Archives for October 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I take a look at a little-known survey that sheds light on the future of theater in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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As theater lovers wait restlessly for Broadway to resume performances after the coronavirus pandemic has been brought under control, the revival of “The Music Man,” which stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster and is now set to open on February 10, 2022 (yes, I know, we’ll see), is the show that has stirred up the most excitement. That’s no surprise, since it’s a great musical with a dream cast. But for me, the most interesting news about the American musical is not the latest rescheduling of an as-yet-hypothetical revival: It’s the release of a statistical survey that, read carefully, serves as a crystal ball in which you can see the possible future of American theater.

Dramatics, a monthly magazine for theater students and teachers, has been publishing since 1938 an annual survey of the musicals and plays most often produced by American high schools. Thousands of drama teachers throughout the country supply Dramatics with the data for these lists, and National Public Radio has taken on the daunting task of compiling all of the surveys, thus making it possible to see how the favorites have changed over time….

You may wonder why anyone other than their parents should care about what musicals high-schoolers are performing. Certainly most journalists seem not to: So far as I know, NPR is the only major media outlet to take note of the most recent of these surveys. But I think they’re making a mistake. According to Dramatics, nearly 50 million people attend high-school musicals each year, most of them young people for whom they serve as an introduction to the musical as a genre. It stands to reason, then, that the shows they see and in which they perform today will have a powerful influence on the ones they’ll want to see on Broadway ten years from now—or 40….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird:

Shirley Horn sings “Here’s to Life” with John Williams and the Boston Pops in 1993. The arrangement is by Johnny Mandel:

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

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

From 2016:

I remember quite a lot about my ten-year-old self and the town in which I lived—but not much about the rest of the world. Just the other day I looked up Wikipedia’s timeline of events in 1966, thinking that I might find a bit of fodder for a Wall Street Journal column about the fiftieth anniversary of something or other. It was, not surprisingly, an eventful year, but I was struck most forcibly by how little I noticed at the time about its most consequential occurrences. Nineteen sixty-six was, among many other noteworthy things, the year in which Lenny Bruce, Montgomery Clift, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Hofmann, Buster Keaton, Evelyn Waugh, and Clifton Webb died, but I didn’t yet know who any of those men were…..

Read the whole thing here.

“To have one’s fortune told gratifies, after all, most of the superficial demands of egotism. There is no mystery about the eternal popularity of divination.”

Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

W.B. Yeats reads and talks about three of his poems on the BBC. These recordings were made in 1932, 1934, and 1937:

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

“Anyone can squander money, and anyone can hoard it. But the most difficult thing in the world is to know how to spend it.”

Emlyn Williams, The Corn Is Green

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a production of Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas webcast from Dallas. Here’s an excerpt.

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Prior to the coming of the pandemic, I traveled all over America to see and review regional theater productions. Thanks to the theatrical webcasts that I started covering in March, though, I’ve been discovering first-rate companies of whose existence I was previously unaware. That’s one of the many reasons why smart theater companies will make streaming video an integral part of their plans for the post-COVID future—it’s an indispensable way to spread the word more widely about what they’re doing. 

Dallas’ Undermain Theatre, the latest of these discoveries, was founded in 1984 and now performs in a 90-seat theater of its own. While it’s highly thought of in Texas, I only just found out by chance that Bruce DuBose, the company’s producing artistic director, is starring in a webcast version of “St. Nicholas,” one of Conor McPherson’s monologues about unhappy people who live too close to the edge that separates the real from the unreal. Written in 1997, it has since become one of Mr. McPherson’s most admired monologues, and what Undermain is doing with it is thrilling. Not only is Mr. DuBose an outstanding performer, but the production as a whole is identical in quality to the superlative work being done online by New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.

The premise of “St. Nicholas” is funny going in: The principal character is a self-hating, booze-swilling Dublin drama critic in his late fifties who falls in with a group of vampires. As if that weren’t enough, Mr. McPherson’s critic is jealous of the people he reviews because he longs in vain to write his own plays: “I had no ideas for a story….I could only write about what was there already. I was a hack.” This is, needless to say, an over-familiar piece of abuse flung at critics by those who resent them—but Mr. McPherson, being not a hack but one of our very greatest playwrights, turns it into a wholly believable tale of a troubled soul who has lost his way in the dark….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for St. Nicholas: