About Last Night

Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra perform Sy Oliver’s “Well, Git It!” in Du Barry Was a Lady, directed by Roy Del Ruth and released in 1943. Buddy Rich is the drummer and the trumpet solos are played by Ziggy Elman and Jimmy Zito. Dorsey is the trombonist:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“‘How do men get to be dictators, that’s what I want to know?’ Aunt Flora looked round disgruntledly but with an air as if soliciting approbation for her dissatisfaction.

‘Oh, the formula is simple,’ Walter said. ‘You gather around you all the ‘have-nots.’ You keep on the right side of the law, speaking, denouncing, promising, till, with all the natural discontent which exists in human nature poured out in your support, you carry the elections and are swung into the saddle. Just when your closest supporters become troublesome and the Army a little restive, you embrace the old order of nationalists and allay all their grievances and anxieties. With yourself now firmly in the saddle, the Army your obedient instrument, you shoot your erstwhile supporters as traitors to the national cause and become an out-and-out patriot. Bravo! bis! bis! But when the old order dutifully asks permission to decorate you for your patriotic services with one of their most ancient orders of nobility, you say, No. You are a simple man in a mackintosh, with a simple heart. Ostentation is foreign to your nature. Besides, aren’t you a revolutionary? But, above all, a patriot. Bravo! bis! bis!’”

William Gerhardie, Of Mortal Love

From 2006:

One of the travails of writing a biography of a great artist is that you find yourself returning repeatedly to certain words and phrases–especially superlatives. The nice thing about word processing is that it’s possible to search your manuscript for repeated words. The bad thing is that if you’re not careful, you become compulsive about it….

Read the whole thing here.

“The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of ‘luxury,’ the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater’s pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call it a luxury.”

Henry James, preface to The Wings of the Dove

As of today, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf has seven rehearsals to go before our first public preview on May 11. I don’t want to tempt the dark gods of the theater by sounding unreasonably confident, but we do seem to be pretty much where we ought to be at this stage in the process, and I’m now eager to move the show out of the rehearsal room and into the theater. That happens on Thursday, followed two days later by our first technical rehearsal, at which point we’ll start to find out exactly how Satchmo plays when properly lit and accompanied by an appropriately evocative soundtrack.

I can already tell you, though, that Barry Shabaka Henley’s performance is going to be something to see. He was, needless to say, quite remarkably good when we opened Satchmo four months ago at Chicago’s Court Theatre, but his performance in the triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis has grown richer and more complex now that he has forty performances of the play under his belt. I’ve spent the past week and a half fitting him into the context of my staging, which is significantly different in both appearance and overall tone from the one that was directed by Charles Newell in Chicago. It’s been a pleasure to help him find his footing, though “help” is definitely the operative word: Shabaka has taught me far more about the play than I could ever have told him.

Pleasure, in truth, has been the keynote of our rehearsals in West Palm Beach. Jimmy Danford and Ashley Horowitz, my stage manager and assistant stage manager, are unfailingly nice, superlatively competent collaborators who make hard work feel like a romp in the sandbox. I can’t think of two better people with whom to spend eight hours a day shut up tight in a nondescript rehearsal room, quarrying a familiar script for fresh discoveries. And while directors aren’t supposed to tell tales out of school, I trust that Ashley, whom everyone at Palm Beach Dramaworks from the boss on down described to me as “adorable,” will forgive me for reporting that it’s really, really funny to hear her reading the naughtier lines from Satchmo out loud.

As comfortable as I already feel in the director’s chair, I know that I’m still in the process of learning a brand-new job, and I spend a lot of time each day thinking about how to do it better. One thing that I’ve considered deeply is a piece of advice that Pierre Monteux, a great orchestral conductor who was also a great teacher, gave to André Previn, his best-known pupil. As Previn remembered it:

He liked cloaking his advice with indirection and irony…he saw me conduct a concert with a provincial orchestra. He came backstage after the performance. He paid me some compliments and then asked, “In the last movement of the Haydn symphony, my dear, did you think the orchestra was playing well?” My mind whipped through the movement; had there been a mishap, had something gone wrong? Finally, and fearing the worst, I said that yes, I thought the orchestra had indeed played very well. Monteux leaned toward me conspiratorially and smiled. “So did I,” he said. “Next time, don’t interfere!” It was advice to be followed forever, germinal and important.

