About Last Night

• My theater-related travel and the resulting deadlines haven’t left me with much spare time of late, but I’ve still managed in the past couple of weeks to consume and enjoy an album and two autobiographies.

The album is Erroll Garner’s The Complete Concert by the Sea, a newly released three-CD set about which vast clouds of enthusiastic prose, none of it even slightly overstated, have already been generated, not just in the jazz press but in such mainstream publications as the New York Times and my own Wall Street Journal.

In case you haven’t heard, The Complete Concert by the Sea is a new and expanded reissue of the much-loved live album in which Garner and his hard-working trio were caught on the fly in 1955. Not only has it been carefully remastered—the mono sound was mediocre—but this new “reissue” contains twice as much music as the original LP, all of it thrilling.

Longtime readers of this blog won’t need reminding that I’m a huge Garner fan. As I wrote back in 2006:

One of Garner’s albums was called The Most Happy Piano, and that sums him up very nicely. As Joseph Epstein wrote of H.L. Mencken, “He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre.” You simply cannot listen to his best recordings without breaking out in an ear-to-ear grin.

That’s especially true of Concert by the Sea, in which Garner’s one-man-band piano style (big-band riffs in the right hand, guitar-like four-to-a-bar strumming in the left) is heard at its irresistibly infectious best. As the old bluesman said, if you don’t like this album, you don’t like ham and cheese.

• I quit keeping up with new books about dance when I stopped going to dance performances a decade ago. As a result, I didn’t even realize that Jacques d’Amboise, one of the outstanding American ballet dancers of the twentieth century, had published an autobiography in 2011. When I saw I Was a Dancer in a Chicago bookstore two weeks ago, I decided that it might make for good airport reading, and I gulped the whole of it down last Thursday en route from Chicago to Connecticut. It turned out to be a delightful piece of work—naïve, unselfconscious, wholly engaging—that I very much wish had been published while I was still at work on my own brief life of George Balanchine, d’Amboise’s teacher and mentor.

To be sure, d’Amboise’s up-from-the-working-class tale of personal transformation is fascinating in its own right, but I Was a Dancer is most interesting of all as an up-close chronicle of the early years of New York City Ballet. Take, for instance, this comparison of Balanchine and Jerome Robbins:

Robbins took what you did naturally, enhanced, packaged, and presented it—he helped you become more of what you already were. Balanchine took the music, developed his own ideas of movement, and challenged you to become more than you thought you could be. With Robbins, you were amplified; with Balanchine, you were transformed.

Bull’s-eye.

• Even more engrossing, at least to me, is The Blue Touch Paper, David Hare’s soon-to-be-published memoir, which comes out next month and whose bound galleys I finished reading last night.

Hare is one of the few political playwrights whose best work I find consistently compelling, and The Blue Touch Paper explains why in this laser-like passage:

As my work reached a larger public, I would grow used to the pressures for censorship, offered for the most exemplary reasons. When people tell you they value political art, what they often mean is that they enjoy political propaganda which corroborates what they already think. All kinds of groups, including socialists and feminists, would ask me to reconfigure work in order to show what ought to happen rather than what does. I grew used to having to argue to the literal-minded that drama is not and cannot be a cartoon form of exhortation. It is about people, it is not about types.

The whole book is like that, sharp and unsparingly perceptive, not least about the author himself. On first reading I incline to rank it alongside Moss Hart’s Act One as one of the finest autobiographies ever written by a playwright. We’ll see whether time leads me to modify that snap judgment, but if you’re interested in postwar British theater, I can’t recommend it too strongly.

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Three excerpts from George Balanchine’s Apollo, danced by Jacques d’Amboise as Apollo, Melissa Hayden as Terpsichore, Jillana as Calliope, and Patricia Neary as Polyhymnia. The score is by Igor Stravinsky. This performance was originally telecast in 1963 on NBC’s Bell Telephone Hour:

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Kiri Te Kanawa sing “Contessa, perdono,” an excerpt from the finale of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), accompanied by Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. The production, taped for television in 1976, was directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle:

An excerpt from Miloš Forman’s film version of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, in which Salieri (played by F. Murray Abraham) talks about this scene:

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

“Laskell had made a stab at a station he could not usually get and by some luck of atmospheric condition he broke into the recorded Glyndebourne performance of The Marriage of Figaro. It was in full flight and nearing its end in the magical last scene where farce moves to regions higher than tragedy can reach.”

Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I write about a Chicago revival of The Rainmaker and the New York transfer of a very important regional production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Fifteen years after his death, N. Richard Nash is forgotten save for “The Rainmaker,” his perennially popular romantic comedy about a shy spinster who falls for a con man who promises to put an end to a summertime drought—for a price. Like Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful,” “The Rainmaker” started out in 1953 as a “Philco Television Playhouse” live-TV drama, had a shortish Broadway run and went on to become a successful film and a regional-theater staple. Along the way it was also turned into a hit musical called “110 in the Shade” that was excellently revived on Broadway in 2007. The original play, though, hasn’t been produced there since 1999, and I wondered what Chicago’s American Blues Theater, which did a splendid job with “Side Man” earlier this season, would make of a show for which few critics now have much use. Most latter-day reviews of “The Rainmaker” dismiss it as dated. Why, then, is it still so beloved?

