About Last Night

“I once won one of Mary Ann Madden’s ‘Competitions’ in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a ’10’ of anything, and mine was the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: ‘I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.’ That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.”
David Mamet, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal'” (Village Voice, Mar. 11, 2008)

• Julian Barnes writes about Flaubert’s late correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement. Barnes quotes a letter the author wrote near the end of his life where he said, “Giving the public details about oneself is a bourgeois temptation I have always resisted,” killing hopes that if Flaubert lived today he would be on Tumblr (URL: farouche.tumblr.com).
• I also finally got to Hilary Mantel’s essay on Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained and think you should get to it too:

To many of us, a great deal of what we encounter daily is unexplained. If you are in mid-life now, it is possible to have received what was described at the time as a good education and still know nothing of science or technology. Those on the other side of the cultural divide complain that the artists are proud of their deficiency, but this is seldom so. It’s easy, if you can read, to brush up your Shakespeare, but not so easy to use your spare half-hours to catch up on the inorganic chemistry you missed. It’s the people cringing from their scientific illiteracy who buy Stephen Hawking books they can’t read, as if having them on the shelf will make the knowledge rub off; they snap up tracts on atheism, too, to show that if they’re ignorant they’re at least rational.

If she’d only mentioned that never-read copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach, it’d be like she was seeing into my soul.
(Both these links purloined over various months from Jenny Davidson.)
• Also, finally, against my better judgment, and with fear that I will make my dear co-bloggers grip their heads and exclaim, “What have you done to our blog! Our beautiful arts blog!” but I have to share my outrage with everyone, I am including a link to David Cook doing unspeakable things to “Eleanor Rigby” on American Idol. Just watching this performance nearly turned me into Seymour Glass, it was that phony, and people are praising it! Simon! Joe R.! I look forward to next week when David will freestyle for ten minutes, then break his guitar over the speaker while performing “The Sound of Silence.”

“Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up and eats their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse on heap of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They’ve no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.”
— Amy Gerstler, “Bear-Boy of Lithuania,” included in Medicine

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 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:

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 20 and reopens Apr. 29 at the Music Box Theatre for an open-ended run, reviewed here)

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

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

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The Homecoming (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

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

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

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

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, closes June 16, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)

ON TOUR:

• Moby-Dick–Rehearsed (drama, G, not suitable for children, touring the U.S. through May 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Mar. 29 and reopens Apr. 29 at the Cort Theatre for an open-ended run, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• Victory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Come Back, Little Sheba (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
* * *
“A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could.”
William Hazlitt, Characteristics: In the Manner of Rochefoucault’s Maxims

While the Ted Hughes moment is afoot, now is maybe a good time to publicly wish that his book Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being be brought back into print. It’s such an eccentric and dazzling piece of criticism, it seems terrible that it’s fallen out of print in both the United States and England.* Especially since Hughes claimed writing it gave him cancer — the least we could do is keep the book circulating a while longer.
Faber & Faber? NYRB? Anyone?
* Currently, the cheapest copy on Abebooks is $88; a used copy on Amazon.uk is 80 pounds. Every time I check out the local library’s copy, I worry that I’m going to misplace it somewhere and have to wash dishes in the library kitchen forever.
RELATED: A nice piece about Hughes and myth from the Journal of Mythic Arts.

“Usually his wit was austerely pure, but sometimes he could jolt the more cynical. Once we were looking at a furnished apartment that one of our friends had just rented. It was overbearingly eccentric. Life-size clay lamps like flowerpots remodeled into Matisse nudes by a spastic child. Paintings made from a palette of mud by a blind painter. About the paintings Randall said, ‘Ectoplasm sprinkled with zinc.’ About the apartment, ‘All that’s missing are Mrs. X’s illegitimate children in bottles of formaldehyde.'”
Robert Lowell, “Randall Jarrell, 1914-1965: An Appreciation”

“The sense of doing good, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.”
Albert Camus, The Fall