For those who missed the news, the West Coast premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, takes place on Tuesday at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills. (Tuesday’s performance is a preview—Wednesday is the official opening night.)

LA Weekly included Satchmo in its latest list of “19 Best Things to Do in L.A. This Week”:

Actor John Douglas Thompson stars in Satchmo at the Waldorf, a multiple-character solo performance from Long Wharf Theatre and Shakespeare & Company about the legendary Louis Armstrong. Along with playing the trumpet and cornet, Armstrong crooned standards such as “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World,” making him one of America’s most beloved jazz greats. Nicknamed Satchmo (a possible derivative of “satchel mouth”), Armstrong was a character with many stories, as heard in writer Terry Teachout’s play. Directed by Gordon Edelstein, the show focuses on Armstrong’s reflections following one of his final performances in 1971 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

I’ll be doing a post-show talkback at the Wallis on Tuesday night. Performances run through June 7. To order tickets or for more information, go here.

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The trailer for the Wallis’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf:

The Wall Street Journal interviewed me about Satchmo at the Waldorf in 2012. To watch the video, which also includes footage from the show, go here.

Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. This concert, originally broadcast on April 3, 1948, also features Anne McKnight, Jane Hobson, Erwin Dillon, Norman Scott, and members of the Collegiate Chorale:

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

“This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.”

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report enthusiastically on two new plays, Robert Askins’ Permission and Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt. Here’s an excerpt.

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Robert Askins’ “Hand to God” set the bar very high for “Permission,” in which he returns for the second time in a row to the mysterious world of fundamentalist-flavored evangelical Christianity as practiced in suburban Texas. Mysterious, that is, to Manhattanites: Most residents of flyover country (as it’s known on the godless coasts) don’t find it strange at all. But here as in “Hand to God,” Mr. Askins has found a decidedly peculiar corner of the culture that spawned him and put it on stage for the rest of us to puzzle out.

“Permission” is about two Christian couples, one of which hews to a cultish practice called “Christian Domestic Discipline” in which the wife is “submissive” to the all-powerful authority of her husband and consents to be spanked by him if she fails to do his bidding. “Permission” proceeds from the premise that CDD (which really exists) is actually a stealthy way of legitimizing the sadomasochistic longings of its practitioners. This notion isn’t all that amusing in and of itself, but Mr. Askins uses it to fuel a knockabout farce (so to speak) in which things get out of hand with dizzying and delicious speed.

Mr. Askins doesn’t content himself with sniping lazily at easy targets. Yes, his benighted characters are engaging in absurd behavior, but they’re real people, not grotesques…

Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” which made it to Broadway in 2011, did nothing for me, but colleagues familiar with her previous work assured me that it didn’t do her justice. Then I saw “Our Lady of Kibeho” and found it impressive—the best new play of 2014, in fact. So I decided to check out Arena Stage’s premiere production of “The Blood Quilt” to see which way the coin would fall, and the verdict is positive. By turns raucously funny and electrically intense, “The Blood Quilt” is a tale of black family life that places Ms. Hall alongside Amy Herzog as the most promising young American playwright of the past decade.

The plot of “The Blood Quilt” is old-fashioned in all the right ways. Four half-sisters (their mother got around) return to the home in rural Georgia where they grew up and where their mother has just died. When she was alive, they came home each year for a quilting bee, and their plan is to continue the ritual. One of them, though, is a big-city lawyer (Meeya Davis) who broke away from the family and didn’t make it back for the funeral, thus setting in motion a well-wrought kitchen-sink drama whose dramaturgy is reminiscent of “A Raisin in the Sun” but whose subject matter is wholly contemporary. In addition, Ms. Hall shares with August Wilson and Horton Foote the magical ability to sift poetry from everyday speech…

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To read my complete review of Permission, go here.

To read my complete review of The Blood Quilt, go here.

A video featurette about Permission:

Katori Hall talks about The Blood Quilt:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I hold forth on the rise, fall, and temporary return of the Broadway musical-comedy overture. Here’s an excerpt.

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If you’re under the age of 50 and you somehow manage to score a ticket to Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of “The King and I,” get set for a surprise at the top of the show. Here’s what happens: The lights go down. Ted Sperling, the conductor, steps into the pit, raises his baton and gives the downbeat. The 28-piece orchestra starts playing…and nothing else happens. No singing, no dancing, no explosions. Instead, you hear a medley of tunes from the show that you’re about to see, and when it’s over, you’re so worked up by the thrilling music and brilliant playing that you give Mr. Sperling and the orchestra a huge round of applause.