The answer is as direct as the play itself: “The Rainmaker” tells you what you want to hear about human nature, and does so without once putting a dramatic foot wrong. Cast it well and stage it efficiently and the results will disarm all but the most cinder-hearted of cynics—and American Blues Theater has done it right as…well, rain. Not only are ABT’s seven actors beautifully suited to their roles, but Sarah Ross’ triple-interior set makes how’d-she-do-that use of every square inch of the 90-seat theater’s stage….

“The Rainmaker” takes place on a prairie ranch where it hasn’t rained for weeks. The Curry family is wilting under the heat, and Lizzie (Linsey Page Morton), the daughter, is feeling it all the more powerfully because she’s come to the reluctant conclusion that she’s not pretty enough to snag a husband. Bill Starbuck (Steve Key), a traveling rainmaker with a smooth line of talk, begs to differ. Sure, he’s a phony, but he’s a true believer in the power of optimism to water dry souls, and in the process of mulcting the Currys out of $100, he gives Lizzie something more precious than a thunderstorm.

What is it? You can probably guess, but you won’t be quite right, which is part of the charm of “The Rainmaker”: It doesn’t cheat the audience by being blatantly obvious…

Eric Tucker’s five-actor Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has transferred to an off-Broadway house, the Pearl Theatre Company. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in this space back in June: “Not since Peter Brook’s now-legendary 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company version has there been so radically original or mysteriously poetic a production of the greatest of all stage comedies….”

* * *

To read my review of The Rainmaker, go here.

To read my review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, go here.

A scene from the 1956 film version of The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster in the title role:

I arrived at my New York apartment last night after a longish stretch of time on the road and found a pile of unopened mail on the dining-room table. Most of it was instantaneously disposable—catalogues, uninteresting press releases, unwanted review copies—but no sooner did I see an inch-thick package from my theatrical agent than I pushed everything else aside and tore it open. It contained, as I expected, ten finished copies of the newly released acting edition of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, forwarded to me from the publisher, the illustrous Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

The fourth page of the script tells the improbable story of Satchmo in three paragraphs whose just-the-facts-ma’am language conceals as much as it reveals:

The world premiere of SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF was presented by Shakespeare & Company (Tony Simotes, Artistic Director; Nicholas J. Puma, Jr., Managing Director) in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Long Wharf Theatre (Gordon Edelstein, Artistic Director; Joshua Borenstein, Managing Director) in New Haven, Connecticut.

SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF premiered Off-Broadway at the Westside Theater Upstairs, New York, NY, on March 4, 2014. It was produced by Long Wharf Theatre and Shakespeare & Company; and Scott & Roxanne Bok, Roz & Jerry Meyer, Karen Pritzker, Ronald Guttman, Shadowcatcher Entertainment, John LaMattina, Joey Parnes, S.D. Wagner, and John Johnson. It was directed by Gordon Edelstein; the set design was by Lee Savage; the costume design was by Ilona Somogyi; the lighting design was by Kevin Adams; the sound design was by John Gromada; and the production stage manager was Linda Marvel. It starred John Douglas Thompson.

SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF was written at the Winter Park Institute of Rollins College in 2010 and extensively revised at the MacDowell Colony in 2012. A workshop performance of the first version of the play was presented by Rollins College in 2011, directed by the author and starring Dennis Neal. The first full production of this version was presented at Orlando Shakespeare Theatre in 2011, directed by Rus Blackwell and starring Dennis Neal.

What it reveals, to be sure, is significant enough. In addition to DPS, everyone mentioned in those three paragraphs—every person and every institution—dared to take a costly chance on an untested playwright whose “credentials” were dubious in the extreme. A new play by a drama critic? Who was I trying to kid? But I was serious, and so were they…and now I hold the proof in my hands. Not only has Satchmo at the Waldorf been published, but it’s been staged in Orlando, Lenox, New Haven, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles, with more stagings set for this season in Chicago, San Francisco, Colorado Springs, and West Palm Beach—the last of which, even more improbably, I’ll be directing myself.

What does that dry language conceal? Vast amounts of hope, fear, trembling, ecstasy, and—above all—unremitting work. It’s true that I wrote the first draft of Satchmo in less than a week, but that was in 2010, and I did it for a lark. And what happened between now and then? A week’s worth of fun turned into a five-year stretch of hard labor. Joyful, too: I wouldn’t trade an hour of it for anything in the world. But it’s an understatement to say that I had no idea what I was getting into when I sat down in Winter Park one January morning and typed the first words of the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf.

So how do I feel today? Grateful without limit—and ready to start kicking the can down the road again.

I spent the week just past in Chicago, reviewing four shows for The Wall Street Journal and meeting with Charles Newell, the artistic director of the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, who will be staging a new production of Satchmo in July. We talked about casting, looked at a preliminary model of the set, and discussed his ideas in detail. Rehearsals start on December 8. I’ll be there, fully prepared to roll up my sleeves and immerse myself yet again in the endless but blissful work that goes into getting the curtain up come opening night.

I can’t wait.

Suzanne Farrell, Adam Lüders, and New York City Ballet dance the last section of George Balanchine’s Vienna Waltzes, set to the waltzes from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. This performance was originally telecast by PBS on October 10, 1983. Farrell danced the role for the last time on the night of her retirement from the stage in 1989:

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

“Unless one is a moron, one always dies unsure of one’s own value and that of one’s works.”

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, September 19, 1852 (trans. Francis Steegmuller)

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, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, many performances sold out last weekreviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• 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)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Guys and Dolls (musical, G, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The Price (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 22, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• You Never Can Tell (Shaw, PG-13, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• An Iliad (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Island (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 26, reviewed here)