About Last Night

Juan seemed
To her, as ‘t wer, the kind of being sent,
Of whom these two years she had nightly dreamed,
A something to be loved, a creature meant
To be her happiness, and whom she deemed
To render happy; all who joy would win
Must share it,—Happiness was born a twin.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

As I write these words, Mrs. T and I are tightly and jointly crammed into an Amtrak Viewliner Standard Bedroom that is rolling down the rails leading from Manhattan’s Penn Station to West Palm Beach, Florida. We’ll be spending the first three weeks of January on Sanibel Island, as is our custom, and instead of flying, we decided to take the train this year. I’ve done something similar once before, traveling to and from Chicago via Amtrak in 2004 to write a Wall Street Journal piece about what it feels like to spend the night in a sleeper car:

I grew up dreaming of long-distance trains. They were in the songs I loved (“I took a trip on a train/And I thought about you”) and the movies I watched (“I tipped the steward $5 to seat you here if you should come in”). Their tracks crisscrossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood, and their braying whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I’d never been.

Alas, the highways and airlines were killing off passenger trains long before I figured out exactly what Cary Grant wanted to do to Eva Marie Saint on the Twentieth Century Limited. By the time I was old enough to travel alone, I took it for granted that I’d never spend a night in a sleeper car, watching the world rumble by. So when the Department of Homeland Security raised America’s alert status from yellow to orange a few days before I had to fly from New York to Chicago to look at plays, it struck me that this might well be my last chance to satisfy a longtime craving….

Robert Frost once wrote a poem about a songbird whose autumnal task was to tell his listeners “what to make of a diminished thing.” As I laid eyes on the cramped roomette in which I would be spending the next 20 hours, I knew that would be my job as well. A Viewliner Standard Bedroom stuffs two seats, a toilet and a foldaway sink into slightly more than 23 square feet of floor space, about the size of an Upper West Side walk-in closet. If you want a compartment similar in size to the one in which Grant wooed Saint in “North by Northwest,” you’ll have to pay a lot more….

I can’t say that our trip has been luxurious, but it’s definitely been something of an adventure, one that we’ve found for the most part to be enjoyable. That said, we’ll be glad to get to West Palm Beach, where we plan to spend the night in a hotel, then pick up a rental car and drive across the peninsula to Sanibel Island, a place where we have come in recent years to feel entirely at home.
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This isn’t a vacation: I’ll be filing my regular Wall Street Journal columns from Florida, seeing shows in Fort Myers and other parts of the state, and flying to and from New York to see still more shows there. Nevertheless, I have no new book to write or play to rehearse, for which I am hugely grateful. Having just put a demanding year behind me, I propose to revel in Mrs. T’s company and do as little as possible insofar as possible, and Sanibel is a perfect place to do (or not do) both of those things.

May your January be as happy as we expect ours to be.

* * *

Frank Sinatra sings “I Thought About You.” The arrangement is by Nelson Riddle:

Julius Katchen plays Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3, D. 899, on French TV in 1968:

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

Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,

Our own felicity to make or find.

Oliver Goldsmith, “The Traveller”

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains my best-theater-of-the-year column. Here are some of the highlights:

• Performer of the year Chicago’s Larry Yando, who appeared in Writers’ Theatre’s Dance of Death and Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s King Lear

• Best revival of a modern play Ontario’s Shaw Festival production of Edward Bond’s The Sea

• Best large-scale revival of a musical John Rando’s Broadway revival of On the Town

To see my other picks, including the best play, director, and company of 2014, go here.

“Benevolence is often very peremptory.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Of all the seasonal postings that have appeared on this blog since I launched it, this one, written in 2005, still means the most to me:

I was stretched out on a gurney in the emergency room of Lenox Hill Hospital, where I’d been brought five years before when an undiagnosed case of work-exacerbated pneumonia had reduced me to a similar state of disrepair. By then I knew that what I feared most had come to pass: I’d been stricken with congestive heart failure. My body was full of excess fluid—lungs, legs, the whole shooting match—and had I waited much longer to seek help, I would have drowned in it. Instead, the doctors stuck a nitroglycerine patch on my shoulder, pumped me full of a fluid-expelling diuretic, and handed me a phone on which I made a half-dozen necessary calls: my brother in Missouri, my co-blogger in Chicago, my editor at The Wall Street Journal, the woman with whom I’d planned to have dinner and see Waiting for Godot the following night. To all of them I made my regrets, thinking wryly of a favorite saying: If you want to hear God laugh, make a plan….

The unnamed woman mentioned above and at the end of this posting, by the way, is now Mrs. T.

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

The slow movement from Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra, performed by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conducted by the composer. This is the first piece of music that I heard after going into the hospital:

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:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, all performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• The Elephant Man (drama, PG-13, contains partial nudity, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• My Old Lady (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• This Is Our Youth (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)