About Last Night

The New York Times had an interesting story on Sunday about The Producers, which is still turning a profit every week, but a much smaller one than when the show was new:

Its box office grosses, which set record highs–more than $1.2 million per week–in its first year, have fallen about 20 percent in the last 12 months. It now ranks below newer shows like “Hairspray” and “Mamma Mia!” as well as “The Lion King,” the 1997 Disney phenomenon whose success some believed “The Producers” might emulate. Worse, in a supremely status-conscious metropolis, the show is now an easy ticket. “The Producers” has not regularly sold out since the beginning of the year, despite a bout of new television advertising.

I’m not surprised, nor should you be. As I wrote here back in July, Mel Brooks’ Borscht-belt style of anything-for-a-laugh humor is the last gasp of a dying comic language:

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.

With six months’ worth of Wall Street Journal drama columns under my belt, I feel even more confident in saying that we won’t be seeing many more shows like The Producers. If you seek the future of musical comedy on Broadway, look to Avenue Q. It’s smaller, hipper, faster, snarkier. And–yes–better.

Damn you, OGIC, for being smarter than me. I wrote a print-media review of Mystic River (the piece hasn’t run yet, but will be posted in the right-hand column in the next week or so), and I didn’t say one thing about Laura Linney, whom I adore and admire without reserve and whose small but staggering bit at the end of the film deserved all the praise you gave it. What’s more, it does change the total effect of Mystic River…but did I mention it? Nooooooooo.

OGIC and I blogged compulsively on Friday and over the weekend, so if you were too busy dressing up as a sexy ketchup bottle (or recovering from a post-Halloween hangover) to visit us, keep on scrolling until your fingers go numb. Among other things, you’ll find postings on:

The surprise at the end of Mystic River

How E.M. Forster can make you a nicer novelist

Louis Armstrong’s house

Joseph Cornell’s boxes

Ned Beatty, the new Big (not Puff) Daddy

My first visit to a fine-art auction, and how I almost went bankrupt before I finally put down my paddle and slunk away

The implausibility of The Human Stain

Super-expensive art and the wild and crazy gazillionaires who buy it

Plus other good stuff, including loads of links to other people’s good stuff.

We’re both kind of busy this week, so clean your plate before you ask for another helping…and buy my book!

Maud rules! (Even if she is only three and a half feet tall.)

I’ve been meaning to post something about Mystic River, which I finally caught about a week ago. You may have read Terry’s comments, which centered on the problematic score. Speaking strictly as a layman in all matters musical, I can still loudly echo Terry’s feelings about that damned score. It was a scourge. It was a menace. It chewed up and spat out whole scenes.

Apart from the music, I found Mystic River most impressive as a portrait of the insular South Boston neighborhood where it is set, but not entirely satisfying as drama–until its surprising last two scenes. Sean Penn’s lavishly praised performance as Jimmy struck me as way overbearing; the madder his character gets, the more screen acreage he seems to take up, and the flatter the story becomes. Its panoramic view of a troubled community over two generations telescopes into a narrower and narrower study of a single character with a single, hypertrophied dimension.

Don’t get me wrong, the movie did keep me engrossed. But by the time the brutal climax had detonated, I was weary, glad to have it done with, and ready to go home. But it was then that Mystic River unfurled two unforeseeable concluding scenes that changed–not everything, but a great deal. Jimmy’s wife (Laura Linney) saunters into the first of these scenes, a serene and satisfied Lady Macbeth, and steals the movie in about five minutes.

Finally dropping her guard, Linney’s character delivers a quietly chilling monologue that yanks Jimmy’s personal trials back into the context of the neighborhood and its remorseless tribal ethos. Her speech changes some of what we think we know, not about the murder mystery but about the force field in which the murder has been committed and revenged. A previous scene with her father, for instance, takes on new significance; we’re forced to reevaluate a couple of minor characters as more than goofball sidekicks; and Jimmy’s blazing anger (if not Penn’s performance) clicks into place, newly plausible and sympathetic. The scene recasts things in a way that makes the movie, for my money, all of a sudden ten times more interesting.

The last scene continues to track Jimmy’s wife. By now the camera can barely take its eye off her. Her silent confrontation with the other major female character (Marcia Gay Harden) is another haunting moment that beats anything in the first 90% of the film for sheer suggestiveness. After all the fixation on male angst, male bonding and male rivalry, the women emerge from the background and make the movie whole. It’s not so much that earlier scenes don’t deliver any feeling, but that these last scenes don’t deliver it in blunt blows. More like electric pinpricks.

I’m of two minds about this turn so late in the story. I thought at first that it seemed tacked on and unprepared for; but Laura Linney’s character is conspicuously unreadable in earlier scenes, and the revelation of her character and loyalties enriches the drama to a degree that probably wouldn’t be matched if it weren’t sprung as a late semi-surprise. But it may be too easily missed in the shadow of all the fireworks leading up to it, since it is so much subtler than any of the movie’s other revelations and arrives so late. These last scenes are so subtle, in fact, that even now I worry I’m reading too much into them. But I don’t think so–or at the very least I don’t want to think so, since they transformed the movie, for me, into something not just well made but haunting and memorable.

I just found in my e-mailbox the following press release:

Due to impending construction on West 43rd Street, “URINETOWN: The Musical,” the winner of three 2002 Tony Awards, will have to leave Henry Miller’s Theater.

“Love, Actually” is the title of a generous, searching new Guardian essay on E.M. Forster and the ethics of fiction by the novelist Zadie Smith. I mean “generous” in the best sense of the word: not that she gives Forster’s work too easy a time, but that she muffles the skeptic in her long enough to own up to, and consider seriously, the pleasure she takes in it.

Smith points out that for a long time now in academic literary studies, it has been compulsory to resist loving literature. She learned to do this all too well as a student at Cambridge, and in this essay her triumph is to unlearn that dubious wisdom and to instead resist dismissing Forster as easy and mawkish. How did she unlearn it? By writing novels herself, mostly:

A few years ago, I agreed to take part in a debate on “Modern British Art” at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts]. Two famous young artists rounded on me for what they saw as my “aesthetic fascism” (I’d brought up the topic of value judgments in modern art), arguing that there was no possibility that I could find more value in King Lear than the text printed on the back of a cornflake packet. This is an exceedingly stupid version of a very serious aesthetic and ethical debate that has been raging in the humanities for about 40 years. Once I’d have counted myself on the side of the young artists, and now I don’t. They say when you become a practitioner you become a sentimentalist–maybe that’s what happened. All I know for sure is that I no longer find it impossible to speak of value (not universal value, or even shared value, but value as it concerns this reader), nor to lend my nervous voice to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s strong Aristotelian claims, mainly, that literature is one of the places (when we read attentively) that we can have truly altruistic instincts, “genuine acknowledgement of the otherness of the other.” Ten years ago, the idea that reading fiction might be a valuable ethical activity in its own right was so out of fashion that it took an author of Nussbaum’s hard, philosophical bent to broach it without incurring ridicule. Rather bravely, she climbed the disputed mountain of literary theory and planted her philosophical flag firmly in the dirt. Her flag said: “Great novels show us the worth and richness of plural qualitative thinking and engender in their readers a richly qualitative way of seeing.”

My flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: “When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good).”

This is only a small taste of a long, beautifully written essay, full of insights and feeling, that makes strong claims both for Forster’s contribution to the possibilities of the novel, and for the pleasure of reading as a good in itself. When she writes that “the heart has its own knowledge in Forster, and Love is never quite a rational choice,” Smith is talking equally about love between people and love of literature. Her essay connects these dots admirably and, best of all, humanely.

Yesterday afternoon I went to a Brazilian birthday party (my goodness, do those Brazilians know how to have fun!), after which I took the subway to Times Square to catch the opening-night performance of a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, and Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. I’ll be writing about it in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, so I mustn’t jump the gun, but I do have two preliminary observations to make:

(1) Ned Beatty (who got a hats-off review from Ben Brantley in this morning’s Times) is one of the finest character actors in the business. He isn’t famous, but he works all the time, and even if you don’t know him by name, I’ve no doubt that you’d recognize him instantly. He has 123 entries in the Internet Movie Database, starting with Deliverance, though it’d be a shame if he ended up being best remembered for the part he played in that shabby little shocker. When I think of him, it’s as Jack Kellom, the older cop in The Big Easy, one of my favorite not-quite-first-rate movies. Kellom is a quintessential Ned Beatty part, a genial glad-hander who turns out on closer inspection to be both dishonest and weak. I love that kind of two-faced acting, and Beatty is fabulous at it.

Because he’s short, chubby, and moon-faced, Beatty never gets to play film leads, and I gather that this production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his Broadway debut. Not to give the game away, but it’s damned well about time.

(2) In New York City, drama critics don’t usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience–they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces…from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)

Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?

I got home, blogged a little, and decided I wasn’t sleepy, so I turned on the TV and started surfing. All of a sudden I found myself watching two familiar-looking ballet dancers cavorting around a studio stage, and quickly realized that I was seeing a performance of George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux by Jacques d’Amboise and Melissa Hayden. It was, needless to say, Classic Arts Showcase, the foundation-supported “network” that beams high-culture video snippets free of charge, 24/7, to any station in the world that wants to run them. In New York, they’re shown at irregular intervals on CUNY-TV, the station of the City University of New York, and I see them on occasion, usually in much the same way I did just now–at random, in other words.

To spend a half-hour or so with Classic Arts Showcase is to empty a wildly mixed bag of cultural bits and pieces. The performance of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, for instance, was originally telecast in 1962 on Voice of Firestone, a quintessentially middlebrow network TV series of a sort inconceivable today. Forty years ago it aired in prime time, where it might have been seen by an untold number of youngsters who could have said to themselves, “So this is ballet? Hey, that’s cool.” And so it was.

Next up was an encore, Novacek’s Perpetuum mobile, dazzlingly well-played in 1957 by Nathan Milstein, a very great violinist whose centenary is only a month away. (By an improbable coincidence, I’d just been reading From Russia to the West, Milstein’s witty, outspoken memoirs, and listening to his incomparably aristocratic 1959 recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which you can purchase for the preposterously low price of $3.98 by clicking here.) This clip came from the BBC, which used to present classical music in the most no-nonsense manner imaginable. No fancy sets, no swoopy camerawork, nothing but Milstein, the pianist Ernest Lush, and a page-turner. When did you last see a page-turner on TV?

Ten minutes’ worth of good solid black-and-white high-culture fare–followed by a stiff dose of nonsense. We heard a recording of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and saw a painting by Berthe Morisot, across which the camera panned lovingly, tediously, and pointlessly, Morisot and Prokofiev having, so far as I know, nothing whatsoever in common. I lost patience after a half-minute and changed channels, having just been forcibly reminded that even at the height of the middlebrow moment, TV and high culture coexisted uneasily.

Today, long after the death of American middlebrow culture, they scarcely coexist at all, save on random, context-free occasions in the middle of the night. I wonder how many people in New York City saw that clip of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux? Fifty? A hundred? Surely not much more than that, and probably less. And how many of them knew who Jacques d’Amboise was? Or George Balanchine? Or Tchaikovsky, for that matter?

And so at last to bed, having come to no conclusions whatsoever about the likely fate of Western culture. Fooled you!