Friday again, and time for this week’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Today I reviewed three plays, one off-off-Broadway production (The Caterers) and two out-of-town shows (King Lear in Boston and Leading Ladies in Washington, D.C.). I gave all three a thumbs-up:

Talk about timely: I saw “The Caterers,” Jonathan Leaf’s new play about an Islamic terrorist and his three hostages, a British filmmaker and a pair of Jewish caterers, a couple of hours after Mayor Bloomberg warned New Yorkers of a possible terrorist assault on the local subway system. The news was still so hot that I had trouble getting a cab to the theater–and “The Caterers” is so nightmarishly believable a portrait of terrorism in action that the friend with whom I saw it had a panic attack when it was over.

Part of my friend’s anxiety arose from the fact that “The Caterers” is being performed by a very fine cast (Judith Hawking is especially strong) in an Off-Off Broadway theater small enough that you can smell the powder whenever Mohammed (Brian Wallace) fires his pistol. But Mr. Leaf’s play, which was inspired by a real-life incident, is wholly plausible in its own right…

Alvin Epstein is best known in Manhattan for his appearances in the plays of Samuel Beckett. He first attracted attention a half-century ago in the Broadway premiere of “Waiting for Godot” and was most recently heard from this February in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s splendid revival of “Endgame.” Now he’s up in Boston, guesting with the Actors’ Shakespeare Project in the best “King Lear” I’ve ever seen on stage….

I have a weakness for the vanilla-ice-cream farces of Ken Ludwig, the latest of which, “Leading Ladies,” is now playing at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre (yes, that Ford’s Theatre). As usual with Mr. Ludwig, this tale of Clark & Gable (Ian Kahn and JD Cullum), two fourth-rate Shakespearean actors who dress up in drag to swindle a small-town heiress (Karen Ziemba) out of an inheritance, is silly, sentimental and efficient to a fault, the fault being that you can see the denouement coming two miles off.

Fortunately, “Leading Ladies” is also funny in a sweet, old-fashioned way that may not have much to do with its purported genre (Mr. Ludwig is too nice a guy to write six-door farce, which thrives on unbridled cruelty) but is agreeable all the same….

As usual, no link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, Web-based journalism’s best bargain.

UPDATE: The Journal has just posted a free link to this review. Go here to read the whole thing.

1. I went to bed at two a.m. on Thursday morning.

2. I got up at six-thirty to write my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.

3. At nine-fifteen, just as I was starting to draft the last sentence of the column, I received a terse e-mail from Eric Gibson, my editor at the Journal: “Think we need you to comment on Pinter’s Nobel for Sightings stedda agreed topic. Can do?”

4. “Pinter’s Nobel?” I said to myself, puzzled.

5. I checked the wires and found out that Harold Pinter had just won the Nobel Prize for literature.

6. Oaths were uttered.

7. I put aside Column No. 1 and spent the next five hours drafting and polishing Column No. 2.

8. My assistant showed up fifteen minutes early for an afternoon work session, only to discover that I’d been so busy working on Column No. 2 that I never got around to putting my clothes on. (Yes, she has keys.)

9. More oaths were uttered.

10. I got dressed, quickly.

11. The column got finished and filed shortly thereafter.

12. I staggered to a press preview of Alan Ayckbourn’s Absurd Person Singular. It was raining.

13. I sloshed home after the show, took the phone off the hook, and fell into bed.

If you want to talk to me, call back tomorrow. Or Sunday.

P.S. Read “Sightings” in the “Pursuits” section of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.

P.P.S. You can always count on Mr. Alicublog to come out swinging!

August 2004:

What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn’t get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?…

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Glenn Gould’s average fee for a solo recital in 1964, the last year he performed in public: $3,500

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $21, 124.58

(Source: Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange)

“An artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”

Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World

I mentioned the other day that I’d bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love. What’s especially striking about this etching, at least from my point of view, is that it’s one of only three figurative works of art out of the two dozen pieces in the Teachout Museum, and the only one in which the subject’s face is fully visible. Milton Avery’s “March at a Table” is a portrait of March, the artist’s daughter, but her face is concealed, and in Pierre Bonnard’s “Femme assise dans sa bagnoire,” Marthe, the artist’s mistress, has turned her head away from the viewer. Since people who buy art normally buy what they like (unless they’re snobs or investment-oriented collectors), I always took it for granted that my unconscious avoidance of the human face said something significant about me. But I never did figure out what it was, and in any case my purchase of “Woman’s Head” presumably says something no less significant.

The woman in question, by the way, is a most interesting piece of work—pensive, not conventionally “beautiful” by any conventional definition of the word, and yet I can’t take my eyes off her. It’s been that way ever since I first saw her on line (I bought “Woman’s Head” from a Florida auction house). I couldn’t have told you why I found her so irresistibly fascinating, but I did, and do.

I reviewed a biography of Maria Callas four years ago for the New York Times. This is part of what I wrote:

Thelonious Monk, no stranger to paradox, once wrote a splintery, deliberately awkward jazz waltz to which he gave the title “Ugly Beauty.” He could have written it with Maria Callas in mind. A jolie laide with hard, bony features and a startlingly long nose, she contrived through sheer force of will to persuade audiences that she was a great beauty with an even greater voice. It was, of course, a con job. Her technique was full of holes, and the voice itself was more than a little bit peculiar-sounding, thick and foggy and apt to crash through the guardrails with no warning. The wobbly high C she sings in her 1955 recording of “O patria mia,” the big soprano aria from the third act of Aida, is one of the scariest moments in all of recorded opera—it sounds as if someone had grabbed her from behind and was shaking her like a cocktail.

The beauty of Callas’s voice was so strangely proportioned that some very discerning people simply cannot hear it…

No doubt some of my friends will be just as puzzled when they first see the ugly beauty who now makes her home in my living room. Nor will I try to persuade them that she’s pretty, because she isn’t. All I know is that I decided the moment I saw her that I couldn’t live without her. Love is like that.

Several readers wrote to comment on yesterday’s posting about how the phrase No problem has replaced You’re welcome as a response to thanks. Here’s some of what some of them said:

– “The thing I detest down here [North Carolina]
is when you ask a salesperson if they have a three-handled widget and
he/she cheerfully says,

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)

– Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here)

– Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

– Sides: The Fear Is Real… (sketch comedy, PG, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Oct. 27)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– No Foreigners Beyond This Point (drama, PG, a brief bedroom scene, reviewed here, closes Sunday)