Book or no book, I remain the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, in which capacity I went to see Twentieth Century, which opened last night, and wrote about it for this morning’s paper. It’s very uneven, and Alec Baldwin is the opposite of funny, but I did have some good things to report. Here are two:

A passenger train is a perfect setting for a comedy but difficult and expensive to put on stage, so I’ll start by assuring you that John Lee Beatty, the designer of this Roundabout Theatre Company production, has done a good job of evoking the streamlined art-deco interior of the old Twentieth Century Limited. Mr. Beatty’s set slides from side to side in order to reveal more of the train’s interior (as well as suggesting its forward motion), and while it won’t make you fall down dead with astonishment, it’s quite sufficiently nifty.

Anne Heche, on the other hand, is a whole lot more than nifty–she’s dynamite on a stick. Dolled up to the max in William Ivey Long’s slinky period costumes, she looks like a blonde clothespin in a black pantsuit, flinging her miraculously flexible arms and legs around the stage as if they were made of some space-age equivalent of rubber and tossing off her lines in the kind of hoity-toity finishing-school accent you learn from a Hollywood diction coach. She’s doing Katharine Hepburn, of course, but her Kate the Great is more a manic caricature than a slavish imitation, and so unabashedly gleeful that only a sourpuss would do anything other than giggle. Walter Bobbie, the director, has given her plenty of tricky moves, and she makes the absolute most of them, revealing an unsuspected gift for physical comedy. I won’t say Ms. Heche is worth the price of the ticket all by herself, but she sure did make me laugh….

No link, so if you want to read the rest of the story, go buy a Journal. A dollar is a dollar.

In other news, I’m still working on the Balanchine book, it’s still due on April 1, it’s still going well, and I may post another snippet of it tonight. Watch this space for details.

A thousand apologies for the deafening silence from my corner lately. I rolled back into Chicago two days ago, but I’m swamped. Until next week, you’ll hear a few peeps out of me but not a whole hell of a lot more, I’m afraid. Thanks to the readers who sent birthday wishes; the day was very nice, and what do you know, spring did arrive more or less on time.

While I scramble to meet more deadlines than I care to count, here are a couple of links:

– Nathalie is great on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I loved the movie too. I don’t have much to add to her observations, except to say that while Jim Carrey is a good sad sack, Kate Winslet’s performance is the ingredient the movie couldn’t have done without. I always liked Being John Malkovich, which is similarly fascinated with the inside of consciousness. But after seeing the sweeter, more loosely conceived Eternal Sunshine, I suspect the earlier movie may now seem almost unwatchably sour, as well as overly invested in the machinery of its fantastical premise.

– Charles Schulz is getting the auteur treatment with Fantagraphics’ forthcoming 25-volume Complete Peanuts. I spent some of the weekend going through last year’s very cool Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, an ever-so-slightly selfish Christmas gift to my dad. Book designer Chip Kidd (best known for his Jurassic Park cover art) put this volume together. In the Sun article, he compares “Peanuts” to Bauhaus:

“Schulz did for the comic strip what the Bauhaus did for architecture,” he says. “I know that sounds really eggheady, but what I mean is this: Visually he pared everything down to its simplest forms. Charlie Brown is a circle with two dots and a squiggle and a line, and all of a sudden it’s a person. It’s minimal, but Schulz is so in control of the minimalism that the characters almost work like typography-it’s like you’re reading them. There’s your form. And then for your content: He predated Woody Allen’s neuroses by a good 20 years. On the comics page!”

Also revealed: Schulz hated the name “Peanuts,” but deferred to the wishes of the United Feature Syndicate as one of the terms of his contract.

Back to the salt mines!

I thought you might enjoy knowing what a week in the life of a freelance writer, i.e., me, is like:

(1) My Balanchine book is due April 1. I have a chapter and a half left to write.

(2) Between now and then, I also have to write and file two Wall Street Journal drama reviews, my Washington Post column, and three other pieces.

(3) On April 2, I hop on a plane, ready or not, and fly south to see (what else?) some ballet in Raleigh, N.C.

In short, I hear that train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ round the bend… but all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. I think. I hope. Gulp.

Needless to say, I’m not likely to be posting a whole hell of a lot during the next week and a half, but I do promise to make some sort of daily appearance in this space, however exiguous. A few of my colleagues linked to yesterday’s excerpt from the Balanchine book, suggesting approval thereof, so I imagine I’ll do the same thing once or twice more. To those of you who want to know what happened to Tanny Le Clercq, the book comes out in November. And to those of you who have already gotten your hands on early copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, I say…tell your friends!

“Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode. It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.”

Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership

“Lightning was a mad grin in the room, thunder a shudder over all the earth.”

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus

“I suppose I’m a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad, but irresistibly funny.”

Joe Orton, quoted in the Manchester Guardian (September 19, 1966)

Another chapter done and polished, and I’m headed for bed. Yay!

I may try to post something more during the day, but if I don’t, it just means I’ve gotten a good start on Chapter Five.

Keep wishing me luck.

“Granted that in later life a man will have to learn to get along with other people–I learn with horror that the knack is now taught in high school as a ‘social study’–that is all the more reason there should be a period in his life when he has to get along with nobody but himself. It will be a sweetness to remember.”

A.J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris