About Last Night

I report on two satisfying shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, Million Dollar Quartet and Keen Company’s off-Broadway revival of I Never Sang for My Father. Here’s an excerpt.
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Good clean rockabilly fun has come to Broadway in the form of “Million Dollar Quartet,” an unpretentious, engagingly energetic staged concert with just enough story to qualify it as a jukebox musical. The subject is the celebrated evening in 1956 when Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley got together at Sam Phillips’ recording studio in Memphis for an informal pre-Christmas jam session. These pop-music giants are respectively portrayed by Lance Guest, Levi Kreis, Robert Britton Lyons and Eddie Clendening, four accomplished musicians who evoke their legendary models without stooping to literal imitation. Put them together and you get a hell of a band….
Don’t go to “Million Dollar Quartet” looking for great acting. Three members of the front line are not professional actors (Mr. Guest is the ringer) and the book, by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux, is tissue-thin. This is the kind of show that goes flat whenever the characters stop singing and start talking. Fortunately, they do plenty of the former and not too terribly much of the latter….
How good must a play be to make it worth seeing? It certainly needn’t be a masterpiece. Robert Anderson’s “I Never Sang for My Father,” which had a modest but respectable run on Broadway in 1968 and was then turned into a modestly successful film, is a post-“Glass Menagerie” kitchen-sink drama about an aging father (Keir Dullea) and his angry, alienated son (Matt Servitto). Though devoid of poetry, it’s so true to life that you’ll wince at every other line, and Keen Company’s revival is as satisfying as a meat-and-potatoes dinner whipped up by a five-star chef….
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Read the whole thing here.

I’m one of many people who’s read and been impressed by James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I talk about the book, and the phenomenon that inspired it. I was inspired in turn by something that struck me while reading Contested Will, though Shapiro himself didn’t get around to mentioning it: Shakespeare is, so far as I know, the only major artist since Homer whose authorship of the works for which he is remembered has been systematically questioned. Why? Why the Bard and not, say, Bach?
If that question piques your curiosity, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Vladimir Horowitz plays the slow movement of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488:

Is there a more beautiful piece of music in all the world?

A reader writes:

I’ve been reading Pops with tremendous pleasure–it was the ideal book to take with me on a recent trip to New Orleans for the French Quarter Festival. A parking attendant saw me there carrying it one day and shouted out, “Good book!”

That might just be the best review I’ve ever gotten.

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)

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

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

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

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

CLOSING SOON 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)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cocktail Party (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Be sure to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books”