Then the show starts.

If, on the other hand, you’re older than 50, you won’t be surprised in the least by what I’ve just described. That’s the way pretty much all Broadway musicals used to begin—with an extended orchestral prelude called an “overture.” Most musical-comedy overtures consist of a string of instrumental excerpts from the songs of a show, played in a continuous sequence with the curtain down and orchestrated in a cymbal-crashing style designed to whip the audience into a frenzy of expectancy. And that they do, on occasion spectacularly so, as in the raucous overture to “Gypsy,” whose climax is a shrieking take-it-all-off trumpet solo that never fails to bring down the house….

Broadway overtures started going out of fashion in the ‘60s and were all but extinct a decade later. Just as Hollywood directors of that era preferred to plunge straight into the action of a film in advance of the credits, so did prominent musical-comedy director-choreographers like Jerome Robbins (“On the Town,” “West Side Story”) and Michael Bennett (“A Chorus Line”) decide that it was more dramatically effective to cut to the chase. Younger audiences suckled on today’s faster-moving TV shows are even less likely to want to sit around for five minutes waiting for the show to get going.

But there’s more than one way to start a musical. Christopher Wheeldon’s “An American in Paris,” for example, begins with an extended dance number that contains no dialogue, while Cy Coleman’s elaborate overture to “On the Twentieth Century” is “accompanied” by equally elaborate stage action. And when you’ve got a full-size synthesizer-free orchestra in the pit, as is the case with “The King and I,” even clock-punching millennials will surely be disarmed by the sheer beauty of its playing….

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Read the whole thing here.

Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony in a 1989 live performance of his overture to Candide:

“A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.”

Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

My monthly essay for the June issue of Commentary, whose occasion is the publication of Molly Guptill Manning’s When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II , can now be read on line. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s said that two things about war are insufficiently appreciated by those who, like me, have not known it first-hand: 1) It is, when not terrifying, mostly dull, and 2) it is, like all human enterprises, subject to the operation of the law of unintended consequences. Few aspects of World War II better illustrate both of these points than the Armed Services Editions publishing project. Between 1943 and 1947, the U.S. Army and Navy distributed some 123 million newly printed paperback copies of 1,322 different books to American servicemen around the world. These volumes, which were given out for free, were specifically intended to entertain the soldiers and sailors to whom they were distributed, and by all accounts they did so spectacularly well. But they also transformed America’s literary culture in ways that their wartime publishers only partly foresaw—some of which continue to be felt, albeit in an attenuated fashion, to this day….

Starting from scratch, these civilians quickly managed to get large numbers of books into the hands of large numbers of grateful servicemen. Without their efforts, America’s soldiers and sailors would have found their wartime service to be even more cruelly burdensome than it was—and America’s authors and publishers would have faced a very different set of problems when the war ended and those servicemen returned home….

The story of the ASEs is told efficiently enough in When Books Went to War. But Manning is a lawyer, not a literary scholar, and she appears to have little or no awareness of their cultural context, thus making it impossible for her to interpret the project’s larger significance other than superficially. It is revealing, for instance, that the word “middlebrow” appears nowhere in When Books Went to War. Yet the most casual perusal of the list of books reprinted by the Council on Books in Wartime reveals that it reflected in every way the democratic assumptions of the middlebrow culture that dominated America throughout much of the 20th century. The vast popularity of the ASEs testifies to the strength of those assumptions.

At the heart of middlebrow culture was the belief that high art was accessible to anyone who was willing to put in the effort to understand it, and that reading “serious” bestsellers such as Irving Stone’s Lust for Life or John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley could serve as preparation for more ambitious ventures into great literature. For those servicemen who were already in the habit of reading for pleasure, the stateside counterpart of the ASEs was the Book-of-the-Month Club (which is mentioned only in passing in When Books Went to War). Both enterprises were essentially aspirational in their goals, both drew on the same wide-ranging pool of books, and both were broadly successful in elevating the literary tastes of those readers who made good use of them….

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Read the whole thing here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, virtually all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, some performances sold out, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)
• On the Twentieth Century (musical, G/PG-13, all performances sold out, closes July 19, contains very mild sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Visit (serious musical, PG-13, far too dark and disturbing for children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• Sense and Sensibility (musical, G, closes June 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, closes June 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Grounded (drama, PG-13/R, explicit sexual references, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Side Man (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MALVERN, PA.:
• Biloxi Blues (comedy, PG-13, sexual content, reviewed here)