About Last Night

“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.”
Ivy Compton-Burnett, “A Conversation Between I. Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain”

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:

• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

• A Raisin in the Sun (drama, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• London Wall (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 20, reviewed here)

“Fiction is fact distilled into truth.”
Edward Albee (quoted in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1966)

Not long ago I was introduced to an audience as an “intellectual.” Though I didn’t beg to differ, I entered, as I always do, a silent demurrer. To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am, at least to my own way of thinking, is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in artistic beauty.

It’s also true, though, that I probably spend more time thinking about non-artistic ideas than your average aesthete, if there is such a thing. I just finished reading a book about Brian Friel’s plays and am about to start reading a biography of Lincoln. My impression is that most eggheads don’t jump around like that: they’re usually one thing or the other. And even within the realm of art, I range more widely afield than is typically the case. I’m as likely to be reading about (say) George Balanchine or Milton Avery or Emmanuel Chabrier as I am about a playwright, or any other kind of wordsmith.

I’ve been that way for as long as I can remember, and I understood early on that it was a peculiar way to be. What’s more, my whole life has been shaped by this peculiarity. For a long time I expected to be a musician when I grew up, but I finally figured out that while I had enough talent to pursue music as a career, it would be a mistake for me to do so. To be a successful performing musician requires a singlemindedness of artistic purpose that I’ve never had. While I loved playing music, I’m sure I would have found it frustrating to do that and nothing else, just as I found it frustrating later on when I spent a few years paying the rent by writing newspaper editorials, mostly about foreign policy. The job didn’t bore me in the least, and I think I did it pretty well, but it didn’t fulfill me, either.

After a lifetime of puzzling over this bifurcation in my nature, I’ve decided that it arises from the fact that even though I’m a fundamentally verbal person, I spent much of my youth making and thinking about music, the least verbal or representational of art forms. As Igor Stravinsky famously said in Expositions and Developments, music is “supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions.” He was exaggerating for effect, but at bottom he meant what he said, and I think he was more or less right.

The fact that I came to music so early, and immersed myself in it so fully, undoubtedly explains why I happily embraced the other non-verbal forms of expression that I encountered later on. Abstract art and plotless dance made immediate sense to me, the same kind of sense that music had previously made. And while I get little or nothing out of the “abstract” prose of writers like Gertrude Stein, my tastes in the verbal realm also appear in some cases to bear a recognizable relationship to my musical inclinations. I tend not to care for plays of ideas–Ibsen bores me stiff–whereas I have a special liking for playwrights and filmmakers who, like Chekhov and Jean Renoir, care more about mood than plot. By the same token, I scarcely ever worry about whodunit when I read a mystery. It’s the characters and their quirks that carry me from page to page, just as my own biographies concentrate more on personality than ideas.

I hasten to point out that this is a general preference, not an iron disposition. I love the plays of Bertolt Brecht, for instance, and I have a more than casual interest in constitutional law, about which I’ve read far more than you’d expect of a card-carrying aesthete. But I incline as a rule to the mode of thought and feeling implied by T.S. Eliot’s remark that Henry James had “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” All history, especially the history of the twentieth century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. As Irving Babbitt pointed out:

Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than is commonly realized a bucolic episode. It lends color to the assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is homicidal mania.

That’s one of many reasons why I choose not to call myself an intellectual. “How many intellectuals have come to the revolutionary party via the path of moral indignation, only to connive ultimately at terror and autocracy?” Raymond Aron asked in The Opium of the Intellectuals (a book that John Coltrane, of all people, can be seen reading in a little-known snapshot). To be sure, musicians do tend as a group to take an innocent view of human possibility, but you rarely see them escorting anyone to the guillotine. They’re too busy trying to make everything more beautiful, one thing at a time.

From the 1935 film Metropolitan, Lawrence Tibbett sings the prologue from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci:

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

Preposterous ass, that never read so far

To know the cause why music was ordain’d!

Was it not to refresh the mind of man,

After his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Because of the crush of New York openings this month, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column today in which to review the Atlantic Theater Company’s revival of The Threepenny Opera and the New York premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Anybody who feels like sticking it to capitalism couldn’t do better than to revive “The Threepenny Opera,” the 1928 Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill masterpiece whose murderous anti-hero justifies his criminal career by asking this pointed question: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” By coupling such sentiments with a jaunty, sharp-cornered score that is equally indebted to early jazz and modern classical music, Brecht and Weill pulled the pin on a theatrical time bomb that has been going off at regular intervals ever since. Marc Blitzstein’s English-language adaptation, which opened Off Broadway in 1954, ran there for six years, and “The Threepenny Opera” has since been mounted three times on Broadway. No pre-“Oklahoma!” musical has had a more enduring stage life–proof that American theatergoers like nothing better than to be told what greedy bastards they are.
The economy being the way it is, I suppose it was high time for somebody to tell once more the tale of Mack the Knife and his crooked cohorts. Hence the Atlantic Theater Company’s Off-Broadway revival of Blitzstein’s pungently singable version, directed and choreographed by Martha Clarke. But Ms. Clarke, who came to fame as one of the founders of Pilobolus Dance Theatre and has since specialized in dance-driven performance-art works, is less at home with words. Not only do the dialogue scenes lack bite, but the staging is unfocused (too much stylized group movement, not enough here’s-who’s-talking clarity).
While I’ve never heard a “Threepenny” production that was better sung or played, the rough edges of Weill’s score have been blunted in the process. It doesn’t help that the cast is for the most part both smooth-faced and pretty-voiced…
Will Eno is the male Sarah Ruhl, a postmodern semi-surrealist who specializes in coyly metatheatrical comedies. Such flyweight folk cannot but prosper in the age of Irony Lite, and “The Realistic Joneses,” which has moved to Broadway after a run at the Yale Repertory Theater, is surely destined for similar success there and elsewhere.
The cast consists of two married small-town couples, both named Jones, who live next door to one another. Bob and Jennifer (Tracy Letts and Toni Collette) are older and sadder, John and Pony (Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei) younger and seemingly more frivolous, but they’re all stuck in the same leaky boat. Bob and John, it turns out, are both afflicted with an “irreversible and degenerative nerve disease” called Harriman Leavey Syndrome (yes, it’s fictional) that is gradually gnawing away at their language skills and motor functions, and Jennifer and Pony are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with their slow but inexorable disintegration.
That’s a familiar but nonetheless promising premise for a black comedy. Unfortunately, Mr. Eno, as is his wont, has swathed it in cute repartee…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Lotte Lenya sings “Pirate Jenny” in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera:

From 2004:

“The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car,” H.L. Mencken told a reporter for Life in 1946. Kurt Andersen asked me the other day whether I thought Mencken would have taken to blogging. I think it’s possible (just), but I’m absolutely sure he would have bought an answering machine. I’ve used one for the past quarter-century, and I can’t imagine how I ever got through the day without it. I even bought my septuagenarian mother her first answering machine…

Read the whole thing here.