About Last Night

I reviewed two newly opened plays in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The first is Little Shop of Horrors, a Broadway revival of the 1982 off-Broadway musical, now running at the Virginia Theatre:

I don’t mind admitting that I came to the theater with malice aforethought. Broadway, after all, plays it so safe these days that I wouldn’t have been entirely disappointed had this safer-than-safe cash cow gone belly up. Instead, it turned out to be a zippy romp, staged and sung to the hilt. Hunter Foster and Kerry Butler are completely charming as Seymour and Audrey, two Skid Row florists brought together by Audrey II, a jumbo Venus flytrap that dines on human blood. Douglas Sills is suitably slimy as Orin, the pain-loving dentist who snorts a little too much laughing gas and ends up as plant food. Audrey II is winsomely monstrous, Scott Pask’s comic-book sets are just right, and even if you don’t especially care for ’50s rock (which I don’t), the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken songs are genial enough. So what’s not to like? Nothing, really, except that the music is TOO DAMN LOUD….

The second is Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events, a play about 9/11 now running at Playwrights Horizons:

How did “Recent Tragic Events” exasperate me? Let me count the ways. For openers, it stinks of cutesy-wutesy postmodernism. Aside from that stupid sock puppet, Mr. Wright bashes us in the face with such trickery as a bell that rings whenever the plot takes what the playwright wrongly supposes to be an unexpected turn (David Ives, call your lawyer) and a chummy stage manager who talks to the audience (Thornton Wilder, call your executor). Stripped of these devices, “Recent Tragic Events” boils down to a feeble sketch about how four vapid sitcom-type characters are transformed by an unimaginable catastrophe. Mr. Wright, a graduate of United Theological Seminary who now writes for “Six Feet Under,” doubtless considers this to be deep thinking (the play’s epigraph is a loooooooong quote from Schopenhauer). I suppose it is, too–six feet deep, to be exact….

As usual, no link, so to read the whole review, march to the nearest newsstand and buy a copy of the Journal. “Weekend Journal,” the section in which my theater column appears, is well worth your while, with or without me.

“Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.”

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

“Mummy was easily found in the drawing-room, listening to, or apparently keeping quiet during, a Miles Davis record. Gilbert presided at the gramophone, which faithfully rendered that tiny, elementary universe of despair and hatred.”

Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20

This posting is brought to you by my newly repaired iBook, with all data intact except for my e-mail address file, which so far I haven’t been able to find.

Once again, if you are a regular correspondent through my personal e-mail address (as opposed to the blog), please send me an e-mail ASAP so that I can reconstruct as much of my address file as possible.

That excepted, praise be!

I’ve been looking through the bound galleys of The George Gershwin Reader, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. I flipped through the bibliography and found a piece of mine, “The Fabulous Gershwin Boys,” published in the Washington Post 11 years ago. Nothing unusual about that, except…I don’t remember writing it. In fact, I don’t remember anything about it. I suppose it must have been a book review, but of what? Beats me.

You may not find this surprising for somebody who writes a lot of stuff, but I do. I’m not saying that I could sit down and write out a bibliography of my published pieces. Far from it. When I put together A Terry Teachout Reader out of my clip files last year, I was startled by how many articles I’d forgotten. Still, I recognized all of them as soon as I saw them on the page, and their contents came back to me instantly. Yet I have no memory whatsoever of having written a piece about George and Ira Gershwin for the Washington Post 11 years ago. That’s a definite sign of something or other, though I’d rather not think about what.

Incidentally, I’m quite prepared to be twitted for my vanity in having riffled through that bibliography in search of myself. I have an excuse of sorts: I have to check books I might possibly review to make sure they don’t mention me invidiously, which would create a conflict of interest were I then to write about them. (Yes, this has happened.) But the truth is simpler: I get a kick out of seeing my name in books I didn’t write. I may be 47, but in my heart I’m still a 20-year-old baby writer who marvels at the mysterious spectacle of his own name in print. I still remember the first time I turned up in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, back in my undergraduate days. You have to be a natural-born library wonk to regard that as a great event, but I sure did.

The real sign that you’ve become a low-grade personage, I suppose, is when you pop up in other people’s memoirs. (This has happened to me twice.) Which reminds me of a funny story that I won’t bother to check because I like the way I remember it. Bill Buckley is supposed to have sent Norman Mailer a copy of his latest book, in which Mailer was mentioned. In the index, next to Mailer’s name, Buckley scribbled in the margin, “Hi!”

As I noted here last week, almost everybody has weighed in against Chicago’s new Soldier Field–so much so that the temptation to buck the trend must have been all but irresistible to New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp. So what do you get when an irresistible urge hits an unmistakable eyesore? An explosion of jargon-rich apologetics.

I call this type of design parabuilding: it is the modern tick on the postmodern host….Here modernity erupts with the jubilance of a prodigal returned.

As for those who have lamented the way the new design caters to the relatively few who will enter the stadium, at the expense of taxing the senses of the many who have to drive by it every day, Muschamp directs them to take their medicine and like it:

…implicit in such criticisms is the assumption that the city should somehow operate outside the economic system we have developed for ourselves in the post-cold-war world. Perhaps it should. Until that dubious prospect is realized, however, we shouldn’t expect our architects to do more than aestheticize the actual urban condition.

I think I’d prefer it if he just came out and called all of us who hate it philistines.

(By the way, neither the photos accompanying this story nor the live shots that appeared on “Monday Night Football” effectively convey how alarmingly the new bowl dwarfs and impinges on the old colonnade. There are gorgeous views of the stadium available, for sure; it just happens that the commonly accessible views are not among them.)

Bob Dylan has posted a tribute to Johnny Cash on his website. “If we want to know what it means to be mortal,” he says, “we need look no further than the Man in Black.” And he reminisces: “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all summer on the radio, and it was different than anything else you had ever heard.” (Link via Boston Phoenix Media Log.)

Dylan’s memory has a close echo in “I Walk the Line (Revisited),” Rodney Crowell’s joyful homage to his ex-father-in-law that appears on his 2001 album “The Houston Kid”:

I’m back on board that ’49 Ford in 1956 / Long before the sun came up way out in the sticks / The headlights showed a two-rut road way back up in the pines / The first time I heard Johnny Cash sing, I Walk the Line.

The best thing about this track, though, is the surprise cameo.

I was glad to receive this response to my recent post comparing Walter Scott to Stephen King:

Scott was no great stylist, but he was vastly more popular and influential in his own time than any novelist is today. Scott’s stories caught the imagination of whole continents, whereas the most one can say about King is that he’s very popular for a writer, and even he can’t match the likes of Dr. Atkins in sales of individual books. I would suggest that the nearest analog to Scott in today’s world would be George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg. Both have created other worlds in which a good