In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the off-Broadway opening of Soft Power. Here’s an excerpt.

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Talk about timing: “Soft Power,” the new David Henry Hwang-Jeanine Tesori musical about Chinese-American cultural diplomacy, has opened at the exact moment when relations between the Trump administration and mainland China have become impossibly fraught. The deftness with which Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori juggle reality and fantasy can’t help but put you in mind of the real world, in which two deeply dissimilar cultures, one of them a democracy weathering a populist convulsion and the other an order-worshipping authoritarian state, seek to come to profitable terms with each other.

If that doesn’t sound much like a good old-fashioned Broadway musical…well, neither did Stephen Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” back in 1976. And while I’m not quite ready to call “Soft Power” a Sondheim-quality masterpiece after a single viewing, I can already say that I don’t remember when I last saw a musical that was this smart—and touching.

Mr. Hwang and Ms. Tesori describe “Soft Power” as “a play with a musical.” DHH (Francis Jue), the protagonist of the play, is Mr. Hwang, more or less, and the musical around which the play is wrapped is a fevered dream that he has after being stabbed in the neck by a thug and nearly dying (which really happened to Mr. Hwang). In the show, DHH is invited by Xūe Xíng (Conrad Ricamora), a Shanghai theatrical producer, to turn a hit Chinese movie romcom called “Stick to Your Mistake” (yes, it’s imaginary, and it sounds better in Chinese) into a Broadway musical that will be, like Mr. Hwang’s own “Aida,” a “world-wide smash.” DHH doesn’t find the proposition practical: In the film, a married couple pulled apart by love decides to stay together instead of pursuing individual happiness, a Chinese-style denouement that is nothing like that of a Broadway show. Still, a job’s a job, so he goes to work anyway, discovering in the process that Xūe is caught up in an extramarital relationship similar to the one portrayed in “Stick to Your Mistake.”…

That’s where the musical comes in. What Xūe wants DHH to do is write a show that will persuade Western viewers of the superiority of the Chinese way. “What a truly great civilization achieves,” he explains, “is ‘soft power’—through our ideas, inventions, culture—to change the way people think.” This, Xūe believes, is what such great Broadway musicals of the past as “The King and I” have done, and his hope is that “Stick to Your Mistake” will similarly “bring Chinese values to the world.”

So what kind of musical does DHH dream up in his delirium? A crazy parody of “The King and I” in which Xūe and Zoe (Alyse Alan Louis), his American mistress, play the principal characters….

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Read the whole thing here.

A montage of scenes from Soft Power:

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review an off-Broadway revival of Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Molly Sweeney,” Brian Friel’s 1994 play about a 41-year-old woman blind from early childhood onward whose sight is unexpectedly restored by surgery, hasn’t been done in New York since the Irish Repertory Theatre’s superb 2011 production. Now Keen Company, one of my favorite off-Broadway troupes, is presenting a small-scale revival of this three-hander that is noteworthy for an unusual piece of casting: Pamela Sabaugh, the first low-vision actor ever to play Molly, is reprising the groundbreaking performance she gave at Philadelphia’s Amaryllis Theatre Company 12 years ago, this time in a version staged by Jonathan Silverstein, Keen’s artistic director. I didn’t see Ms. Sabaugh in Philadelphia, but it’s hard to imagine anything better than her calm, centered acting as the Molly of this production, who discovers that the world of sight she was once forced to imagine is not so miraculous as she had always supposed.

I was struck by the subtlety with which Ms. Sabaugh and Mr. Silverstein bring out an aspect of the play that was not fully clear to me when I first saw it: Strong as she seems to be, Molly is in truth a victim, a woman to whom men do things for reasons of their own….

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Read the whole thing here.

