About Last Night

Not only did I see a play in Maine last week, but I made a point of paying a visit to the Portland Museum of Art. Though the museum’s permanent collection is always worth a look, I went there specifically to look at two exhibitions, “American Moderns: Masterworks on Paper from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art” and “Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place.” Both are exceptionally fine, and the second show inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Journal.
It happens that many of America’s finest artists, including Homer, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver, either lived in Maine or spent a considerable amount of time there. You can’t spend five minutes driving down the road without seeing why. I suppose there might be more picturesque places in America, but I can’t think of anywhere that offers more concentrated opportunities in a smaller geographical space to a representational artist.
What struck me about the Winslow Homer show was the way in which it dramatizes how profoundly affected Homer was by the Maine seascape. This is, of course, a commonplace–everybody who knows anything about Homer knows how frequently he painted the coast of Maine–but to actually see a painting like “Weatherbeaten” in Maine is to be reminded with freshly illuminating force of this well-known fact.
How did the experience of seeing “Weatherbeaten” and Marsden Hartley’s “Surf on Reef” at the Portland Museum of Art affect an art lover who, like me, was raised on twentieth-century abstraction? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.”
Matthew Arnold, “A Word About America”

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)

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

• The Grand Manner (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 1, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 1, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, 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 GLENCOE, ILL.:

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

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:

• Killer Joe (black comedy-drama, X, extreme violence and nudity, closes July 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

“Don’t forget the Western is not only the history of this country, it is what the Saga of the Nibelungen is for the European.”
Fritz Lang (quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America)

A 1931 newsreel of George Gershwin playing “I Got Rhythm” at the old Manhattan Theater (now the Ed Sullivan Theater) in New York. This is the only surviving sound film of Gershwin at the piano:

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

“Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.”
Mary McCarthy, “America the Beautiful”

Reading list for those attending the filmmaker’s Rogue Film School:

Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

Re-watching a couple of his documentaries over the weekend began thinking how it was too bad Herzog wasn’t tapped to create the Voyager’s message to aliens. One imagines a future army of extraterrestrials arriving on Earth speaking in Herzog: “What is this planet we find ourselves upon? Everything is pointing to a new world but we need to articulate what that might be…”

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
John Updike, Problems