I mentioned in this space the other day that “personal distractions” were among the things that had kept me from posting for three weeks. The main one is the fact that I have fallen in love. 

The woman in question is Cheril Mulligan, a theater-and-film buff from and lifelong resident of Long Island. We became acquainted through Twitter, on which she tweets under a pseudonym, and “Three on the Aisle,” the theatrical podcast that I do with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli. We got to know one another during the lockdown by exchanging direct messages on Twitter, and resolved to meet in person once we were both fully vaccinated. We both realized during her first visit to my apartment in upper Manhattan in June that we were in love, and we’ve had no reason to change our minds since then. Indeed, we now visit each other every weekend.

What’s she like? Smart, funny, kind, caring, and beautiful, for openers. (Yes, she looks like Liv Tyler.) In addition to appreciating good food, Cheril loves music—she’s deeply into Stephen Sondheim—and has a keen ear. Our tastes overlap, but not completely, in part because she’s a good deal younger than I am. As a result, we have the continuing pleasure of sharing all sorts of new things with one another. It was thanks to Cheril, for instance, that I first heard the music of John Hiatt and saw The Visitor, Paddington 2, and (no kidding) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while I in turn have had the privilege of showing her It Happened One Night and Rio Bravo and introducing her to Bill Evans and João Gilberto. I rejoice to report that she is now a full-fledged bossa nova fan.

My late wife Hilary, to whom I was wholly devoted, wanted me to find a new partner as soon as possible after she died, so much so that she brought up the subject more than once in her last months. “You’ll make a shitty singleton,” she warned me. I knew she was right, but I didn’t think it possible that I would get so lucky twice in a lifetime, especially in the midst of a pandemic, and four months later, I’m still stunned by my good fortune. Like the song says, I am once again “aware/Of being alive,” and it is my beloved Cheril who has made me so. Having her in my life is an unmixed blessing.

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Adam Driver sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” (from Company) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story:

“Where there is the greatest love, there are always miracles.”

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Broadway transfers, Chicken & Biscuits and Is This a Room. Here’s an excerpt.

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Douglas Lyons’s “Chicken & Biscuits,” the third of an unprecedented eight shows by Black playwrights that are set to open on Broadway this season, bills itself as “a feel-good comedy that will feed your soul.” This production, which is extremely well directed by Zhailon Levingston, originated at a theater in Queens but was forced to close after less than two weeks because of the lockdown and is now being remounted with a mostly new cast at the much larger Circle in the Square Theatre. While the play is far from perfect, it delivers on its promise, and if you’re prepared to look past its flaws, you’ll find it to be both amusing and touching….

Nearly all of what I’d read about “Chicken & Biscuits” going in said that it tells the story of Baneatta and Beverly (Cleo King and Ebony Marshall-Oliver), two bickering sisters who are thrown together for their father’s funeral, at which it emerges that he had a third, illegitimate daughter, Brianna (NaTasha Yvette Williams). This makes the play sound like a farce, which it isn’t: Not only does Brianna make her entrance comparatively late, but it’s played straight. Moreover, the real emotional center of the play is to be found not in the reunion of the sisters but in the awkward relationship between Baneatta and Kenny (Devere Rogers), her youngest child, who is not only gay but has a Jewish partner (Michael Urie) to boot….

Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre plans to run two documentary plays—both of which are based on real-life occurrences and have already had well-received off-Broadway runs—in rotating repertory through mid-January. The first to open, Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” is a 65-minute staging by a four-person cast led by Emily Davis of the transcript of the FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor who was convicted in 2018 of leaking to the media a classified intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. (Its companion piece, Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” opens Sunday.) The transcript is performed verbatim, right down to the tiniest hems and haws.

I didn’t see the Vineyard Theatre’s original production, so I assume it’s possible that “Is This a Room” was more compelling in the company’s intimate 132-seat theater, but it doesn’t work at all in the 922-seat Lyceum, where there is no possibility of up-close intensity and the expressionistic special effects come across as absurdly exaggerated….

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Read the whole thing here and here.

Chuck Jones receives an honorary Oscar from Robin Williams in 1996 for his work in the field of animated cartoons:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The story of show business is the story of people who accidentally create art that lasts.”

Jaime Weinman, Anvils, Mallets & Dynamite: The Unauthorized Biography of Looney Tunes

Pardon my absence, but I’ve been grappling with a combination of technical problems, personal distractions, and a flood of back-to-back openings on and off Broadway, and I simply haven’t had time to post on this blog for the last three weeks. I’m glad to be back!

Here are links to the pieces I’ve published in The Wall Street Journal since my last posting:

• I reviewed a superb streaming webcast of A Phoenix Too Frequent, Christopher Fry’s rarely produced three-character verse play, directed by Keira Froom and performed by Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre. To read what I wrote, go here.

• I wrote an all-flags-flying rave of Bedlam’s new off-Broadway stage adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, directed by Eric Tucker. Read all about it here.

• I wrote with identical enthusiasm about the Broadway transfer of Lackawanna Blues, Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s one-man autobiographical play, but didn’t think much of Six, a new concert-style pop musical about the six wives of Henry VIII. My review is here.

From 2011:

I recently made a new friend, an occurrence that is unfailingly gratifying for the middle-aged, since the constant friction of life has an unfortunate way of robbing us of the old ones. People are forever dying or moving away or getting married, having children, and withdrawing into the increasingly private sphere of family life, and if you don’t continually replenish your reserve of friends, you’re likely to look up one day and find that you haven’t any….

Read the whole thing here.

“Modern science was fixing it so that anybody can do anything but nobody can know what the hell is going on.”

Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a streaming webcast of the stage version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. Here’s an excerpt.

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Streaming webcasts of theatrical performances are growing increasingly scarce as Broadway producers and drama companies begin opening their doors once more. Yet their value remains undiminished, for streaming video gives regional companies a national profile and makes shows available to viewers who either find it difficult to go to the theater or are nervous about Covid-19. What’s more, it doesn’t necessarily require a budget-busting cash outlay from producer: One of the things I learned from reviewing streaming theater during the lockdown was that you don’t need multiple cameras to capture a play for webcast. It turns out that some (though by no means all) of the single-camera videos routinely made by theater companies for their archives can also be watched with pleasure at home.

Connecticut’s Westport Country Playhouse, for example, has just made available on its website an archival video of a live performance of its 2008 production of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” staged by Mark Lamos, the company’s artistic director. While there’s nothing fancy about the camerawork, the production itself comes through transparently and persuasively, enhanced by the audible presence of a fully involved audience. What’s more, Mr. Lamos and his 10-person cast, led by Brian Hutchison and Mark Mineart as George and Lennie, have given us a first-class version of Steinbeck’s 1937 novella, one in which the familiar tale of two itinerant ranch hands who share a tragic rendezvous with fate is told in an unadorned style that makes it fresh and new…..

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Read the whole thing here.

“A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America