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums every weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

9. The Beatles, The Beatles (Apple)

I knew a certain amount about the Beatles when I first heard the White Album, as The Beatles is universally known, in 1969. Like all my elementary-school classmates, I’d seen them on The Ed Sullivan Show, and even though I had yet to purchase my first full-fledged rock album, I’d since been introduced to a fair number of their singles by listening to the radio and watching the animated-cartoon series called The Beatles that ran on ABC every Saturday morning from 1965 to 1969. It wasn’t very good—in fact, it was perfectly awful—but some of the songs, “Paperback Writer” and “Penny Lane” in particular, did catch my ear. Even so, I wouldn’t have called myself a Beatles fan: I was much more interested in Tchaikovsky, Judy Collins, and $64,000 Jazz.

Then, however, came “Revolution.” No sooner did I hear it on the radio than I went right out and bought the single, the B side of “Hey Jude.” As the ear-shattering introductory fuzz-guitar riff blasted out of the cheap little record player in my bedroom, I connected for the first time with rock as a present-tense music. To put it another way, I now understood that rock and roll was the music of my generation, just as $64,000 Jazz had been the music of my parents’ generation. The difference, of course, was that I liked both kinds of music—and still do.

The White Album came out three months later, but I couldn’t afford a double album, so I borrowed Bob Nelson’s copy early in 1969 and spent the next few weeks starting to get a grip on its proliferating stylistic variety. It didn’t yet occur to me that the Beatles I had known and briefly loved no longer existed: I simply took it for granted that the White Album, like its predecessors, was the product of a genuine group effort. It wasn’t, of course, which explains why I loved some of the songs and didn’t much care for certain others, as well as why there were more than a few, “Helter Skelter” and “Revolution 9” in particular, that I didn’t get at all.

I went through a long stretch of not listening to the Beatles in college. It wasn’t until their albums started to be transferred on CD that I returned to their music and decided that in fact I still loved it. A few years later, I wrote an essay for Commentary in which, after much thought, I set down what I had to say about them:

After the Beatles, rock-and-roll would never be the same. What started out as a stripped-down, popularized blending of country music and rhythm-and-blues intended for consumption by middle-class teenagers evolved into a new musical dialect in which it was possible to make statements complex and thoughtful enough to seize and hold the attention of adult listeners….

Neither virtuoso instrumentalists nor pure songwriters, they instead explored the possibilities of the hybrid art of the record album as art object more successfully than any other popular musicians of their generation. For this—and for the beauty of their best music—they will be remembered.

I’ll stand on that, and on my after-the-fact conclusion that Revolver was the best thing they ever did. That said, the White Album is also full of good things, and though I doubt I’ll ever feel the need to listen to it all the way through again, few months go by when I don’t put on “Back in the U.S.S.R.” or “Blackbird” or “Julia” and marvel at what the Beatles could do when the stars were in phase.

(To be continued)

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“Back in the U.S.S.R.,” from The Beatles:

The video for the single version of “Revolution,” directed by Michael Lindsey-Hogg and filmed on September 4, 1968:

The “Penny Lane” episode of The Beatles, which originally aired in 1967:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

Shura Cherkassky plays Igor Stravinsky’s Circus Polka: For a Young Elephantas an encore at a 1995 recital. This piece was originally commissioned by the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1942 to accompany a “ballet” for fifty elephants that was choreographed by George Balanchine:

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

“The monomaniac is unlikely to succeed. Most leave only their bleached bones in the roadless desert. But the rest of us, with multiple interests instead of one single mission, are certain to fail and to have no impact at all.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

8. $64,000 Jazz (Columbia)

I started exploring the dusty, long-inaccessible contents of my father’s record cabinets when I was in junior high school. In addition to a dozen or so jazz albums of indisputably canonical importance, about some of which I’ll be writing in future installments, he also owned a copy of $64,000 Jazz, a jazz sampler released by Columbia Records in 1955 as a promotional tie-in to The $64,000 Question, one of the prime-time TV quiz shows that was later proven to be fixed.

I wrote a long blog posting about $64,000 Jazz in 2013, for it was, unlikely as it may sound, one of the record albums that would do the most to shape my adult musical tastes. Here’s part of what I wrote back then.

