About Last Night

…there’s a very good chance that your e-mail got deleted. My blogmailbox gets crammed with press releases and spam, and I’ve been so busy traveling that I wasn’t able to clean it out. Alas, it got cleaned out automatically, as I discovered last night. So if you wrote me and I didn’t reply, please try again. I’ll try to do better next time!

“Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.”
Samuel Butler, Notebooks

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:

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

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

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

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SATURDAY IN STOCKBRIDGE, MASS:

• Noël Coward in Two Keys (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS:

• Othello/All’s Well That Ends Well/The Ladies Man (Shakespeare/Feydeau, PG-13, not suitable for children, playing in festival repertory, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in festival repertory, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:

• Our Town (G, not suitable for young children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• All’s Well That Ends Well/Bach in Leipzig/Burn This (Shakespeare/Moses/Wilson, PG-13, playing in festival repertory, reviewed here)

“Silence and darkness were all I craved. Well, I get a certain amount of both. They being one.”
Samuel Beckett, “Play”

Mark Morris dances “Dido’s Lament” from his staging of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group:

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

“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”
Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence”

Mrs. T and I are in Spring Green, Wisconsin, home of American Players Theatre, an outdoor amphitheatre where we’ll be seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight and George Bernard Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses on Wednesday. I last visited Spring Green three years ago as part of a week-long marathon trip across the state during which I also stayed in two Frank Lloyd Wright houses.
Here’s part of what I wrote about the company in 2005:

I started my week-long sweep across the state in Spring Green, a microscopic village (pop. 1,444) with two giant-sized claims to fame. Not only is it the site of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s eminently tourable home and headquarters, but just down the road from the Wright Visitors’ Center is the American Players Theatre, a summer-and-fall repertory company that bills itself as “the most popular outdoor classical theater in the country.” Located in a hollow at the top of a thickly wooded hill (it’s a ten-minute walk from the parking lot to the theater), APT presents five plays each season in a 1,148-seat open-air amphitheater blessed with flawless acoustics.
Scenery isn’t everything, natural or otherwise, but APT fills its naturally beautiful performing space with crisply staged classics that I might call “Broadway-quality” if I’d seen a Broadway revival lately that was half so good….

Today we’ll be touring Taliesin, escorted by my friend Keiran Murphy, who showed me around on my last visit, an experience that ranks very high on my list of memorable days. I’ll be surprised if Mrs. T doesn’t find it equally entrancing.
I wrote and filed three pieces last week, meaning that I don’t have to write anything else until we return home on Thursday night–a good thing, too, since I hate writing in hotel rooms and am still worn out from my recent travels. We’re staying at the House on the Rock, a resort-attraction-inn (as the Web site describes it) that defies description, so I won’t try to describe it, or anything else.
The truth is that I’m written out, too, and so won’t be hearing from me again until next week, except for the usual almanac postings and theater-related stuff. A little silence never hurt anybody, least of all me.
See you around!

I’ve settled on the epigraphs for Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
The first one comes from a letter written by Armstrong shortly before his death in 1971:
Now I must tell you that my whole life has been happiness.
The second one is a remark made by the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi:
Don’t look for obscure formulas, nor for le mystère. It is pure joy I’m giving you.
The Brancusi quote exists in numerous variants, and I went to a good deal of trouble to track it to what appears to be its original source.
The Armstrong quote was originally published in Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971, a book by Max Jones and John Chilton, and is well known to Armstrong scholars.
Here it is in context:

Now I must tell you that my whole life has been happiness. Through all of the misfortunes, etc., I did not plan anything. Life was there for me and I accepted it. And life, what ever came out, has been beautiful to me, and I love everybody.

I hope I feel that way when I’m seventy.