About Last Night

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together; our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not, and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our virtues.”
William Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well

A few months ago I announced in this space that the University of Chicago Press would be bringing out a uniform edition of the Parker crime novels of “Richard Stark,” the nom de plume of Donald E. Westlake. Interested parties will be pleased to know that the first three titles in the series, The Hunter, The Man With the Getaway Face, and The Outfit, have just been published. (I reviewed them here.)
For more information about the Parker Edition, visit the blog of the University of Chicago Press, where you will also find a link to a very interesting interview with Donald Westlake:

When Bucklin Moon of Pocket Books said he wanted to publish The Hunter, if I’d help Parker escape the law at the end so I could write more books about him, I was at first very surprised. He was the bad guy in the book.
More than that, I’d done nothing to make him easy for the reader; no smalltalk, no quirks, no pets. I told myself the only way I could do it is if I held onto what Buck seemed to like, the very fact that he was a compendium of what your lead character should not be. I must never soften him, never make him user-friendly, and I’ve tried to hold to that.

Read the whole thing here.

“If my discoveries are other people’s commonplaces I cannot help it–for me they retain a momentous freshness.”
Elizabeth Bowen

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:

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

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 through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“I am omnbibulous. I drink every known alcoholic drink and enjoy them all. I learned early in life how to handle alcohol and never had any trouble with it. The rules are simple as mud. First, never drink if you have any work to do. Never. Secondly, never drink alone. That’s the way to become a drunkard. Thirdly, even if you haven’t got any work to do, never drink while the sun is shining. Wait until it’s dark.”
H.L. Mencken, interview (recorded by the Library of Congress in 1948)

John McCormack sings “I Hear You Calling Me” in 1929, accompanied by Edwin Schneider:

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

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
John Berryman, “Dream Song 14”

Mrs. T and I are working our way from Maine to New Hampshire to Massachusetts, then back to Maine. We spent Sunday night in Portland, where we stayed at the Pomegranate Inn, a bed-and-breakfast that is also a gallery. Having spent the preceding weekend on a two-masted schooner whose quarters are close, we were glad to be able to spread out and relax. The innkeeper left an attractive assortment of books in our room, including William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, Graham Greene’s The Lost Childhood, John Marquand’s So Little Time, and a folio of Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs, and we ate our breakfast crêpes beneath an acrylic abstract by a Maine painter named Honour Mack. Pretty arty, huh?
From Portland we drove to Manchester, where we spent the day visiting the Currier Museum of Art and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Zimmerman House, which was built in 1950 and is now owned by the museum. The Currier’s small but choice permanent collection includes a dozen noteworthy paintings by Arthur Dove, Adolph Gottlieb, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Childe Hassam, Joan Mitchell, Jules Olitski, Mark Rothko, Charles Sheeler, Andrew Wyeth, and Neil Welliver, all of which are on display and very much worth seeing. The crowning glory of the museum, however, is the Zimmerman House, a flawlessly executed specimen of Wright’s Usonian style that was bequeathed to the Currier by its original owners, whose ashes were scattered in the backyard garden. One of the docents who showed us around the house grew up in the neighborhood–she still lives there–and told us that the local children referred to their ultra-modern home as “the monkey house” when it was under construction.
Not only is the house in near-mint condition, but it contains all of the original furniture that Wright designed for the Zimmermans, including a custom-crafted four-rack music stand. Isadore Zimmerman and his wife Lucille were both serious amateur musicians who hosted concerts in their living room, and Wright’s stand permits the members of a string quartet to play facing one another. Of the twelve Wright houses that I’ve stayed in or toured, this is the one that I find most aesthetically perfect, though the Seth Peterson Cottage runs it a close second (Mrs. T prefers the Muirhead Farmhouse).
As if all that weren’t exciting enough for one day, it so happens that yet another Wright house is located only a few blocks away from the Zimmerman House. The Kalil House remains in private hands but is easily visible from the street, and if you should happen to have $1,900,000 to spare, you can buy it. (Go here to see listings for the seventeen other Wright houses that are currently on the market.) Alas, Mrs. T and I forgot to bring our checkbook, so we settled for looking longingly out the windows of the tour bus that drove us from the Currier to the Zimmerman House and back again.
I’m playing semi-hooky from my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, by which I mean that I haven’t been to any shows since last Tuesday, when I saw Hair in Central Park. This morning, though, I’ll be writing a column about Shakespeare Santa Cruz (which we visited last weekend) and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s production of Around the World in 80 Days (which I saw a couple of weeks ago) in Room 3 of the Bedford Village Inn. As soon as it’s finished, Mrs. T and I will eat breakfast, pack our bags, hop in the car, and pay a visit to Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, who’s been holed up at the MacDowell Colony for the past few weeks. Then we’ll go see the Peterborough Players do Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which was written in (and about) Peterborough, New Hampshire.
From there we head south…but that’s enough for today. Breakfast awaits!