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The first of the big-money game shows, The $64,000 Question was so widely viewed that it actually displaced I Love Lucy as America’s most popular TV series, the first and only show ever to do so. The Rev. Alvin L. Kershaw, an Episcopal minister, won $32,000 in 1955 (the equivalent of $278,810 today) answering questions about jazz. Columbia thereupon released $64,000 Jazz, an anthology of performances by twelve of the label’s top-selling jazz artists. What the show’s unsuspecting viewers didn’t know was that it was rigged, a fact whose disclosure helped to trigger the nationwide scandal that was later portrayed by Robert Redford in Quiz Show. (It’s not known whether Rev. Kershaw, who died in 2001, was one of the crooked contestants.) Not surprisingly, $64,000 Jazz went out of print shortly after the program was cancelled, and eventually it became something of a collector’s item.

Needless to say, I knew none of this in 1968, the year in which I found Columbia CL 777 buried among my father’s old records. What interested me about $64,000 Jazz was the music it contained. I’d only just started listening to jazz, and that summer I borrowed a plywood string bass from the band room of my junior high school and taught myself how to play it. I spent countless hours plucking along with those records, $64,000 Jazz among them, and though I had no way of knowing it then, the course of a large part of my future life was thereby set in stone.

$64,000 Jazz was the first of my father’s albums to which I listened closely and attentively. It was an exceedingly suitable record for a budding young jazz buff to have discovered, for its twelve tracks, all of them selected and annotated by the legendary record producer George Avakian, included now-classic performances by the illustrious likes of Louis Armstrong, the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Eddie Condon, Duke Ellington, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Harry James, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding, and Sarah Vaughan. Listening to these performances, which were cut between 1938 and 1955, introduced me to jazz in all its kaleidoscopic diversity, and persuaded me right from the start of my musical career that I wanted to play not just one kind of jazz, but every kind.

When I started playing piano a couple of years later, I taught myself how to pick out the introduction to Erroll Garner’s version of “Laura,” which I learned from $64,000 Jazz. “Laura,” as it happens, was my father’s favorite song. It would always please him to hear me play it, just as it pleases me that my best friend bears the name of the tune that he loved so much….

Forty-five years after the fact, it’s strange to think how powerful and permanent an effect $64,000 Jazz had on me. Not only have I written books about two of the musicians whose music I first heard on $64,000 Jazz, but I actually got to know George Avakian before his death in 2017. Eddie Condon’s version of “I’m Comin’ Virginia” was one of the records that I chose to play at Dick Sudhalter’s memorial service. And when I had to choose a late-Thirties composition by Duke Ellington to discuss in detail in Duke, I picked I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart.

The $64,000 Question, however, is all but forgotten today, a footnote to the history of Eisenhower-era pop culture. Though the phrase “the $64,000 question” remains part of the American language, it’s now a stone-dead metaphor, one that I’ve never heard used by anyone much under the age of fifty. As for me, I never saw the show, which went off the air two years after I was born, and to watch a kinescope of The $64,000 Question on YouTube today is to marvel at how anyone could ever have supposed that it was anything other than comprehensively fraudulent.

Even so, I will always be grateful to its makers for having opened the ears of a small-town boy to the sound of jazz—a boy who grew up to play bass in the nightclubs of Kansas City and write the biographies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Such are the ways of the law of unintended consequences, a law of life that I have now lived long enough to appreciate in all its inscrutable, probability-beggaring splendor.

(To be continued)

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Erroll Garner’s 1951 recording of David Raksin’s “Laura,” with John Simmons on bass and Shadow Wilson on drums:

A 1956 episode of The $64,000 Question, originally telecast by CBS in 1956:

The trailer for Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show, a fictionalized portrayal of the TV quiz-show scandals:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

“For Socialism did indeed die with the guns of August of 1914 when the Socialist masses rejected proletarian solidarity and enthusiastically embraced nationalism and fratricidal war instead. It was not the end of Marxism as a theology: theologies do outlive faith. But it was the end of Socialism as a dream—at least for an entire generation, if not forever. Since then power has won in every conflict between the promise of Socialism and the reality of power; since then, above all, nationalism has won in every conflict between the promise of Socialism and the passion of nationalism.”

Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the order in which I first heard them.

7. Bartók Rhapsodies for Violin and Orchestra and Berg Violin Concerto, played by Isaac Stern and accompanied by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic (Columbia)

It used to be that when you lived in a small town far from the nearest big city, you bought what the local stores sold or what you could order by mail from Sears, Roebuck, and not much else. The notion that you might someday be able to boot up your laptop, click a few keys, and have a record “delivered” to you electronically within seconds was the stuff 2001: A Space Odyssey was made of. Laptops didn’t exist back then, much less digital sound files, and it certainly never occurred to me that I would live long enough to see Sears teetering on the edge of extinction.

Hence I got my first copy of Isaac Stern’s 1959 album of works for violin and orchestra by Béla Bartók and Alban Berg not from Amazon or iTunes but from Keith Collins Piano Company, a store in Smalltown, U.S.A., that sold records on the side but whose main business was furnishing the musically inclined children of Smalltown with pianos, organs, guitars, clarinets, trumpets, and other instruments. It was there that my parents bought me a Scherl & Roth student-model violin, my first musical instrument, purchased on the installment plan. By contrast, Collins Piano had only a couple of bins devoted to classical records, but since there was no other place in town that sold such recherché fare—Smalltown had no record stores at all—I contented myself with whatever was in stock, occasionally screwing up the nerve to place a special order for a specific album.

I can’t imagine how a record of concerted works by Berg and Bartók made its circuitous way into the classical bin at Collins Piano. Granted, Isaac Stern and Leonard Bernstein, the album’s conductor, were as famous in 1969 as it was then possible for American classical musicians to be. But Berg and Bartók wrote modern music, meaning that it didn’t sound at all like Mozart, Beethoven, or Tchaikovsky, much less Dolly Parton or Glenn Miller, and if I hadn’t saved up my allowance to purchase that particular album, which had all too clearly been gathering dust for a long time, I’ve no idea who else in Smalltown would have done so.

I brought it home, put on Bartók’s First Rhapsody, and was instantaneously thrilled to the marrow by its strange but potent blend of soaring lyricism and harsh, slashing dissonances. Never before had I heard such a piece, and I resolved on the spot to seek out more music by Bartók and learn who he was and why he composed that way. I didn’t know it at the time, but a door in my unformed artistic consciousness had just swung wide open, never to close again.

By then I was studying the violin myself, so I ordered the sheet music from Collins Piano. The finger-twisting double stops in the first movement defeated me, but I kept on sawing away at them, and in due course I got to where I could stagger all the way through the piece. I have a feeling that the results sounded rather more like Jack Benny than Isaac Stern, but I did manage to play the First Rhapsody just well enough to imagine myself performing it in front of an audience some time in the distant future. That never happened, alas, but I still love the piece, and I expect that this will always be my favorite recorded version.

(To be continued)

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The first movement of Béla Bartók’s First Violin Rhapsody, performed by György Pauk, Iván Fischer, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra of Tokyo at a 2000 concert:

Carnegie Hall Salutes Jack Benny, a TV program originally telecast by CBS on September 12, 1961. Also featured in addition to the comedian are Isaac Stern, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Roberta Peters, Van Cliburn, and the Benny Goodman Sextet (with Red Norvo on vibraharp). The performances, filmed during a Carnegie Hall concert, include a comedy version of the first movement of Bach’s Double Violin Concerto played by Jack Benny and Stern. Benny performed this piece at benefit concerts for symphony orchestras throughout America:

Jack Benny talks about Isaac Stern on The Dick Cavett Show. This episode was originally telecast by ABC on February 21, 1973:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson dance a duet in the opening sequence of “Dancing: A Man’s Game,” an episode of Omnibus hosted by Alistair Cooke and originally telecast by NBC on December 21, 1958:

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