About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I cover two off-Broadway productions, My Name Is Rachel Corrie and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:

Politics makes artists stupid. Take “My Name Is Rachel Corrie,” the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England’s best actors, “Rachel Corrie” just opened Off Broadway after a successful London run. It’s an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop–yet it’s being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better….

The cancellation of last season’s New York Theatre Workshop production of “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” triggered a noisy row in the New York theater community, many of whose members jumped to the not-unreasonable conclusion that the producers were cravenly bowing to backstage pressure from donors who found the play’s politics obnoxious. As a result, the belated opening of “Rachel Corrie” at the Minetta Lane Theatre has had the predictable result of bringing it far more attention than it would otherwise have received.

That’s the only lesson to be drawn from this exercise in theatrical ineptitude….

If you want to see real artists turning complex ideas into compelling theater, pay a visit to the New Group’s revival of Jay Presson Allen’s stage version of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” a slicked-up, simplified version of Muriel Spark’s darkly comic 1962 novella that nonetheless manages to suggest more than a few of the book’s multiple layers of moral ambiguity. The play ran for a year on Broadway but hasn’t been seen there since 1968–the film, for which Maggie Smith won a best-actress Oscar, is much better remembered–so it is good to welcome it back to the New York stage, especially in so intelligent and incisive a production….

To be sure, Cynthia Nixon is miscast as Miss Brodie, the high-handed Scottish schoolteacher whose romantic streak leads her to embrace fascism. Imperiousness is not in Ms. Nixon’s line, and she has opted instead to play Miss Brodie as a coquette, an interpretation no more plausible than her Scotch accent. Nevertheless, she’s a fine actress, and even though her performance isn’t at all right, she mostly manages to make it work….

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review, plus many other good things. (If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll find it here.)

P.S. Maud went to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with me. To find out what she thought of it, go here.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to the first half of this week’s drama column, in which I discuss My Name Is Rachel Corrie. To read it, go here.

Hugs and kisses to the many readers who responded promptly to last week’s queries, much obliged. Herewith, the answers.

– Did Art Blakey really say this?

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other
countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do
with Africa.

He sure did. The source is the interview with Blakey published in Art Taylor’s book Notes and Tones.

– Did Betty Comden and Adolph Green really write a song whose lyrics succinctly summarized famous books? Yes, indeed. It’s a revue number called “Reader’s Digest.” Nobody came up with the complete lyrics, but here are some pertinent excerpts:

Les Mis

“A man cannot forgive being made to look foolish.”

George Hunka (a/k/a Mr. Superfluities) and Isaac Butler (a/k/a Mr. Parabasis) are two of the smartest theater bloggers around. They are also gifted theater professionals, and I just got back from the opening night of their latest collaboration. In Public is a play written by George and directed by Isaac. This is its second off-off-Broadway production. I saw the premiere a year ago and was impressed. I found it even more impressive this time around.

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.

“‘All the world’s a stage,’ of course, but a metaphor as general as that loses all its meaning. Only a second-rate actor could have written such a line out of pride in his second-rate calling. There were occasions when Shakespeare was a very bad writer indeed. You can see how often in books of quotations. People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations.”

“Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because they young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food.”

Too much to do! Not enough time! Yesterday was bad, today will be worse, and I’m leaving town tomorrow, not for fun (though I expect to have some anyway).