Archives for 2021

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast version of The Belle of Amherst. Here’s an excerpt.

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Emily Dickinson is not only a great poet but an artistic giant who casts a long shadow across both high and popular American culture. On the one hand, her hauntingly gnomic verses formed the basis for “Letter to the World” (1940), one of Martha Graham’s very best dances, and Aaron Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, ” a song cycle of supreme sublimity. On the other hand, she cavorts wildly and ahistorically throughout “Dickinson,” the Apple TV+ comedy series in which she is transformed into a kind of proto-goth chick who takes opium and has hot sex with her brother’s fiancée.

“The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s 1976 one-woman play about Dickinson, falls somewhere in between these distant extremes, if far closer to the former than the latter….

Julie Harris appeared in a PBS version of the play taped at a 1976 Los Angeles performance, and that telecast (which can be streamed on Amazon Prime) has caused her to be indissolubly identified with part and play alike. While “The Belle of Amherst” continues to be performed by regional theater companies all over the U.S. and was revived off Broadway in 2014, nobody ever writes about it without making mention of Harris’s delicate, subdued performance, which is widely regarded as definitive.

You’d think such a play would have been taken up as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic closed American theaters and forced them to resort to streaming video, not least because as a one-hander it presents none of the logistical challenges of an ensemble production. But Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new online version of “The Belle of Amherst,” starring Margery Lowe, jointly produced with Coral Gables’ Actors’ Playhouse and taped without an audience in PBD’s 218-seat theater, appears to be the first one to be webcast since the start of the lockdown….

Not only is this one of the best theatrical webcasts I’ve seen in the past year, exactly comparable in artistic quality and production values to Undermain Theatre’s “St. Nicholas” and the Wilma Theater’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” but Ms. Lowe’s performance is superior in certain important ways to that of Julie Harris.

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Belle of Amherst:

Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sing a duet version of “Moonlight in Vermont” on an episode of The Frank Sinatra Show originally telecast by ABC on May 9, 1958:

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

“The disadvantage of ideas in the theatre is that if they are acceptable, they are accepted and so kill the play that helped to diffuse them.”

Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, I reviewed webcast versions of The Last Five Years and The Aran Islands. Here’s an excerpt.

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The most consequential development in the postmodern history of the musical has been the explosion of interest in small-scale revivals initially triggered by John Doyle’s 2005 Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” What we have not yet seen is a comparable explosion of newly written “chamber musicals” that, like Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” (2001) and Josh Schmidt’s “A Minister’s Wife” (2009), are written for very small casts and accompanied by instrumental ensembles of like size. Since such shows would be well suited to the daunting problems posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is good news that “The Last Five Years,” a two-actor musical, is now being presented as a webcast production of supreme dramatic and technical excellence, as fine a show of any kind as I’ve reviewed since I started covering online theater a year ago….

Joe O’Byrne’s “The Aran Islands” is a one-man play assembled by him from turn-of-the-century journal entries by J.M. Synge, the author of “The Playboy of the Western World.” It’s the 10th video production of New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, whose shows continue to set the gold standard for theatrical webcasting. Performed by Brendan Conroy, directed by Mr. O’Byrne and filmed earlier this year at Dublin’s New Theatre, it is a digital remount of the Irish Rep’s original 2017 production, a piece of richly colored storytelling enhanced this time by film footage shot on the isolated islands portrayed in the play….

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Read the whole thing here.

“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous. The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.”

Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Hilary, my beloved wife, died a year ago today, just four weeks after receiving a long-awaited double lung transplant that we had both hoped would cure her of a terminal disease. (I wrote about her life and death here, here, and here.) Losing my life’s companion under such bitterly ironic circumstances wrought havoc on my soul, and I frightened a close friend a few weeks later when I told her that I felt “broken.” In fact, several months went by before I started to pull myself together, and even then, my recovery was a matter of seemingly endless fits and starts. Yet the miracle finally came to pass, and today I am myself again.

Grief, I have discovered, is self-limiting, and mine has burned itself out. It isn’t that I don’t miss Hilary anymore: I’m burning a candle in her memory today, I think about her often, and sometimes I still shed tears at the thought of her (especially when I hear pieces of music that I associate with her). But I have come to fully understand and accept that her death was for the best, and this has helped me to surmount my sorrow. I know she would never have wished to lead the severely impaired post-operative life to which she would have been reduced, and even if she had succeeded in recovering to some limited degree from the transplant surgery that came too late to save her, the pandemic that by then was raging uncontrollably in the outside world would have made it impossible for her to leave the hospital for months and months—if ever.

For me, the process of coming to terms with Hilary’s death was inevitably shaped—and, I suspect, prolonged—by the fact that I had no choice but to go straight from her deathbed into lockdown. That was the final cruelty.

A friend writes:

You were robbed of all the rituals that go along with grieving. The hugs, the trays of food, the too many (in person) “how you holding up?”s. Some of that can be torture, but we do all of it for a reason: it helps (the giver as much as the receiver)! And it sucks that you missed out on it.

It does, yet it is no less true that my friends were as steadfastly supportive as it was possible to be from a distance. Indeed, I believe that their love and sympathy has been the main source of my slow-dawning realization that I will have some kind of life after Hilary, perhaps even a truly happy one—different, to be sure, but not without possibilities of its own.

Even now, people I know continue to make gestures of sympathy that move me deeply. Just the other day, another friend who lives near one of the Frank Lloyd Wright houses that Hilary and I loved best told me that her daughter did a drawing on a small stone and placed it under a tree close to the house as a memorial to my irreplaceable partner. She sent me a picture of the stone, and the sight of it touched me to the heart. Perhaps someday I’ll come see it for myself.

After the British army turned back Rommel’s troops at El Alamein, Winston Churchill told his people, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” More and more, I sense that I, too, have reached the end of the beginning, and am ready at last to make a fresh start. As improbable as it once seemed, my battered heart is full of growing hope for the future, just as my mind is full of memories that no longer sting but instead inspire me to rejoice in the once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck that brought Hilary and me together. Brief and full of trial though our marriage was, it is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me, or ever will.

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Indra Rios-Moore sings “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen: 

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Riccardo Chailly, and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra perform Mahler’s “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” (I have become lost to the world) live in 1989:

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

“I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable