About Last Night

I just got back from Wesla Whitfield‘s last set at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel (right in time to reset my clocks), and I simply had to sit
down and tell you how wonderful it was. The room was full of singers, among them Julie Wilson and Mary Foster Conklin, and Whitfield was well aware of it, for her singing was everything that cabaret ought to be and sometimes is: sly and playful, daring and free, musically impeccable, devastatingly emotional. (I could–and should–say all the same things about her accompanists, Mike Greensill on piano and Sean Smith on bass, for they, too, were flying.)

The Oak Room and I have a history. I used to go there all the time to see my old friend Nancy LaMott, and when she died, eight Decembers ago (how can so much time have passed?), I found it all but impossible to go back. It took a long time before I started to feel even halfway at ease in the Algonquin, and even then my memories often made me too melancholy to appreciate whatever I happened to be hearing, no matter how good it was.

Of course Nancy was on my mind last night, for Wesla Whitfield was the only cabaret singer she admitted to admiring, and she would have really, really loved the late show from which I just returned. The Oak Room hasn’t seen much of Whitfield in recent years, but after an evening like that, I can’t imagine they won’t bring her back for a nice long run. A one-night stand is about thirty nights too few.

I forgot to mention in my recent posting
about Whitfield that she has a new CD out, September Songs. Don’t wait for Christmas. Don’t even wait for Monday. Click on the link and order it now.

I’m reading Wil Haygood’s In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., and finding it engrossing. Perhaps you have to be older than 30–if not 40–to expect to find Davis interesting, but Haygood’s anecdotage is quite arrestingly good. Here’s an amazing story that comes from Keely Smith:

Sammy and Sinatra and singer Keely Smith were sitting around one evening. Just three singers, awash in the joy they were all having, talking about singing, songs, life. Sammy told Sinatra he’d have to leave early, couldn’t hang around. Sinatra couldn’t understand what might be more important than hanging around with him. So he wanted to know why Sammy had to leave, and those blue eyes pressed for an answer. It was Kim Novak; they had a date. A little smirk crawled across the Sinatra face. He told Sammy he could get Kim to break the date. Sammy thought Sinatra was kidding, but he wasn’t, the blue eyes steady and hard. Keely Smith sat listening, looking between both men. Sammy against Frank. She knew who would win. “I said,

I just received a boxful of author copies of the paperback edition of my latest book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. It goes on sale November 4, but you can pre-order a copy or three from amazon.com by clicking on the link.

Depending on the religious inclinations of the potential recipient, The Skeptic might make an excellent stocking stuffer for Christmas–and if you couldn’t afford the hardcover version, this one looks almost as nice on the shelf. So buy early and often. I mean, I blog for free, there isn’t even a tip jar on this page, so you really ought to do something to keep me solvent, right? If we sell enough copies, I do solemnly swear to give Our Girl in Chicago a stupendous dinner at a restaurant of her choice the next time I’m in the Windy City.

(Incidentally, A Terry Teachout Reader has just been listed on amazon.com for the first time. They seem to think it’s coming out in December, which it isn’t, but who’s complaining?)

William Nicholson’s The Retreat From Moscow, starring Eileen Atkins, John Lithgow, and Ben Chaplin, opened Thursday at the Booth Theatre, and I reviewed it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the money graf:

Can a great performance save a lousy show? It depends on the show. The post-opening buzz on “The Boy From Oz,” for instance, is that Hugh Jackman is worth the price of the ticket, but I’d happily pay good cash money never to see that sugar-coated dud again, with or without the excellent Mr. Jackman. On the other hand, Eileen Atkins has definitely done the silk-purse trick at the Booth Theatre, albeit with a higher-quality sow’s ear. William Nicholson’s “The Retreat From Moscow,” which opened last night, is your standard-issue British domestic drama, all dolled up to look like a serious play, but Ms. Atkins tears into it as if it were Chekhov (which is pretty much what Mr. Nicholson wants you to think it is), and even though I wasn’t fooled for a second, it didn’t matter….you won’t find better acting on Broadway, or anywhere else. She is totally present, totally convincing, totally right.

As usual, no link, so to read the whole thing (which also includes my thoughts on Primary Stages’ production of A.R. Gurney’s Strictly Academic), buy a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, which is full of readable goodies.

Ah! What avails the classic bent,

And what the cultured word,

Against the undoctored incident

That actually occurred?

Rudyard Kipling, “The Benefactors”

OGIC and I tend to like the same movies. I can’t remember whether she was the one who first told me about Twilight, or vice versa.

