About Last Night

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• 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)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

• The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WESTPORT, CONN.:

• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, extended through Sept. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:

• Absurd Person Singular (farce, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I get very impatient with people who say ‘I go to the theatre to be taken out of myself.’ I think, ‘There’s probably nothing in yourself.’ I’m only interested in making sure people are reintroduced to themselves. Great theatre draws your attention to things in real life, to the negligible, the boring and nondescript. A playwright like Chekhov makes that considerable and reintroduces us to the things that we have overlooked.”
Jonathan Miller (interviewed in The Independent, Aug. 3, 2010)

An excerpt from the 1942 film of The Man Who Came to Dinner, directed by William Keighley and adapted (mostly faithfully) by Philip G. Epstein and Julius J. Epstein from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Monty Woolley, who plays Sheridan Whiteside, created the role on Broadway in 1939:

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

“To be able to write a play, for performance in a theatre, a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naïve, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. He must be a chaser of wild geese, as well as of wild ducks. He must be prepared to make a public spectacle of himself. He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work; because if he isn’t, he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts.”
Robert E. Sherwood, preface to The Queen’s Husband

Stephen Hough plays Paderewski’s B Flat Nocturne, Op. 14, No. 6:

“A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted.”
Kingsley Amis, The King’s English (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

• Somebody compared me to a Holocaust denier the other day for having spoken ill of Elie Wiesel. While I wouldn’t dream of dignifying such a remark by responding to it, I was struck by its sheer nastiness. It goes without saying that the world has always contained plenty of people who assume that you’re a contemptible idiot if you disagree with them about anything. To be sure, I doubt that such creatures are significantly more numerous today than they were a century ago, or even a quarter-century, but I incline to think that they now talk quite a bit louder than they used to–especially when they’re sitting alone at their computers.

I hear the gentleman in the second balcony yelling “You’re one to talk!” He’s got a point: I’ve written some awfully sharp things in my capacity as a professional critic, and will doubtless continue to do so. But I don’t think I’ve ever cast personal aspersions on the artists whom I’ve criticized. That seems to me to be supremely inappropriate, even when the aspersions are true–and I do know a fair number of unpleasant things about some of the artists whom I cover in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. The world of art has always had its share of…well, bad actors.

Speaking as a biographer, I believe deeply that it is my responsibility to tell the truth about artists who are no longer living, even when it makes them look bad. Speaking as a critic and commentator, I think the private lives of living artists are their business and no one else’s. And lest we forget, the argumentum ad hominem is not in fact an argument at all, though it can be effective when deployed with skill and mercilessness.

Which brings us back, however circuitously, to my own case. I’d like to think that anybody who read a piece (or a posting or tweet) in which I was compared to a Holocaust denier would simply roll his eyes and move on. But I’m old enough to know better. More and more of the American people are choosing to live in closed circles of collective concurrence, and I have no doubt that in certain of those circles, those who read such an attack on me would nod their heads sagely and say something on the order of “Yep, it figures. Probably beats his wife, too.”

George Washington once drew up a list of rules of civility. Here is the first one:

1st Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.

I’m with the father of our country. To be gratuitously nasty in public discourse is like relieving yourself in a swimming pool. Even if nobody knows you did it, you still made the pool a dirtier place for everybody–yourself included.