In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Lydia R. Diamond made a premature but promising Broadway debut in 2011 with “Stick Fly,” a serious comedy about an upper-class black family that didn’t quite work but whose best parts left no doubt of her formidable talent. Five years later, “Smart People,” a sharp-witted satire of the academic monoculture at Harvard in which everything worked to glistening perfection, opened off Broadway and marked her as an up-and-comer. Now Ms. Diamond is back with a second off-Broadway premiere, “Toni Stone,”whose title character was the first black woman ever to play pro baseball.
Like its predecessors, “Toni Stone” introduces you to a world about most of us know precious little—the Negro Leagues, in which Satchel Paige played and Jackie Robinson got his start—and does so in a way that is both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining. Directed with terrific zest and potent physicality by Pam MacKinnon and featuring a star-making turn by April Matthis, it’s the show that should have introduced Ms. Diamond to Broadway…
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
What’s it like to put on a show, and what kinds of people do so? I can think of any number of theatrical memoirs and biographies that are as readable as good novels, starting with Moss Hart’s “Act One.” But if what you want to know is how Broadway works, and why it usually doesn’t, the best book to read was written 50 years ago by a man who never managed to write a successful play. It’s William Goldman’s “The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway,” still in print and as relevant as ever. Smart, catty and comprehensively well-informed, “The Season” tells truths that have withstood the cruel test of time, which is another way of saying that when it comes down to basics, nothing much changes on Broadway….
A half-century after the fact, it’s startling how contemporary “The Season” sounds….
“American citizenship is a high estate. He who holds it is the peer of kings. It has been secured only by untold toil and effort. It will be maintained by no other method. It demands the best that men and women have to give, but it likewise awards to its partakers the best that there is on earth. To attempt to turn it into a thing of ease and inaction would be only to debase it. To cease to struggle and toil and sacrifice for it is not only to cease to be worthy of it but is to start a retreat toward barbarism. No matter what others may say, no matter what others may do, this is the stand that those must maintain who are worthy to be called Americans.”
Calvin Coolidge, “Freedom and Its Obligations” (speech, May 30, 1924)
When the news broke a few weeks ago that the wife of Kenny Burrell, one of the foremost jazz guitarists of the postwar era, had started a GoFundMe campaign to help cover his medical expenses, contributions poured in. That made me proud. Not that I ever doubted it, but those who love jazz clearly care no less deeply about the hard-working men and women who devote their lives to playing and singing it, many of whom find themselves struggling in old age to make ends meet.
Now comes word that Dave Frishberg, another great jazzman, has fallen on similarly hard times, and that friends have set up a GoFundMe campaign on his behalf. Frishberg is, of course, the octogenarian pianist and singer-songwriter whose catalogue includes such deliciously idiosyncratic tunes as “I’m Hip,” “Peel Me a Grape,” “Blizzard of Lies,” “The Difficult Season,” “Sweet Kentucky Ham,” “Heart’s Desire,” “Our Love Rolls On,” “I Was Ready,” “Slappin’ the Cakes on Me,” “My Attorney Bernie,” “Van Lingle Mungo,” “Eastwood Lane,” “I Want to Be a Sideman,” and the most beautiful and piercingly nostalgic of all his songs, “Do You Miss New York?”
In a better-regulated world, he’d be living comfortably off his royalties. Instead, he’s feeling the pinch—hard. According to his GoFundMe page:
Over the last few years, you may have noticed that your old pal, jazz legend Dave Frishberg, hasn’t graced the stages near you, nor tickled your ear drums and funny bones with new music. That’s because he’s suffered a series of setbacks to his health—some minor, some not-so-minor—that have kept him off the road and out of the studio, and steered him more or less into retirement.
We know; if only you’d been aware that Dave had retired, you would have given him a gold watch and a nice cake, right? Well, now you can give him an even better gift.
As it happens, coming along with Dave’s health setbacks are expensive new medical realities. And though the spirit is more than willing, there’s only so much the wallet can do. In other words, those royalties from his work are nice, but they can’t cover everything.
Your donations will help provide long-term health care to keep Dave comfortable at home.
I pulled out my wallet as soon as I heard the word. I urge you with all my heart to go here and do the same. Please help a true artist live out his days in the dignity he deserves.
* * *
Dave Frishberg sings and plays “My Attorney Bernie” on The Tonight Show in 1983:
Faith Prince sings Frishberg’s “Sweet Kentucky Ham”:
Blossom Dearie performs “I’m Hip,” by Frishberg and Bob Dorough:
Diana Krall performs Frishberg’s “Peel Me a Grape”:
Rosemary Clooney sings Frishberg’s “Do You Miss New York?”:
