About Last Night

“Never send off any piece of writing the moment it is finished. Put it aside. Take on something else. Go back to it a month later and re-read it. Examine each sentence and ask ‘Does this say precisely what I mean? Is it capable of misunderstanding? Have I used a cliché where I could have invented a new and therefore asserting and memorable form? Have I repeated myself and wobbled round the point when I could have fixed the whole thing in six rightly chosen words? Am I using words in their basic meaning or in a loose plebeian way?’”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Thomas Merton, August 13, 1948 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway revival of Noises Off. Here’s an excerpt.

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Classic farce—the kind in which doors get slammed at metronomically regular intervals—is hard to write and harder to stage. Not only does it require timing of immaculately finicky exactitude to ensure that the doors slam on time without decapitating anybody, but it works only when the actors conduct themselves with poker-faced seriousness, behaving as though they’re unaware that the audience is convulsed by their humiliating plight. Nothing kills farce faster than aren’t-we-silliness….

For all these reasons, the classic fin-de-siècle farces of Georges Feydeau and their neo-classical progeny, the dark-to-black comedies of Alan Ayckbourn and Joe Orton and the “translaptations” of David Ives, are scarcely ever seen on Broadway, which favors less comedically challenging fare. But Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off,” which is widely thought (by me among others) to be the funniest play ever written, give or take Mr. Ives’ “The Liar,” is a happy exception to that gloomy rule. First seen on Broadway in 1983 and revived there in 2001, it is now being done again, this time by the Roundabout Theatre Company in a production directed by Jeremy Herrin, who made his New York debut last season with the transfer of “Wolf Hall.” This revival is as glorious as “Wolf Hall” was dull…

As befits a farce, “Noises Off” is spectacularly complex, consisting as it does of a chaotic rehearsal and two even more chaotic performances of the first act of “Nothing On,” a third-rate British sex comedy that is being mounted (so to speak) by a second-rate touring troupe. It is, to put it academically, a metafarce—a farce about farce—into which Mr. Frayn has inserted a near-literal turn of the dramatic screw whose ingenuity borders on genius: The two-story set is turned around during intermission, thus allowing us to witness the calamitous events from the point of view of the hapless actors and crew….

Most theatrical rehearsals aren’t remotely as lunatic as this, of course. When things do go wrong, though, they can go really, really wrong, and every disaster portrayed in “Noises Off” has actually happened somewhere or other. What makes the play so funny is that all of them, from the first memory lapse to the last life-threatening pratfall, happen in the same show at the same time. It’s Murphy’s Law run amuck. The second act in particular is a whirligig of slapstick choreography for whose pristine execution Mr. Herrin deserves the highest possible marks.

The secret ingredient of his production is that Mr. Herrin has gone to similar lengths to ensure that every member of the cast plays for truth, not laughs—which, of course, makes you laugh twice as hard….

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Read the whole thing here.

Highlights from the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Noises Off:

Leonard Bernstein talks about and leads the London Symphony in a performance of his Second Symphony, “The Age of Anxiety,” inspired by W.H. Auden’s book-length poem of the same name. The piano soloist is Krystian Zimerman:

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

The Court Theatre’s production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring Barry Shabaka Henley and directed by Charles Newell, opens tomorrow night in Chicago. After eight public previews, we’ll be as ready as we’re going to be.

As for me, this is my seventh opening night for Satchmo, and I’m just as excited as I was in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, and Beverly Hills. It doesn’t get old.

In preparation for the great moment, I present—as I always do before my opening nights—the following clip, which I first saw on TV as a child and which in recent years has become ever more relevant to my life.

Break a leg, everybody:

“Never believe that afflictions improve character, enlarge the understanding, or teach you charitable thoughts! The man not afflicted, the easy, open fortunate man is the likable man, the kindly man, the considerate man—in short, the man who may have time and inclination to think of someone besides himself. Be virtuous, and you’ll be happy? Nonsense! Be happy and you’ll begin to be virtuous.”

James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed

If you live in Chicagoland, you can hear me on the radio Friday morning. I’ll be talking about the Court Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, on WBEZ’s The Morning Shift. Barry Shabaka Henley, the star, will also be interviewed. The program airs live from nine a.m. to ten a.m. CST. (I think our segment runs from 9:40 to 9:55, but we may start talking a bit earlier than that.)

Tune to 91.5 FM to listen live on terrestrial radio in the Chicago area. If you live elsewhere in the world, go here to listen via streaming audio on your computer or download a podcast of the show later in the day.

UPDATE: You can listen to the broadcast on line by going here.

Starting today, my Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column will appear in the paper every other Thursday. This week I pay tribute to Cy Walter, the greatest cocktail pianist who ever lived. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s the grossest of understatements to say that cocktail pianists get no respect. They spend most of their lives playing for people who aren’t listening, a not-insignificant number of whom are either drunk or en route to being so. And while I never actually heard anyone ask for “Melancholy Baby” in the long-ago days when I gigged in bars, it’s usually safe to assume that when somebody does have a request, it’ll be for something you’ve played an octillion times. On the other hand, it’s also true that most cocktail pianists aren’t worth listening to, at least not very closely. Sometimes they’re just going through the motions (and who shall blame them?) and sometimes they simply aren’t very good. But a few such folk are true artists, and one of them, Cy Walter, was a very great one, among the finest popular pianists of the 20th century.

Walter, who died in 1968, spent most of his career playing in classy hotel lounges for Manhattanites who got dressed up to do their drinking. He was closely identified with the Drake Room of the now-defunct Drake Hotel, where he performed off and on from 1945 until his death and where his listeners included the likes of Tallulah Bankhead, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Noël Coward, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins and Tennessee Williams. From 1945 to 1953 he was also a fixture on network radio, performing weekly on a series called “Piano Playhouse.” But his celebrity, such as it was, dried up when he died: Walter’s albums went out of print shortly thereafter, and from then on his name was known only to connoisseurs.

Mark Walter, Cy’s son, is trying to change all that. He started by launching an uncommonly well-stocked website that is the online equivalent of a primary-source biography of his father. Now he’s commemorated the centennial of Cy Walter’s birth by co-producing a pair of compact discs called “Sublimities” (both of which can be ordered from Amazon) that contain a total of 52 tracks by his father. Some are long-unavailable commercial recordings, others radio airchecks that have never before been released. On them Walter can be heard playing piano solos and duets (he frequently performed with Stan Freeman, a pianist of similar talent and stylistic inclination) and accompanying such singers as Marlene Dietrich, Mabel Mercer and Frank Sinatra. Most of the tunes are blue-chip standards, with a few original compositions by Walter thrown in for good measure. All are performed with a consummate elegance and technical wizardry that make you wonder how the man who recorded them could possibly have fallen into obscurity….

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Read the whole thing here.

To order Sublimities, go here and here.

Cy Walter plays “Dancing in the Dark,” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, recorded in 1941:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN FORT MYERS, FLA:
• The Cocktail Hour (serious comedy, PG-13, extended through Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• China Doll (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Spring Awakening (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 24, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)