About Last Night

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 or on “About Last Night” 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)

– Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, extended through Dec. 17)

– 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)

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

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

“Political thinking has become so distorted and corrupted during this long, long half century that one has to begin by tearing it out, roots and all, from one’s soil to prepare the ground for a healthy and humane politics that fosters the virtu of the free citizen.”

Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)

“Many of our intellectual civilization’s problems, our intellectual problems, arise because people do not read aloud. An enormous percentage of literature would simply vanish if the authors had to read their works aloud, only aloud. They would be ashamed; the falsehood would be obvious. When people read only with their eyes, all the falsehood can enter imperceptibly even the most critical eye. The mouth is for speaking the truth or lies, whereas the eyes are really esthetic. The eyes see whether something is beautiful or ugly, useful or useless.”

Aleksander Wat, My Century (trans. Richard Lourie)

(1) I updated the Top Five and “Teachout in Commentary” modules in between deadlines today. Check out the right-hand column and you’ll find lots of interesting new stuff.

(2) I agree with everything Our Girl says immediately below about Rachel Ries. She is the real deal.

Now, back to work!

The other day Peter Suderman wrote here about the rare thrill of seeing pop music giant Beck perform in a tiny DC club.

For those of you outside the music nerd sphere, it’s the musical the equivalent of going to a local sports bar and watching a game with President Bush. It’s like having Conan O’Brian do a show from your living room. It’s like meeting up with Quentin Tarantino to watch Death Wish on a 27″ TV.

And it’s exactly how live rock music should be seen.

For all the trippy, awesome excess of stadium and large venue rock shows, I’ve never been all that impressed with them. You drop a wad of cash to listen to overprocessed, might-as-well-be-CD music while standing a quarter-mile away in a crowd of zillions. Live music isn’t just about hanging out and hearing music-you can do that at a bar with a DJ any night of the week. It’s about getting a sense of the musician, about being close to them, watching how they interact with both the crowd and with their music.

Having been in active avoidance of stadium shows since college, I couldn’t agree more. And it just so happens that I recently had an experience along the lines of Peter’s that I’ve been meaning to write about it; his post is the perfect occasion to finally do so.

If you’ve been paying attention to our Top Five in the right-hand column of this page, you may remember my recent blurb on the album of a Chicago singer-songwriter, Rachel Ries. My friend David and I happened upon Ries last year when she opened for Erin McKeown at Schuba’s. Knowing nothing about Ries at the time, and running low batting averages when it came to unknown opening acts, we prudently approached her set with low expectations. The fact that she came out hoarse and apologetic–she was getting over a cold–didn’t do very much to heighten them. But the moment she started singing, we were both taken.

There’s a rawly emotional, yearning quality to Ries’s voice that made her slight hoarseness on this occasion a plus, adding another dimension of vulnerability. The stripping away of a layer of polish, somewhat like the intimacy of the setting in which Peter saw Beck, served to make us feel closer to the artist. And it lent itself particularly well to the kind of music Ries makes. When I wrote about her album “For You Only” for the Top Five, I may have come off as confused because I wanted to give short shrift to neither the emotional immediacy of her singing nor its artfulness. It’s the former that’s most striking and affecting, but the latter, certainly, that’s responsible for these effects. The vulnerability attaches to both the songs about joy (in which sweetness and erotic charge are so enmeshed as to become practically synonymous) and the songs about pain (in which, refreshingly, the narrators are as likely to be the stories’ villains as their protagonists).

This September David and I went out to Oak Park to see Ries perform as half of a two-person show held in the living room of this local music blogger and his family. It was the most intimate musical performance I’d ever attended, and especially powerful because I’d finally acquired Ries’s CD only a few weeks earlier and had spent those few weeks playing it on a continual loop–washing dishes, working out, driving, getting ready for work in the morning. I’m like that with new musical crushes; I want that music burned into my brain and typically don’t rest, or listen to anything else, until it’s effectively recorded there. By the time of the Oak Park concert, I was still high on discovery and knew half the tracks backward and forward.

