About Last Night

New York City can be a vexing and unnerving place to live. Helicopters woke me at six-fifteen this morning, a bit earlier than my usual rise-shine-and-write time, and yesterday afternoon I shared a subway with a fellow who kept shouting “Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” as he walked briskly from one end of the car to the other and back again.

Be all this as it may, I’m in a thoroughly benign mood, for I just returned from a visit to my cardiologist, one year to the week after my busy life was interrupted by an unexpected ambulance ride to Lenox Hill Hospital. He tells me that my heart is now completely normal, with no irregularities of any kind. So long as I keep taking my medicine, eating right, and going to the gym, it’ll stay that way.

It was snowing when I arrived at the doctor’s office–but by the time I got back home, the sun was out. No fooling.

I decided to see where “About Last Night” was being read before going to bed, and found these cities (among many others) glowing on our Site Meter map of the United States as of midnight:

– Allentown, Pennsylvania

– Alpharetta, Georgia

– Auburn, Maine

– Bend, Oregon

– Cherry Hill, New Jersey

– Cordova, Tennessee

– Hacienda Heights, California

– Hattiesburg, Mississippi

– Hines, Illinois

– San Marcos, Texas

Hello, everybody, and good night!

At last, a hat trick–I praise three new Broadway shows, John Doyle’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column:

In an act of recreative genius, Mr. Doyle has knocked the cobwebs off “Company” and turned it into an utterly contemporary chronicle of marriage and its discontents, one whose implications have never been more immediate.

Like Mr. Doyle’s 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” this is a small-scale production in which the 14 members of the cast double as their own onstage orchestra, playing everything from piccolo to double bass. It’s no stunt, either: By making their own music, the actors create an atmosphere at once intimate and intense, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s astringent new orchestrations strip away all the tired pop-music clich

“We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called

I set my iBook on shuffle play the other night and sat down at the kitchen table to fill up my seven-day pillbox. (Don’t let anybody tell you that the life of a Manhattan drama critic isn’t exciting!) As Aimee Mann started singing “Deathly,” I glanced at the clock, saw that it was eleven, and suddenly found myself remembering a conversation I had thirty-odd years ago with a long-lost college friend. She was a slightly older married woman who had long, ash-blonde hair, thin legs, and a bone-dry sense of humor, all of which I found irresistibly (and unrequitedly) appealing. Those were the days when I was hosting a late-night jazz show on the campus radio station, and my friend remarked that she liked it when I played “eleven o’clock music.”

“What’s eleven o’clock music?” I asked innocently.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Music to…you know. That’s when my husband and I like to do it.”

This offhand remark promptly triggered a near-incapacitating spasm of jealousy, which doubtless explains why it burned itself into my memory, surfacing without warning half a lifetime later–especially since my friend, as it happens, looked more than a little bit like Aimee Mann, a coincidence that now causes me to smile wryly.

Love-hungry bachelors of the Fifties and early Sixties were notorious for using jazz and romantic ballads to grease the skids. Frank Sinatra, I’m told, was their artist of choice, though I’ve also been assured by a number of senior citizens in a position to know that Getz/Gilberto was similarly effective. Blake Edwards notwithstanding, I’ve never met anyone who did it to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet or Ravel’s Boléro, at least not more than once.

As for me, I’ve never been one to play music in intimate situations. Perhaps because I am, or used to be, a musician, I find it distracting. And I suppose it says something significant about me that while music is one of the most important things in my life–perhaps the most important thing–I don’t find it sexy, and never have.

Musicians, yes, if they’re women: I’ve been attracted to more than a few of them over the years, and the snippet of dialogue from High Fidelity that I posted as an almanac entry a couple of years ago is in my case not without autobiographical overtones:

BARRY: I want to date a musician.

ROB: I want to live with a musician. She could write songs at home, ask me what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our private jokes in the liner notes.

BARRY: Maybe a little picture of me in the liner notes.

DICK: Just in the background somewhere.

But even though I’ve long been drawn to women who make music, it’s not their music that draws me, at least not directly. I’ve no idea why I make this odd distinction, and I’m not sure what it means, either, since I’ve never been attracted to a woman who made bad music–yet there it is.

For me, music exists in a realm infinitely removed from physical sensuality. It is, as the theologians say, “wholly other,” and it seems to me altogether appropriate that it was in a book about a religious conversion, Karl Stern’s The Pillar of Fire, that I ran across one of the few descriptions of music that seems to me at all valid:

“To talk about music” is a miserable paradox, and contains in four words an admission of incongruity. I remember the embarrassed feeling I had when I read Kierkegaard’s somber theological speculations on Mozart and Don Giovanni. Is Don Giovanni not just a “charming” opera which has a place on the repertoire somewhere with Carmen and The Barber of Seville? Or is it something entirely different, opening up the fathomless abyss of human existence? There is a hierarchy of values, the validity of which cannot be proved by what one calls ordinary means. In this respect, as in others, the Good and the Beautiful are intimately related. To me Mozart’s quartets and Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichord are in essence much more closely akin to Saint Thomas’ Summa than to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, although the latter is music and the Summa is not.

Be that as it may, I have nothing but respect for those fortunate souls who find music sexually arousing. More power to them, I say, though as I say it I can’t help but think of a story that Doug Ramsey likes to tell about his old friend Paul Desmond, the celebrated alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and a man who by all accounts knew his way around a bedroom, though he wasn’t one to kiss and tell:

Once when he and I were dining, a corpulent, polyestered, middle-aged couple planted themselves next to us and announced to Paul that they recognized him from an album cover and just wanted him to know that his music sure was good to make love by. Desmond took a long look at the flabby woman in her beehive hairdo and caked makeup, and the man with his paunch and cigar stub, and said, “Glad to be of help.”

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway 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:
– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/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)
– The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)

OFF BROADWAY:
– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

CLOSING SOON:
– Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

“If we apply to authors themselves for an account of their state, it will appear very little to deserve envy; for they have in all ages been addicted to complaint.”

Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, March 2, 1754 (courtesy of Pratie Place)

Robert Altman, Anita O’Day, and Betty Comden: it was a rocky Thanksgiving for lovers of American art.

About Altman’s death I have nothing much to say, for I respected his films far more than I liked them, and only wrote about one of them, Gosford Park. Our Girl (with whom I saw Gosford Park five years ago) thinks otherwise, and I’m hoping she’ll get around to explaining why at some point.

I felt much the same way about O’Day, whose hard-swinging, ever-ingenious jazz singing I admired greatly without ever warming to it. I saw her in person twice, once in her prime and once long afterward, blogging about the second occasion without identifying her:

I recently saw a public performance by a very old artist. No names or details–it wouldn’t serve any purpose–but it was a disastrous, pitiful self-parody of ruined greatness, the kind that leaves a dark and permanent stain of humiliation in the memory. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Yet it did…

I still recall that performance with retrospective horror, and since then have been exceedingly careful about going to see performers whose time has come and gone.

My memories of Betty Comden are sunnier, not only because I was an unabashed fan of her work but also because I was lucky enough to interview Comden and Adolph Green, her late friend and lifelong colleague, for a 1999 New York Times profile:

Sixty-one years after they began working together, it is almost possible to take Ms. Comden and Mr. Green for granted, because they are so much a part of the theatrical air we breathe. Their hit shows, which include ”On the Town,” ”Wonderful Town,” ”Peter Pan,” ”Bells Are Ringing” and ”On the Twentieth Century,” have yielded a bumper crop of standards; whenever you sing ”New York, New York, a helluva town” or ”The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day” in the shower, their words are on your lips. In addition, they wrote the scripts for ”Singin’ in the Rain” and ”The Band Wagon,” by common consent the two finest film musicals to come out of Hollywood since World War II. No less remarkable is the roster of superstars with whom they have worked, including–just for starters–Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, Mary Martin, Andre Previn, Jerome Robbins and Frank Sinatra….

One unintended consequence of the drying up of musical comedy as a living idiom has been the welcome opportunity to revisit the best shows of the 40’s and 50’s. My guess is that the joint reputation of Betty Comden and Adolph Green has only just begun to benefit from that continuing revaluation. But even if their musicals should fail to survive the test of time, I am certain that the elegantly turned, emotionally true lyrics they wrote for such individual songs as ”Lucky to Be Me,” ”Lonely Town,” ”Just in Time,” ”The Party’s Over” and ”Make Someone Happy” will continue to be sung so long as human beings stubbornly insist on falling in and out of love. To listen as Tony Bennett and Bill Evans turn ”Some Other Time” into a piercingly rueful monologue about missed chances (”This day was just a token/Too many words are still unspoken”) is to realize, once and for all, that the life’s work of the longest-lived writing team in the history of the American theater is far more than just a barrel of laughs.

I made no secret of the fact that I admired Comden and Green without reservation when I visited them at her Upper West Side apartment six years ago, and they in turn made it known to me that they liked what I later wrote about them in the Times. I wouldn’t change a word of it today.

Back then “Some Other Time” was my favorite song, and though in recent years I’ve come to love another song
from On the Town even more, I have no doubt that there can be no more fitting tribute to Betty Comden than to recall the words she and Adolph Green wrote for the most piercingly beautiful of wartime ballads:

Twenty-four hours can go so fast,

You look around, the day has passed.

When you’re in love

Time is precious stuff;

Even a lifetime isn’t enough.

Where has the time all gone to?

Haven’t done half the things we want to.

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.

This day was just a token,

Too many words are still unspoken,

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.

Just when the fun is starting,

Come’s the time for parting,

But let’s be glad for what we’ve had

And what’s to come.

There’s so much more embracing

Still to be done, but time is racing.

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.

The world is poorer for her passing.