“Life—how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.”
V.S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)
• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)
• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)
• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)
IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G, suitable for children, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)
TT: Almanac
“To be young is painful but exhilarating: to be certain and to pass into uncertainty and on to new certainties; to be conscious of the changes from one hour to the next; to be intolerant of others and blindly interested in oneself. It is so hard to remember youth, simply because one loses dramatic interest in oneself. One is harsh; one is all sentiment.”
V.S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
TT: Snapshot
Patti LuPone sings the opening scene of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock in a revival by the Acting Company that was telecast on PBS in 1986. The production was directed by John Houseman and Christopher J. Markle:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
TT: Free for the asking
If you visit this blog more than occasionally, you’ve been encouraged numerous times to read A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume roman fleuve about twentieth-century England, which was originally published between 1951 and 1975. In 2004 I wrote an essay about A Dance to the Music of Time for the New York Times Book Review in which I praised it in the strongest possible terms.
Should you need a stronger push, Levi Stahl, an accomplished litblogger who works for the University of Chicago Press, advises me that effective today, all twelve volumes of Dance will become available as e-books and will be marketed on all existing e-book platforms. What’s more, A Question of Upbringing, the first volume in the cycle, can be downloaded for free. No catch: it’s yours. The eleven other volumes will cost you eight bucks apiece.
This is, in my opinion, an absolutely brilliant piece of marketing, and I cannot commend it to you too enthusiastically. For more information, go here and here, then get cracking. You won’t be sorry.
TT: Prose in motion
Every writer dreams of seeing one of his books being read in public. It’s never happened to me, alas, but a friend of mine snapped this photograph on the B train in New York City the other day and e-mailed it to me. The book on the left is, needless to say, the paperback edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Whoever and wherever you are, dear reader, I hope you were enjoying yourself as much as I enjoyed seeing you on the screen of my MacBook!
TT: Almanac
“The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd—one cannot answer deep questions about what one’s life was like—one writes novels about it.”
Anthony Powell, (interview, London Times, May 15, 1986)
THE ORIGINAL MOVIE MOGUL
“For the past half century and more, it has been generally taken for granted that the director of a film is to be considered its ‘author,’ the individual who is primarily responsible for the film’s total effect, even when the weight of factual evidence pertaining to a specific film clearly indicates otherwise. Yet it remains unusual for the average American filmgoer to be able to name the directors of more than a handful of his favorite movies, and prior to the Fifties, when the ‘auteur theory’ became fashionable, it was far less common. For years, the only Hollywood directors widely known by name were those who, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, also starred in the films they directed–and a mostly forgotten man named Cecil B. DeMille…”