Archives for September 2020

“Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?’ And that voice has generally entered the brain at the moment the actor loses contact, however momentarily, with the character in the situation, and, looking back to examine this or that line, turns, like Lot’s wife, into salt.”

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline. Here’s an excerpt.

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If you’re looking for streaming theater webcasts and are prepared to pay the tab, BroadwayHD, a subscription-based digital platform launched five years ago, has more than 300 shows to offer. Many are British productions, but a fair number of the plays and musicals are of American origin (though some are West End transfers of Broadway shows). Several of BroadwayHD’s most noteworthy offerings were taped by PBS and telecast as episodes of its “Great Performances” and “Live at Lincoln Center” series, and one of the latter, Lincoln Center Theater’s premiere production of Dominique Morriseau’s “Pipeline,” is a major event.

Performed by LCT in 2017, “Pipeline” has since been taken up by regional theaters from coast to coast. Part of the reason for its ubiquity is its preternaturally timely subject matter: “Pipeline” is the story of Nya and Xavier (Karen Pittman and Morocco Omari), a divorced middle-class black couple whose teenage son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), attacks one of his schoolteachers and is at risk of going to jail as the curtain goes up. But Ms. Morriseau is no mere headline-grabber, and “Pipeline” is an exceptionally well-crafted play that pulls you in by working the miracle of theater, which has the power to take you to places you’ve never been, showing you how other people live—and how they feel about their lives….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Pipeline:

The Art Farmer Quartet, with Farmer on flugelhorn, Jim Hall on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, and Walter Perkins on drums, plays “My Kinda Love” on a 1964 episode of Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual:

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

Envy, to which th’ ignoble mind’s a slave,
Is emulation in the learn’d or brave.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about the likely effects of social distancing on the arts in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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With Labor Day in the rear-view mirror, attention is turning to the fall season, the time when arts organizations announce their plans for the year to come and Hollywood rolls out “prestige” movies and TV series…only it’s not happening in 2020. Because of the pandemic, live theater is almost entirely shut down, as are most movie theaters. Ballet companies everywhere have scrapped “The Nutcracker,” the cash cow that pays their bills for the rest of the year, and museums are leaving up the exhibitions that were on display in March.

Yes, the art world is trying to sound optimistic, but the writing on the wall consists of two ominous words: social distancing. New York’s newly reopened Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art are admitting only 25% of their regular foot traffic. The Houston Symphony reopens its 2,900-seat concert hallthis Saturday, but it will play for only 150 people, while the Dallas Symphony is offering programs by “smaller orchestral ensembles” to be performed for audiences of no more than 75 in its 2,062-seat hall.

While the prospects for 2021 may seem more encouraging, appearances are deceiving. Chicago’s Writers Theatre announced a truncated four-play season—but warned that “we do not plan to produce in our theatres until early 2021 at the soonest.” The catch lies in those last three words. The same conjectural specificity applies to San Francisco Ballet, which plans to resume performances on Jan. 19. But the title of the 2021 season is “Take a Leap of Faith,” and it isn’t hard to guess what that means. If you’re planning to subscribe, remember that you’re being asked to “take a leap of faith” and trust that the pandemic will have gone away by opening night. As for Broadway’s 41 theaters, some insiders are now saying that they may not reopen until the fall of 2021.

Could it be that social distancing will lead to the end of the arts as we know them?…

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Read the whole thing here.

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but though his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

Glenn Gould: Off the Record, a 1959 CBC documentary about the pianist’s life in his lakeside cottage:

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

“Few there are who can truly rejoice in their neighbor’s good fortune. In most, envy and malice taint the spirit.”

Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. David R. Slavitt)