“Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.”
Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage

Mrs. T and I are off to Washington, D.C., to see Mary Zimmerman’s new production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, one of the all-time great problem shows (brilliant score, impossible book). Zimmerman’s revival, which originated in Chicago earlier this season, is an attempt to solve the show’s underlying conceptual problems without compromising the integrity of Bernstein’s music. Does it succeed? I’ve heard varying reports from Chicago, so I want to see for myself.
Mrs. T and I will be spending the night in Washington and returning to New York on Wednesday for further adventures in our new apartment, which is gradually starting to look less like a warehouse and more like a residence. More as it happens!

“Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.”
Margaret Drabble, A Summer Bird-Cage

After a long and unbroken string of too-bad-to-be-true incidents, Mrs. T and I arrived last Friday at the alarming conclusion that we were both in a Philadelphia. For those unfamiliar with the one-act plays of David Ives, a Philadelphia is a metaphysical black hole “inside of what we know as reality.” When you fall into a Philadelphia, everything—but everything—goes wrong.
No, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m too tired. The two of us only just started to crawl out of our Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon, just in time to drive to New Jersey (which is, of course, dangerously close to Philadelphia) to dine with an aunt and uncle and see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of I Capture the Castle. So in lieu of sharing the gory details, I’ll post an excerpt from “The Philadelphia” that explains everything. Metaphysically speaking, that is.
* * *
AL: Because in a Philadelphia, no matter what you ask for, you can’t get it. You ask for something, they’re not gonna have it. You want to do something, it ain’t gonna get done. You want to go somewhere, you can’t get there from here.
MARK: Good God. So this is very serious.
AL: Just remember, Marcus. This is a condition named for the town that invented the cheese steak. Something that nobody in his right mind would willingly ask for.
MARK: And I thought I was just having a very bad day….
AL: Sure. Millions of people have spent entire lifetimes inside a Philadelphia and never even knew it. Look at the city of Philadelphia itself. Hopelessly trapped forever inside a Philadelphia. And do they know it?
MARK: Well what can I do? Should I just kill myself now and get it over with?
AL: You try to kill yourself in a Philadelphia, you’re only gonna get hurt, babe.
MARK: So what do I do?
AL: Best thing to do is wait it out. Someday the great cosmic train will whisk you outta the City of Brotherly Love and off to someplace happier.

American Ballet Theatre dances Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire in 1973. The score is Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht:

“Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through.”
Joseph Conrad, “Typhoon” (courtesy of Books, Inq.)

I’m taking a day off from my Wall Street Journal drama column. See you next Friday!

Rudolf Serkin, Eugene Ormandy, and the Vienna Philharmonic play the first movement of Mozart’s C Major Piano Concerto, K. 467: