About Last Night

Long before he metamorphosed into the smiling maestro of Sing Along With Mitch and the producer of such preposterous pop novelties as Frank Sinatra’s “Mama Will Bark” and Rosemary Clooney’s “Come on-a My House,” Mitch Miller, who died over the weekend at the august age of ninety-nine, was a classical oboist who cut a fair number of solo records for which he will always be remembered by connoisseurs of great wind playing. Here’s one of the very best ones:

Amazingly enough, I’m not even close to finished with Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Among other things, I’ll be talking about the book at New York’s Bryant Park at 12:30 on Wednesday, August 11, accompanied by the fabulous jazz trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, who’ll play before I speak and supply some relevant musical examples during the speech itself.
Alas, the New Yorker, which used to check its facts, got the date of my appearance wrong in its Goings On About Town section. If you show up on August 4, I won’t be there–I’ll be up in New Hampshire, seeing the Peterborough Players’ production of Tartuffe. So kindly ignore the New Yorker and come hear Jon-Erik and me and me do our thing next Wednesday!

In the Greater New York section of this morning’s Wall Street Journal, I re-review the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, in which Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters have replaced Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sad to say, the production is as disappointing now as it was when it opened last year. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway feeds off Hollywood like a thirsty vampire. It was the presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury in the first Broadway revival of “A Little Night Music,” not the production’s dubious artistic merits, that kept it running for six months. Now that they’ve moved on, the producers have decided to take a very big chance and replace them not with a second pair of certified screen stars but with Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters, two deservedly beloved Broadway performers whose names are not generally known to the public at large (though Ms. Peters teetered on the edge of full-scale celebrity in the ’70s and ’80s and Ms. Stritch’s guest appearances on “30 Rock” have made her a somewhat more familiar face). Will they be able to keep the show open for another six months? I doubt it–and not just because they lack the name recognition necessary to galvanize the tourist trade. Much as I esteem both women, neither one of them is well cast….
Ms. Stritch’s cackling spunky-grandma demeanor is infinitely removed from the haughty disillusion of the worldly-wise Madame Armfeldt…
Ms. Peters, who was last seen on Broadway six years ago in Sam Mendes’ revival of “Gypsy,” is even more closely identified with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim than Ms. Stritch, having previously created starring roles in “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Into the Woods.” I don’t blame her in the least for wanting to try her hand at playing Desirée Armfeldt, the aging actress who longs to put the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue behind her and settle down with a more-or-less suitable man. It’s one of the richest and most emotionally complex female roles in a Sondheim musical, and Ms. Peters, who looks half her age, brings it to persuasive life in the heart-wrenching scene in which she sings “Send in the Clowns” to Alexander Hanson. Elsewhere, though, her mile-wide performance is too coarse for comfort…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Who is to say what is normal in a king? Deferred to, agreed with, acquiesced in. Who could flourish on such a daily diet of compliance? To be curbed, stood up to, in a word thwarted, exercises the character, elasticates the spirit, makes it pliant. It is the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.”
Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III

In the last of three reports from my recent drama-related travels in California, I review two shows currently being performed at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Lion in Winter. Both are superior. Here’s an excerpt.
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While some of Shakespeare’s plays border on being performer-proof, others need tender loving care to flourish onstage. “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is one of the latter, a relentlessly artificial farce whose comedy is almost entirely verbal and whose hectically bawdy wordplay leaves little room for the richness of characterization that modern audiences expect from a Shakespeare production. Small wonder that “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is mounted so infrequently in America that I’ve reviewed it in this space only once before now. The good news–very, very good news–is that Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s outdoor production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” directed by Scott Wentworth, is a complete success…
Rarely do I get to see a production of a Shakespeare comedy in which each member of a large cast stands out in such high relief. Fold in a heaping helping of zany comic business and you get a show that is not just amusing but wildly, chokingly funny. Then, without warning, the last scene modulates into the shadowy key of doubt, and after the play’s enigmatic closing line (“You that way: we this way”) is spoken, you leave the theater marveling anew at Shakespeare’s matchless ability to surprise….
Indoors on the company’s adjoining main stage, Richard E.T. White has directed a vigorous revival of James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter,” a play that is now best known in its handsomely cast 1968 film version, which teamed Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn, but is even more rewarding when seen in live performance….
Goldman’s play, in which the strife-ridden marriage of England’s Henry II (Marco Barricelli) and Eleanor of Aquitaine (Kandis Chappell) is portrayed as a drawing-room comedy steeped in wormwood and gall, is a piece of theatrical prestidigitation that juxtaposes a 12th-century setting with 20th-century dialogue (“Is this an audience, a goodnight kiss with cookies or an ambush?”). The trick is to deliver the clever lines not archly but with ram-you-damn-you boldness, and Mr. Barricelli, the company’s artistic director, has it down pat. He gives a leonine, space-filling performance that put me in mind of the young Orson Welles…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma

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, 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)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, 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 GARRISON, N.Y.:

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

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through Aug. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN ORINDA, CALIF.:

• Mrs. Warren’s Profession (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:

• Arms and the Man (comedy, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Grand Manner (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)