT GOOD.” Sure enough, there’s nothing fancy about the down-to-earth dramaturgy of Ms. Hall’s kitchen-sink chronicles of family life in all its varied aspects. All she does—if “all” is the word—is tell stories about ordinary men and women who, as Jack Webb said of the characters in “Dragnet,” sound “as real as a guy pouring a cup of coffee.” Yet truth gushes out every time they open their mouths…

After praising “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning” (2008), “Our Lady of Kibeho” (2014) and “The Blood Quilt” (2015), I decided that Ms. Hall, who is 38, was one of the most promising American playwrights of her generation. With the off-Broadway premiere of “The Hot Wing King,”directed with galvanizing vitality by Steve H. Broadnax III, I’m now inclined to go a notch or two further…

Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis), the title character, is an amateur chef from Memphis who specializes in elaborately sauced chicken wings—his latest creation is Cajun Alfredo With Bourbon-Infused Crumbled Bacon—and is going for the gold at this year’s Hot Wang Festival. (That’s how they say “wing” down in Memphis.) He is also a straight-acting gay man who left his wife and children in St. Louis and moved to Memphis to live with Dwayne (Korey Jackson), a local hotel manager…

As for Dwayne, he has family problems of his own. TJ (Eric B. Robinson Jr.), his widowed brother-in-law, is a small-time thief who is neglecting Everett (Cecil Blutcher), Dwayne’s 16-year-old nephew. Everett in turn longs to escape the chaos of his own splintered home and live with Dwayne and Cordell. Dwayne is fine with that—but Cordell isn’t. That’s where things get complicated…

“Girl From the North Country,” Conor McPherson’s self-directed jukebox musical based on the songs of Bob Dylan, has reached Broadway after hugely successful runs in London and at New York’s Public Theater, slightly altered but essentially the same as the show I reviewed in 2018, calling it “a musical that does complete justice to the artistry of the great American songwriter whose genius inspired it.”…

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To read my review of The Hot Wing King, go here.

To read my review of Girl From the North Country, go here.

Steve H. Broadnax III talks about The Hot Wing King:

Clips from the Broadway transfer of Girl From the North Country:

Bing Crosby sings “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, on an episode of The Hollywood Palace originally telecast by ABC on March 1, 1969:

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

“There must be a spice of mischief and wilfulness thrown into the cup of our existence to give it its sharp taste and sparkling colour.”

William Hazlitt, “On Depth and Superficiality”

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

This week we have the playwright and director Conor McPherson in the studio to talk about his artistic philosophy, the ghostly worlds of his plays, and the process of creating the Bob Dylan quasi-musical, now on Broadway, Girl From the North Country. The critics also discuss the recent production of To Kill a Mockingbird that staged at Madison Square Garden for an audience of 18,000, Tumacho at Clubbed Thumb, Kate Hamill’s Dracula at Classic Stage Company, and James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner at Shakespeare Theatre Company.

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.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss Hollywood movies whose subject matter is infectious disease, with special reference to Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan. Here’s an excerpt.

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Carl Goldman, a 67-year-old California radio-station owner,was infected with COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Today he is in quarantine in a facility in Omaha run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post called “I Have the Coronavirus. So Far, It Isn’t That Bad” in which he remarked that his quarantine location, which was last used for the 2014 Ebola outbreak, “looked like something out of ‘The Andromeda Strain,’” Robert Wise’s high-tech screen version of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel about a mysterious illness that turns out to have been caused by an extraterrestrial virus.

One of the things about Mr. Goldman’s piece that struck me most forcibly was that he resorted so naturally to a movie-based metaphor to describe his experience. If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to do that fairly often, since the boomers all grew up watching the same “water-cooler movies.” Even the CDC does it: Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, wrote in the Atlantic that “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a broadly similar pandemic, was “a fair and accurate portrayal of how the public health community might respond to a disease outbreak like the fictional one in the film.”

That was quite an endorsement, especially given the fact that countless such movies, most of them eminently forgettable and deservedly forgotten, have been ground out by Hollywood.  (“The Killer That Stalked New York,” anyone?) A few, however, have been rather more noteworthy…

Moreover, one such film, Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), is not merely a nail-nibbling thriller but Kazan’s first indisputably major film, a now-classic piece of noir-style urban cinematic storytelling….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Panic in the Streets:

“There must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”

W.H. Auden, “Psychology and Art To-day”

Billy Joel performs “New York State of Mind” on The Mike Douglas Show. This episode was taped on August 9, 1976:

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

“Even for spirits less fastidious than Strachey’s, there is, even at the best of times, a great charm in the past. Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”

Max Beerbohm, “Lytton Strachey” (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)