Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out in December, is about to go to the printer. This means that I still have a few more days in which to make changes in the text–though not large or frivolous ones. The Unwritten Law of Last-Minute Fixes is that they should only be made to correct actual factual errors, so I’ve been rereading Pops with a gimlet eye to see if anything slipped past me….
The original Benny Goodman Quartet performs “I’ve Got a Heartful of Music” in Hollywood Hotel, directed by Busby Berkeley and released in 1937. Goodman is heard on clarinet, Lionel Hampton on vibraphone, Teddy Wilson on piano, and Gene Krupa on drums. This sequence is believed to be the first time that black and white instrumentalists were shown performing together on screen in an American film. The song is by Richard A. Whiting and Johnny Mercer:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“The motor-car, in bringing us all closer together, by making it easy to have luncheon two counties away, has driven us all further apart, by making it unnecessary for us to know the people in the next bungalow. And so, once again, we have to thank civilization for nothing.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Into the Woods and the Broadway premiere of Sea Wall/A Life. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, one of the finest outdoor summer companies on the East Coast, is now adding musicals to its regular repertory of plays by Shakespeare and more modern works in a classical vein. To this end, Davis McCallum, Hudson Valley’s artistic director, has brought in Jenn Thompson, whose Goodspeed Musicals revivals of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “The Music Man” and “Oklahoma!” were of the highest possible quality, to stage “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim’s fractured-fairy-tale parable of innocence and experience. It’s a logical choice for a troupe that performs under a spacious tent pitched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and the results are a triumph for all parties concerned. “Into the Woods” gets done a lot—a whole lot—but I haven’t seen it done this well since the original 1987 Broadway production.
The hallmark of Ms. Thompson’s version is its visual simplicity: There is no set, only a hoop, five green umbrellas, a few wooden chairs and crates, the plain dirt floor of the playing area and a natural backdrop of trees and sky, all of them deployed with the utmost resourcefulness….
The producers of “Sea Wall/A Life,” a double bill of dramatic monologues by Simon Stephens (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”) and Nick Payne (“Constellations”) respectively performed on Broadway by Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal, are counting money at the Hudson Theatre, where tickets cost up to $339 apiece and are selling in abundance. I guess that’s what happens when you cast two sensitive, exceedingly handsome young actors (who are both competent, not that it matters) in a show about postmodern masculinity. Alas, “Sea Wall/A Life” starts out dull, then becomes just plain awful….
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To read my Into the Woods review, go here.
To read my Sea Wall/A Life review, go here.
A featurette about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival revival of Into the Woods:
Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison appear in a staged, scripted recreation of the first rehearsal for the 1956 Broadway premiere of My Fair Lady, in which they created the starring roles. This sequence is drawn from The Fabulous Fifties, which was originally telecast by CBS on January 29, 1960:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“We live and negotiate with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and vulgar are often as regular as those of the finest thread, and all wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance), we must no more intermeddle either with other men’s affairs or our own; for business, both public and private, has to do with these people.”
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Three Commerces” (trans. Charles Cotton)
“When I did not know a thing, I was ashamed to confess my ignorance; and it was not until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: ‘I don’t know.’”
W. Somerset Maugham, “On the Approach of Middle Age” (Vanity Fair, December 1923)
