About Last Night

In case you haven’t heard, I’m on my way to downtown Kansas City today, where I’ll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Kansas City Public Library. The show starts at six-thirty sharp. Stop by and get your copy of Pops signed–and if you don’t own a copy yet, you can buy one there.
For more information, go 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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 27, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• The Temperamentals (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory, closes May 8, reviewed here, here, and here)

Having recently watched Strictly Ballroom for the first time in a decade or so–and having enjoyed it every bit as much as I did in 1993–allow me to share with you one of my favorite pieces of music on the soundtrack, Stanley Black’s ultra-obscure recording of “Os Quindins de Ya Ya,” which some obliging soul has kindly posted on YouTube:

If you remember the scene in which this recording is heard, you are a true Strictly Ballroom fanatic!

“In the great drama we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding.”
David Mamet, Theatre

A scene from Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer:

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

“The theatre exists to present a contest between good and evil. In both comedy and tragedy, good wins. In drama, it’s a tie. In film noir, evil wins.”
David Mamet, Theatre

A reader writes:

I went this weekend to Trinity College in Hartford to see my daughter in the musical Nine. She is double majoring in music and theatre/dance. I thought you would be interested in knowing that your book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is one of her required textbooks in a course she is taking this semester, “American Popular Music.” In fact, she has a paper due on it soon.

I’ve been in textbooks before, but I’ve never been one. Cool.

Readers of Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor will recall that he describes in the first chapter a 1932 Pathé newsreel in which the five-year-old O’Connor showed off a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The experience, she recalled years later in an essay called “King of the Birds,” “marked me for life.”
Sad to say, this newsreel has yet to make it to YouTube, but you can view it online by going here.
You will notice, incidentally, that the anonymous author of the program note for this clip, which is available on British Pathé’s Web site, clearly doesn’t know that the “Mary O’Connor” portrayed in the newsreel is the same person who grew up to be one of America’s greatest writers. O tempora!