So this autumnal September evening in the suburbs was a rare delight: not only did I get to cap my three-week captivation with Ries’s songs and singing by witnessing her live performance, but she was playing only a few yards away from where I sat comfortably couched, glass of wine in hand, surrounded by amiable strangers. Ries was sharing the stage with her friend and frequent collaborator Anais Mitchell, to whom this show was my happy introduction, the pair taking turns performing. Between sets I even chatted with (perhaps gushed to) Rachel, who received all my praise with exemplary grace. During the second set she even played my request, the brilliant and brutal song “Unkind,” which is like a short story whittled down to its essential contours but still suggesting a world of texture and detail.

For those of you in Chicago, Rachel Ries performs this Friday night at the California Clipper–not quite someone’s living room, but intimate enough to promise another memorable show. Her email announcement paints the bar as a kind of home away from home for her:

This Friday I can be found at my favoritest bar of all time, the California Clipper. As I can often & on any given night be found there, it’s nearly business as usual. However, I’ve never played their stage so therein lies a vast difference: on Friday I’ll be dressed up and singing into a mic as opposed to dressed scrappy and humming at the bar whilst losing at Scrabble.

So come out Friday night and have your socks charmed off (by songs like “You Only”) and the hairs on the back of your neck stood on end (by songs like “Unkind”). I’ll be the rapt one in the burnt orange velvet scarf–be sure to say hello.

“As of now at least, more good people are to be encountered in America than in Europe. Theirs is, however, a somewhat coarse and seemingly careless goodness because there is a low level of psychological intensity in human exchanges here, both of the good and the bad.”

Czeslaw Milosz, foreword to Aleksander Wat, My Century

For the last two weeks, sick as a dog and huddled hermitlike in my bed. Before that, there was a truly fabulous and entirely computer-free Vegas junket plus the requisite week to prepare and week to recover. Add it all up, and you have one absurdly long absence from this blog, for which I apologize.

Though I’m now on the mend and making public appearances, i.e., at my workplace, I’m not completely recovered. From time to time the coughing up of a lung still seems imminent, and I’m still on my delightful but soporific cough medicine, which seems to come down to an expectorant heavily cut with vicodin. (Which reminds me: new episodes of House return tomorrow, so set your DVRs.) Since the possibility of a secondary pneumonia was raised by my doctor, I’m playing this one conservatively. I’ll be posting this week, but in all likelihood my contributions will be brief and few as I aim for early bedtimes and a reclining rather than upright posture whenever possible. Still and all, it’s nice to be back.

I’m writing from Seattle on Sunday night, having finally come to the end of a long, hectic weekend of theater-related travel and adventures.

On Thursday I flew to Portland, Oregon, where my traveling companion and I picked up a rental car, headed for Hayden Island, and there took up residence on a yacht. That makes our accommodations sound a bit fancier than they really were: the Grand Ronde Place, the yacht-and-breakfast where I spent my two nights in Portland, is a thirty-four-foot sailboat whose interior is comparable in size to a motor home. The “stateroom,” not surprisingly, was a bit on the snug side, but I’d always wanted to sleep on a boat, the owner-host was wonderfully considerate, and all in all we couldn’t have been happier. Should you find yourself in Portland and feel like staying somewhere out of the ordinary, I recommend the Grand Ronde Place very enthusiastically.

On Friday morning we drove south to the Gordon House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in the Pacific Northwest that’s open to the public. Designed in 1957 and built seven years later, it’s a two-story Usonian house that came within weeks of being torn down when a Philistine with too much money bought the lot on which it stood and decided that he’d prefer living in a McMansion. Thanks to a last-minute rescue effort by the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, the house was dismantled in 2000 and moved twenty-four miles to the Oregon Garden, where it can now be viewed by interested visitors. We spent an hour and a half touring the house and grounds, and–as always–I came away wishing I could live in so perfectly conceived and executed a building. In the evening we saw Portland Center Stage’s production of West Side Story, performed in the company’s brand-new Gerding Theater, a 599-seat proscenium-stage house located in what used to be the Portland Armory.

At noon on Saturday we took the Amtrak Cascades to Seattle, an afternoon-long train trip through Oregon and Washington that left us with just enough time to dine on crabcakes at the Dahlia Lounge. Sunday, by contrast, was a triple-header: brunch with Mr. Rifftides, a matin