I do feel I should point out, however, that we’ve been inadvertently drawing attention to the same actor, since Twilight and Support Your Local Sheriff, about which I recently posted, are both graced by the presence of James Garner, who belongs in the category of Famous but Underrated Artists. He’s been around forever, and everybody knows who he is from TV–my parents watched him in Maverick, I in The Rockford Files–but for reasons not entirely clear to me, he never quite had the film career he deserved. (One reason was that in Garner’s day, it was taken for granted that you couldn’t move from small screen to large. In fact, it’s usually the other way around.) Yet I can’t think of a better romantic comedian, not least because he has the gift of doubleness, the ability to be charming and suspect at the same time.

Cary Grant was like that, too, which reminds me to yield the floor briefly to the ever-relevant David Thomson, who reminds us that Garner was on TV

an hour a week for twenty-six weeks a year for ten years. That is the equivalent of well over one hundred movies–and if any actor could claim one hundred movies made with the wit, narrative speed, and good-natured ease of Maverick and Rockford Files he would be…Cary Grant?

If you don’t know what to do with yourself this weekend, you could do a whole lot worse than renting Twilight, Support Your Local Sheriff, and maybe Hour of the Gun (in which Garner plays Wyatt Earp completely straight) or Marlowe (not the best Raymond Chandler movie, but Garner is marvelous as Philip Marlowe) or even the film version of Maverick. You won’t be sorry.

I was going to point out the obvious flaw in amazon.com’s new book-searching feature, but Bookslut beat me to it:

Amazon.com has completed its newest sparkly addition. Now when you search for a keyword, it searches the text of 120,000 nonfiction books and offers them in your results. I’m sure this is handy in some way. I bet people all over are rejoicing. But all I know is that when I was searching for “curing pig” in an attempt to find the book “Curing the Pig” by Liza Granville, I got 6,454 results, none of the first page results being the book. When I searched for Liza Granville, I got 202 results, none of the first page results being the book. I had to type in the damn ISBN number to find it. I’m sure this is handy, but you can’t turn it off. It just clutters up simple searches, hiding what you’re really looking for. Wired, however, calls the move ingenious.

Amazon.com is also having a contest to see how their “Search Inside the Book” feature has changed your life. Do you think if I bitch and complain that the feature is not optional I’ll win a Segway?

Granted, it really is fun to search your own name, as BuzzMachine seems to have been the first to point out (and yes, that’s the very first thing I did). But it’s only fun once. So I really do hope amazon.com figures out quickly that “Search Inside the Book” needs an on-off switch. Like, say, tomorrow.

If you picked up your copy of The Wall Street Journal today, containing Terry’s stage review, then you can also read John Lippmann on the disappointing reception the adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain met with at the Toronto Film Festival last month, and the attendant nervous scurrying of its marketers at Miramax. By “disappointing,” I mean “mixed,” since Miramax sets the bar high for critical response to its movies–especially the ones it releases in Oscar-bait season.

If you don’t have the paper, here’s the gist of the piece:

But now, a week before the movie has opened, the buzz has pulled back from a surefire Best Picture Oscar nomination. The film’s engine began to sputter at the Toronto Film Festival last month, which has become a major showcase for films with Academy Award aspirations….the word out of Toronto for “Human Stain” was less than unqualified. While it won generally positive reviews from such critics as Roger Ebert, overall reaction fell short of a sure-fire awards contender. “Acting is fine, but never quite gels,” concluded trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter. Some reviewers found fault with the unlikely casting of Nicole Kidman as a cleaning woman and even more of the selection of Mr. Hopkins to play Coleman; Variety called the choice of Mr. Hopkins “problematic.”

Why do I find this not surprising? First, because there is something depressingly predictable, almost automatic, about the rush to film a high-buzz book like Roth’s. It is inconceivable to Hollywood that there might be stories that have already found their most fitting form as books, and can be neither improved upon nor done justice to as movies. (I realize that the very idea that this, rather than profitability, is a guiding interest in Hollywood is absurdly naive.) Second, because I very recently read The Human Stain, guessing that I would probably end up seeing the movie and wishing to have an unadulterated experience of a book that came highly recommended from many quarters.

I finished the novel with mixed feelings, about which more in a later post. For now I’ll just say that what strengths it has are not narrative, nor even really descriptive–to name two qualities that can make a novel genuinely ripe for screen adaptation. It is unfailingly smart and has at its core a fascinating and lifelike character study. But for all the extraordinary events in it, the novel struck me as more than a little inert. More than it narrates or describes, The Human Stain expounds and diagnoses; the less charitable verb, and the one that occurred to me repeatedly as I read it, would be “lectures.” Not, alas, an eminently filmable mode.

On the other hand, not having cared for the book actually gives me half a hope that I will like the movie. After investing scarce and valuable pleasure-reading time in the venture, I’m almost sure to go see it. It doesn’t hurt that the director, Robert Benton, brilliantly wrote and directed one of my favorites, Twilight, a modest little picture with an unbelievable cast. Since it is a trickier thing (though by no means an impossibility) for a movie to lecture than for a book to, it could just be that the process of dramatizing and illustrating this material will have breathed some life into it.