So it was, and I am finding that it is no less applicable to the mysterious art of stage direction. When a gifted actor is finding his own way into a part, and you like what he’s doing, the best thing to do is leave him alone and let him do it. The time to put your two cents in is later—if at all.

Nobody has to remind me that this is a business in which things can go wrong without the slightest warning. I learned the first time I worked on a play that Murphy’s Law operates as inexorably in the theater as in any other branch of human endeavor, and writing my own shows has retaught me that hard lesson time and again. I hope I’m ready for the curve balls to start flying if and when.

All that said, I still feel after nine rehearsals of Satchmo that directing a play might just be the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, excepting only certain vacations that I’ve taken with Mrs. T. May it prove to be infectious.

Nicanor Zabaleta plays his own arrangement for solo harp of Albéniz’s “Malagueña” on a 1964 telecast:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The truth is that any retraced story of bourgeois lives (lives other than great lives of ‘action’—et encore!) throws a chill upon the scene, the time, the subject, the small mapped-out facts, and if you find ‘great men thin’ it isn’t really so much their fault (and least of all yours) as that the art of the biographer—devilish art!—is somehow practically thinning: It simplifies while seeking to enrich—and even the Immortal are so helpless and passive in death.”

Henry James, letter to Henry Adams, Nov. 19, 1903

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review the last two Broadway openings of the 2015-16 season, Shuffle Along and Tuck Everlasting. Here’s an excerpt.

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The first half of George C. Wolfe’s “Shuffle Along” is to 2016 what “Hamilton” was to 2015: It’s the musical you’ve got to see, even if you have to hock your Maserati to pay for the ticket. The cast, led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, is as charismatic as you’d expect, and Savion Glover’s near-nonstop choreography explodes off the stage with the unrelenting impact of a flamethrower. But then comes intermission, and what had looked like a masterpiece goes flat and stays that way.

What’s wrong with “Shuffle Along”? In order to explain why the show doesn’t work, it’s necessary to start by explaining what it tries to do. The original “Shuffle Along,” which is now forgotten save by theater historians, was one of the very first all-black Broadway musicals to score a major commercial success. It can’t be revived because the book, by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, is dated beyond hope of revision, but the jazzy Eubie Blake-Noble Sissle score (which is now best remembered for “I’m Just Wild About Harry”) still retains much of its punch and charm. Hence Mr. Wolfe’s show, whose title, “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” sums up his approach. He has taken the score and used it as the basis for a “42nd Street”-style backstage musical that not only tells how “Shuffle Along” was made but seeks to explain its historic significance…

Mr. Wolfe, who directed “Shuffle Along” and wrote the book, has thus tried to cram two different but related shows onto the same stage, one of them a flashy, more or less traditional musical-with-a-message and the other a sober-sided play-with-songs about a little-known but nonetheless important episode in the history of black culture in America. The problem is that the first act, in which the emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the production numbers, is so viscerally entertaining that you can’t help but feel disappointed when the dancing stops and the talking starts—especially since the talking, while undeniably interesting, is for the most part undramatic, even bookish….

“Tuck Everlasting,” Natalie Babbitt’s immensely and deservedly successful 1975 children’s novel about immortality and its discontents, has now been turned into a modestly proportioned, low-key Broadway musical about a family whose members wander into an enchanted wood, drink unwittingly from a fountain of youth and live—and live—to regret it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, and the pop-folk score (music by Chris Miller, lyrics by Nathan Tysen) owes far too much to “Into the Woods” for comfort. Still, “Tuck Everlasting” realizes enough of its ambitions to be watchable…

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To read my review of Shuffle Along, go here.

To read my review of Tuck Everlasting, go here.

A CBS Sunday Morning feature about Shuffle Along: