About Last Night

From 2006:

When you cross the fiftieth meridian, as I did last month, you’re more than likely to feel the need for some kind of change, especially if your life has been running fairly smoothly of late. Some people get divorced, others buy an age-inappropriate car. Mark Morris took up conducting, which strikes me as an ingenious and productive response to the stealthy approach of the Distinguished Thing. Me, I called 911 three months ago and checked myself into the nearest hospital, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as conducting Vivaldi’s Gloria but at least had the advantage of making me feel a whole lot better about turning fifty than I might have otherwise.

And now what? I painted my first painting a couple of weeks ago, and it was so much fun that I’m itching to do it again. On the other hand, it isn’t very likely that I’ll be showing at a gallery any time soon, and though there’s much to be said for fun, I have a feeling that it’ll take something more all-consuming to distract me from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. But I’m damned if I know what it might be…

Read the whole thing here.

“I’m going to see a play of mine day after tomorrow which opened about a month ago, and it will be full of things which will be different. And some of it will be slightly out of focus, and some of it will be in slightly better focus than before, and I guess that’s the reason why I’m mainly a playwright, because I find that an exciting way to work, an exciting medium to work in.”

Tom Stoppard (quoted in Malcolm Jones, “Tom Stoppard: I Want to Be Like Verdi,” Daily Beast, January 10, 2016)

Fred Astaire performs “One for My Baby,” by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, in The Sky’s The Limit, directed by Edward H. Griffith. This is the film in which the song was introduced. Robert Benchley is seen at the beginning of the scene. The dance was choreographed by Astaire:

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

“You cannot write tragedy without a sense of humor; the lack of it produces something turgid and dull. Wit must be the underpainting of all dark writing.”

Gene Lees, Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review four New York shows, Familiar, Eclipsed, Blackbird, and Disaster! Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Danai Gurira is the zombie-whacking star of “The Walking Dead” and the author of “Eclipsed,” a dead-serious drama about the Second Liberian Civil War that transferred to Broadway this week after a deservedly successful 2015 run at the Public Theater. Now she’s written a new play in which nobody gets killed—onstage, anyway.

“Familiar” is a comedy of assimilation that centers on Donald and Marvelous (Harold Surratt and Tamara Tunie), an upper-middle-class Zimbabwean couple who have escaped the poverty and violence of their native land by emigrating to suburban Minneapolis and wholeheartedly embracing the American way of life (lasagna for dinner, football on Sunday afternoon). Tendi (Roslyn Ruff), their oldest daughter, has followed in their footsteps by shedding her African accent, converting to Christianity, becoming a lawyer and getting engaged to a nice white boy…

Given the potential of its subject matter, it saddens me to report that “Familiar” is so familiar. Think “Abie’s Irish Rose” or “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and you’ll get the idea: Ms. Gurira has rehashed all the clichés of its well-worn genre as if they hadn’t long since been done to death…

As for the Broadway transfer of “Eclipsed,” which features Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) and the four other members of the original off-Broadway ensemble cast, Liesl Tommy’s production has lost nothing by being moved to a larger house. The play remains a staggeringly potent, perfectly performed snapshot of five African women who are fighting for their lives amid the roiling chaos of an unimaginably bloody war of all against all….

David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” a pruriently manipulative tale of pedophilia that made a lot of noise off Broadway in 2007, has finally made it to Broadway in a big-stage revival similar to the smaller-scaled production that I reviewed in this space nine years ago: Jeff Daniels is the star, Joe Mantello the director, with Michelle Williams, lately of “Cabaret,” replacing Alison Pill as the vengeful victim of the piece. It’s a have-it-both-ways shocker that seeks to make us sympathize (but not really!) with a 40-year-old man (Mr. Daniels) who molested a 12-year-old girl (Ms. Williams)…

If you’ve been waiting impatiently for the Broadway transfer of a cheesy, campy off-Broadway jukebox musical that spoofs the disaster flicks of the ’70s, “Disaster!” will be your huckleberry. Somehow, though, I doubt the world is full of sixtysomething fans of “The Poseidon Adventure” who long to see what can best be described as an only-the-jokes-have-been-changed knockoff of “Airplane!”…

* * *

To read my reviews of Familiar and Eclipsed, go here.

To read my review of Blackbird, go here.

To read my review of Disaster!, go here.

The James Brown Revue performs a medley of “I Can’t Stand It,” “If I Ruled the World,” “Cold Sweat,” “Try Me,” “I Feel Good,” and “There Was a Time” on The Hollywood Palace. They are introduced by Phil Silvers. This episode was originally telecast by ABC on February 3, 1968:

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

“I have got to where I should like for my work to be humane, and I do not much care if it even becomes sentimental.”

Fred Chappell, afterword to The Fred Chappell Reader

My “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal is occasioned by Forest Whitaker’s unsuccessful Broadway debut. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Forest Whitaker’s much-ballyhooed Broadway debut in Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie” proved to be a resounding flop. The producers announced last week that the show will close early, on Mar. 27, after just 55 money-losing performances. I’m not surprised. Not only is “Hughie” a gloomy, hour-long two-man play, all of which made it a tough sell to the tourist trade, but Mr. Whitaker, justly admired though he is, doesn’t have the kind of name that moves tickets nowadays….

Alas, Mr. Whitaker also failed in a different way: He wasn’t very good in “Hughie.” That didn’t surprise me, either. I’m not saying he isn’t a first-class film actor. The problem was that he made his stage debut—on Broadway, no less—without any significant stage experience.

It isn’t that movie stars can’t act onstage. Quite a few top-tier golden-age screen actors, including Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, moonlighted regularly on Broadway and in summer stock. But they’d started out as stage performers, putting in plenty of time in front of live audiences before moving to Hollywood. Many of today’s TV and movie stars, by contrast, think they can go straight to Broadway without first studying the craft of stage acting…

The problem is that stage acting, unlike screen acting, is a presentational art, one in which performers are painstakingly taught to speak and move in a larger-than-life manner so that they can be seen and heard throughout a large theater without benefit of close-ups or microphones. That’s the opposite of what a film actor does. He plays not to an audience but to the camera, which is usually only a few feet away, meaning that he can act in an unexaggerated, seemingly natural way. Try that onstage and no one in the audience will be able to hear you beyond the fifth row of the orchestra. This explains why screen actors so often give dull performances whenever they venture onto the Broadway stage….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.