About Last Night

Enough already with the leftovers–it’s time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I render summary judgment on two off-Broadway shows in today’s paper, Paul Rudnick’s Regrets Only and a revival of Suddenly Last Summer:

Paul Rudnick reminds me of Nuke LaLoosh, the rookie pitcher in “Bull Durham” who had a million-dollar arm and a five-cent head. If it’s jokes you want, Mr. Rudnick’s your man, and most of them are funny to boot. For a stand-up comedian, that’d be more than enough–but Mr. Rudnick is a playwright, and “Regrets Only,” his latest effort, proves yet again that it takes more than punchlines to make a play….

Hank Hadley (George Grizzard), a ruggedly handsome fashion designer who just happens to be gay, is incensed when the husband (David Rasche) of his best friend (Christine Baranski) agrees to help President Bush draft a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Thanks to Mr. Rudnick’s jokes and the precision-tooled acting of his cast, “Regrets Only” stays afloat until intermission, at which point things get really, really stupid: Hank talks all the gays in Manhattan into going on strike, meaning that Broadway shuts down and nobody can get a hairdo. Curtain? Not quite, alas, for we have to sit through a semi-serious closing scene in which Mr. Rudnick whacks us over the head with his moral, which is that Gays Are People, Too.

I wonder whether it occurred to Mr. Rudnick that the second act of “Regrets Only,” in which gays are portrayed as playwrights, actors, hairdressers, caterers, florists, and travel agents, is itself a mortifyingly quaint piece of stereotyping….

Tennessee Williams is widely thought to be a great playwright–but not by me. Yes, he wrote one indisputably great play, “The Glass Menagerie,” and I can also see why so many people like “A Streetcar Named Desire” so much more than I do. Most of the rest of his vast output, however, strikes me as overblown and underbelievable, with “Suddenly Last Summer” locking up the booby prize for sheer absurdity. I’ve no idea how Williams’ reputation for seriousness survived its 1958 premiere, much less why the Roundabout Theatre Company has gone to the trouble of reviving what is surely the most unintentionally silly play ever written by a well-known author….

No free link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you on-the-spot access to my review, plus plenty of other good stuff. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I cast a cold eye on the desperate state of dance in America. Just a quarter-century ago, ballet and modern dance were vital, exciting, and (above all) popular. Now they’re at a frighteningly low ebb. What happened–and what can be done to pump up the volume?

To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

“You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they’ve discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction–the wisecrack.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

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)
– Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, 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 SOON:
– Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

“One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient

I’m off to Connecticut for a four-day Thanksgiving marathon, returning to New York on Saturday afternoon to embark on a week-long playgoing marathon. It’s all a bit too much, especially since I filed two Wall Street Journal columns yesterday. I wish I had the steam to post more extensively, but right now it’s all I can do to pack my bag. Expect the usual theater-related postings on Thursday and Friday, but otherwise I plan to lay low until next Monday. Apologies.

In the meantime, let me leave you with some pieces worth reading:

– Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post went to Atlanta to look at the High Museum‘s Morris Louis retrospective and filed this first-rate report about the declining fortunes of a once-fashionable abstractionist who is now criminally underrated. I wasn’t greatly impressed with the High Museum when I visited Atlanta last July, but Gopnik’s piece made me want to jump on the next southbound plane.

– Speaking of museums, Eric Gibson of The Wall Street Journal has written a tough and trenchant column
on the latest round of deaccessioning. Here’s the nut:

Just last week the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., announced that it was selling more than 200 objects from its collection to raise $15 million for the purchase of modern and contemporary art. “Deaccessioning,” as the practice is known, used to be the tool of last resort for acquiring new art. But lately it’s become the tool of first resort, with museums strip-mining their collections just to build a war chest….

What’s so disturbing about collection rentals and sales is that they violate the reason that museums are treated differently from businesses. Because of their transcendent importance, museum objects occupy a position outside the pressures of the marketplace. Yet more and more museums are treating these objects as financial assets that they can tap at any time.

What he said.

– Out of the Mouths of Babes Dept.: Joan Didion, who has written a stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking that will open on Broadway later this season, recently talked to an interviewer about the difference between screenwriting and playwriting:

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there’s nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I’m not sure I’ve ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is….Something I’ve always known and said and thought about the screen is that if it’s anything in the world, it’s literal. It’s so literal that there’s a whole lot you can’t do because you’re stuck with the literalness of the screen. The stage is not literal.

What she said.

That’ll have to hold you for now–I need to go to bed immediately. See you around.

P.S. Check out the new Top Fives.

P.P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

“Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“We who are of mature age seldom suspect how unmercifully and yet with what insight the very young judge us.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge