About Last Night

I have lukewarm feelings about both of the Broadway shows I reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, The Addams Family and Lend Me a Tenor. Here’s an excerpt.
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If you’re a New Yorker with children, or if you’re bringing the family to Manhattan this summer, you’ll have to go to “The Addams Family.” It won’t kill you. You’ll laugh a lot, though never during the unmemorable songs, which are supposed to be funny but aren’t. You’re more than likely to spend a considerable part of the evening wondering how much the set cost. And as you depart the theater, you’ll probably catch yourself wondering whether it was really, truly worth it to take your kids to a goodish musical whose tickets are so expensive that you can buy an iPad for less than the price of four orchestra seats….
If you liked the sitcom and/or the movies, you’ll know just what you’re going to get, right down to the ba-da-da-DUMP (snap, snap) TV-show themelet with which Mr. Lippa’s otherwise anonymous-sounding score begins. The plot, in which young Wednesday Addams (Krysta Rodriguez) falls for a non-creepy boy from Ohio (Wesley Taylor), is as bland as canned tomato soup, and Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth play Gomez and Morticia Addams right down the center (he’s zany, she’s haughty)….
Ken Ludwig writes comfy, low-stakes farces in which no one is embarrassed–at least not for long–and all of the characters live happily ever after. “Lend Me a Tenor,” last seen on Broadway in 1990, is the quintessential example of Mr. Ludwig’s easygoing comic approach, a farce about a production of Verdi’s “Otello” whose star (here played by Anthony LaPaglia) fails to show up for opening night. The plot is properly labyrinthine, the jokes reasonably clever, but never once do you you thrill with sadistic glee as a pompous twit strolls heedlessly toward his well-deserved rendezvous with humiliation. If that’s what you expect from a farce–and I do–you’ll find “Lend Me a Tenor” to be amiable but more then a few teeth short. If not, you’ll like it just fine.
Stanley Tucci is making his Broadway debut as a stage director with this revival. His inexperience shows: The staging, for all its coarsely slapsticky liveliness, isn’t as taut as it ought to be…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.”
Edward Teller, Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics

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:

• 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, 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 NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cocktail Party (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 17, reviewed here)

“There is a God. There is no God. Where is the problem? I am quite sure that there is a God in the sense that I am sure my love is no illusion. I am quite sure there is no God, in the sense that I am sure there is nothing which resembles what I can conceive when I say that word.”
Simone Weil, Waiting for God (courtesy of Laura Good)

A few literary timbits, er, tidbits. My mind is in the bakery.
• Cheeni Rao, a hugely talented young writer, published his first book last year. The book, In Hanuman’s Hands, is a painfully honest, gorgeously written memoir of addiction and recovery, but not like any you’ve ever read. Rao’s spiraling and redemption are intertwined with family mythology about his Hindu ancestors and tales from the Indian epic poem The Ramayana. The book was well received and marked Rao as a writer to watch.
Earlier this year, Rao contributed to the undergraduate alumni magazine I edit at the University of Chicago (his alma mater). His essay, “Stern Lessons,” is about going back to college after the events of In Hanuman’s Hands, finding his path as a writer, and losing a lot more. It’s a wonderful piece of writing, honest and incisive. Read “Stern Lessons” here.
• Here’s an idea I can get behind: for National Poetry Month, why not memorize a poem? I wrote previously about the rewards of learning poems by heart here. I’ll let you know mine as soon as I choose it.
• What are your reading skeletons–as distinguished from your guilty pleasures? I devoured everything written by Lee Child during the second half of last year though, honestly, I’m not sure how ashamed I am or should be. Unlike, say, some of the television I watch, I feel as though I can justify reading any book that keeps my attention. What about you, esteemed co-bloggers?

Flanders and Swann sing “A Song of Patriotic Prejudice,” from At the Drop of Another Hat:

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

“Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.”
Charles de Gaulle, press conference, June 30, 1955

“They showed utter contempt of the law but expected the system to be fair, which to them meant lenient.”
Elmore Leonard, Maximum Bob