“I’ve often felt that life is a hard deal and it’s unrelentingly tragic and an uphill fight. But you can on a day walk into a movie house and for an hour-and-a-half see Fred Astaire dancing and escape in it. Then you walk back out of the darkness into the hot sun and into real life. You were at least refreshed. Like stopping in a bar on a hot day and getting a cold beer and you rest for 10 minutes and then go on with your journey. Instead of the Bergmans and filmmakers like that, is it the escapist filmmakers that are making a more practical contribution to life by giving you this respite?”
Woody Allen, interviewed in The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 15, 2010)

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:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production 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)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CLEVELAND:

• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• An Ideal Husband (comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LOS ANGELES:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

“The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it, those that we inspire contract it; and habit fills up what remains.”
Marcel Proust, À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Within a Budding Grove)

I review the Broadway premiere of David Mamet’s A Life in the Theatre in the Greater New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal, and the verdict is mostly very positive. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
David Mamet is the most American of playwrights. Not only do his snarlingly competitive characters take a zero-sum view of human relationships, but they express it with words that fly through the air like bullets in search of a body. So what could have possessed Patrick Stewart–make that Sir Patrick Stewart–to wrestle with “A Life in the Theatre,” Mr. Mamet’s 1977 play about a pair of actors, one old and one young, who are battling for dominance over one another? Beats me, but I’m glad it did, for Mr. Stewart’s performance, strange though it may sound from time to time, is in the end both deeply comprehending and painfully touching, just like the play itself.
I can’t think why it took so long for “A Life in the Theatre” to get to Broadway. It’s a natural, a two-character comedy with a wrenchingly serious coda and a plum part for a first-class actor who is capable of convincingly portraying a tired old ham. As usual, Mr. Mamet tells us nothing about his characters beyond the words that they speak, but we are, I think, invited to suppose that Robert (Mr. Stewart) and John (T.R. Knight) are working together in the kind of second-rate repertory company that shoves a new production onto the boards every week or two, ready or not. In many of the 26 scenes, we see Robert and John doing their best to stagger through a series of underrehearsed scripts (one of which is a cruelly clever Eugene O’Neill parody). Elsewhere we look on as Robert tries to make John his protégé, hosing him down with gaseous lectures about the craft of theater…
Mr. Stewart plays Robert very much in the English manner, and at first I feared that his pacing would be unidiomatically deliberate (I smiled to hear him wring five finicky syllables out of the word “specifically”). Then I let go of my preconceptions and started watching the performance he was giving instead of the one I wanted to see, and before long I’d stopped keeping score and was enthralled….
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The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of A Life in the Theatre by going here.

Carl Sandburg appears as the mystery guest on a 1960 episode of What’s My Line?:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.”
Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe (Cities of the Plain)

• As I’ve written elsewhere, I no longer find Neil Simon’s plays to be very funny. His insert-flap-A-in-slot-B style of joke-driven comedy strikes me as a rusty relic of the increasingly distant past. But there are those who insist that there’s more to Simon than his punchlines, and so I took a look at the 1975 film version of The Sunshine Boys the other day in an attempt to see for myself what his critical advocates see in him. I tried to watch The Sunshine Boys a couple of years ago and couldn’t get anywhere with it–but this time I saw the film from a different point of view.

What hit me forcibly on a second viewing was that Willie Clark, the character played in the film by Walter Matthau, is not merely an absent-minded old grouch but is all too clearly suffering from dementia. Yes, Simon plays his confusion for laughs–he plays everything for laughs–but anyone who has spent time with a friend or relative afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease will immediately spot the symptoms, which are portrayed with next to no comic exaggeration:

BEN It’s Monday, not Wednesday…didn’t you know it was Monday?

WILLIE I remembered but I forgot.

In 1972, when The Sunshine Boys opened on Broadway, the phrase “Alzheimer’s disease” had yet to become part of the national lexicon. I recently shared a platform with Marion Roach, who mentioned in passing that a piece about her mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s that she wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1983 was, unlikely as it may sound, the first first-person account of the disease ever to be published. A quarter-century later, we all know what Alzheimer’s disease is, and damned few of us are inclined to laugh at it.

I still don’t think The Sunshine Boys is all that funny, but when you view it not as a comedy but as a drama, the punchlines recede in salience and you find yourself confronted with a portrait of an angry, frightened old man that is fraught with something not far removed from pathos. So given the fact that Neil Simon’s plays haven’t been doing especially well in revival of late, I find myself wondering: what would The Sunshine Boys be like if it were staged not for laughs but truth, the way that Matthew Warchus staged last year’s Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests?

As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of that remarkable production:

Matthew Warchus is well aware of the bleak undertones of “The Norman Conquests.” He went so far in a recent interview as to claim that he’d directed the triptych “as if it’s Chekhov.” I wouldn’t go quite as far as that: Mr. Warchus is a master of physical comedy, and each installment is full of the same knockabout antics that can be seen in his production of “God of Carnage,” which is currently playing to packed houses on Broadway. But he also understands the delicate art of silence, and “The Norman Conquests” is no less full of moments of stillness when the laughter dies away and all you can hear is the keening sound of sorrow.

Perhaps Simon’s play isn’t strong enough to stand up to that kind of tough-minded treatment. David Cromer, after all, staged Brighton Beach Memoirs that way, and it closed after just nine performances. But what if some similarly inclined director were to mount The Sunshine Boys not on Broadway but in a small, first-class regional house like, say, Palm Beach Dramaworks or Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre, where the audience, instead of insisting on being “entertained,” would presumably be more willing to go where the production led them?

“If [Simon’s] plays continue to be performed,” I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Brighton Beach Memoirs, “it will only be because actors and directors have found a new way of performing them, one that cuts through the punch lines to find a deeper, more enduring dramatic truth.” Might The Sunshine Boys be the place to start?

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A studio featurette about the making of the film version of The Sunshine Boys:

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (The Sweet Cheat Gone)