July 24, 2008
TT: So you want to see a show?
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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County * (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTON, VT.:
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"A great actress, but like most of them had no real idea of what she was playing. Actually she'd have been a better actress if she'd been a bit more of a fool. She'd have just acted instead of trying to make sense of her parts."
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
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July 23, 2008
TT: Snapshot
Arturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony in a 1952 performance of the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"I never look at anything that isn't beautiful these days unless duty compels me."
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
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July 22, 2008
TT: Almanac
"The mention of rent put Frank on his mettle. 'That's all right, dear,' he said; 'you pay when you can.'
"Each time that he spoke this familiar phrase, and sometimes it was as often as twenty times in a week, he felt overcome by the sadness of the situation. It was seldom, he knew, that any good would come of his sympathy, but it was the hopelessness, the endless hopelessness of the lives with which he had surrounded himself, that awoke his compassion. Frank Rammage's attitude could hardly be called sentimental, for it went farther than mere feeling--he regarded the dishonest and depraved as almost sacred. As usual, however, the little scene had satisfied the mixture of bullying and masochism that lay on the surface of his strange, Dostoyevskian philanthropy. He felt quite jolly."
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
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July 21, 2008
TT, OGIC, and CAAF: Actually, we're all a little fried
Into every blog a little chaos must occasionally fall, but never before have all three of us been under the crunch at one and the same time. On Sunday Terry and Mrs. T hit the road for a solid month of out-of-town reviewing. Laura will soon be departing Chicago for a couple of weeks, and Carrie is currently snowed under with cash-generating work.
Needless to say, none of this means that we're closing up shop. There'll always be a daily almanac entry, a Wednesday "Snapshot," and the usual theater-related postings on Thursdays and Fridays. Nevertheless, regular readers should be forewarned that things are likely to be a bit spotty around here from now until the end of August. All three of us will post as often as we can, which might end up being more often than we expect, but we don't want to make any unkeepable promises.
In short, expect no miracles, but do keep looking in on us--you'll never go away completely empty-handed. And enjoy your summer!
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TT: Neither crunchy nor thumpy
My friend Ethan Iverson, who plays piano with the Bad Plus, read my recent Wall Street Journal column on modern music, in which I mentioned in passing that "I don't go in for crunch-and-thump music, nor do I care for the over-and-over-and-over-again minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass, which puts me to sleep." He promptly issued the following challenge on his blog:
Here's an open invitation to Terry--who, after all, is a current collaborator with modernist composer Paul Moravec: what about a list of classical music since 1950 that he finds interesting? It should be a list of music that is neither twelve-tone or minimalist, nor particularly "crunch and thump."Here goes, straight off the top of my head. I've included links to currently available recordings of all ten pieces, which can also be downloaded from iTunes:
• Benjamin Britten, The Turn of the Screw (1954)
• Aaron Copland, Piano Fantasy (1957)
• Ned Rorem, Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano (1959)
• Leonard Bernstein, Chichester Psalms (1965)
• Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 11 (1966)
• Malcolm Arnold, Symphony for Brass Instruments (1978)
• George Tsontakis, String Quartet No. 3 ("Coraggio") (1986)
• Morten Lauridsen, O Magnum Mysterium (1994)
• Lowell Liebermann, Piccolo Concerto (1996)
• Paul Moravec, The Time Gallery (2000)
Each of these pieces is more or less tonal (though Britten's opera and the Copland Fantasy also make use of serial-type techniques). Beyond that, though, they don't have a lot in common other than that I happen to like them all very much. Some are immediately accessible, while others are tougher nuts to crack. I chose them to suggest the breadth of musical possibility that has been available to postwar classical composers whose language is essentially traditional.
Over to you, Ethan!
UPDATE: Ethan replies.
George Hunka expands.
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TT: Almanac
"Gerald Middleton was a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament. Such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time."
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
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July 19, 2008
TT: Fret not
I'm pleased (and not a little relieved) to announce that www.terryteachout.com, the alternate URL for "About Last Night," has been repaired at last and is functioning once more. If you're in the habit of using that easy-to-remember address instead of www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight, our official URL, you may now return to your old ways.
Sorry about that.
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July 18, 2008
TT: Songs of themselves
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column features three musicals, one on Broadway and two out of town: [title of show], a Vermont production of The Light in the Piazza, and an Oklahoma! in upstate New York. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
The ultimate backstage musical--and I don't mean that as a compliment--has come to Broadway. "[title of show]" is a show about itself, a 90-minute mini-musical whose authors, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, play themselves and whose subject is how the show in which they are appearing came to be written and produced. If all this sounds claustrophobically self-indulgent, there's a reason: I don't know when I've seen a musical that seemed more pleased with itself.
Art about art usually is self-indulgent, but it doesn't have to be--so long as its self-reflexiveness has wider implications. The first two-thirds of "[title of show]" fails to pass that test. It basically amounts to one long inside joke about theater, a daisy chain of glib references to moldy Broadway flops (anybody who can remember "Censored Scenes from King Kong" needs to run right out and get a life) and stale postmodern gimmickry (it is not clever to shout "Key change!" when the song you're singing changes keys). A full hour crawls by before "[title of show]" cuts out the coyness and gets serious....
Everything missing from "[title of show]" is present in abundance in Adam Guettel's "The Light in the Piazza," which has just been revived by the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in a brand-new chamber version for eight actors and five musicians. (The original version calls for 18 actors and 15 musicians.) Mr. Guettel has shrunk the show's scale without diminishing its passionate romanticism--if anything, it plays better this way--and I won't be at all surprised if the new "Piazza" becomes the standard performing version of the first great musical of the post-Sondheim era.
It helps, of course, that this intimate production, directed with intelligence and grace by Steve Stettler, is so very fine. In certain ways Mr. Stettler's "Piazza" is actually superior to Lincoln Center Theater's 2005 Broadway production...
Richard Rodgers, Mr. Guettel's grandfather, was a pretty fair tunesmith himself, and many of his shows profit from the same intimate treatment that the Weston Playhouse is giving to "The Light in the Piazza." I'm not altogether sure that "Oklahoma!" is one of them, but the Hangar Theatre's small-scale revival of the most enduringly popular of the five hit musicals that Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II is still an unpretentiously likable piece of work....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Hating the new
Joe Queenan, who can be a very funny man, published a piece in the Guardian last week in which he declared himself to be unalterably opposed to modern music of all kinds:
In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, concert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they'll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they'll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.My editor at The Wall Street Journal sent me a link to Queenan's piece, accompanied by the suggestion that I might possibly want to write a "Sightings" column about "Admit It, You're as Bored as I Am." Boy, was he ever right. Pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what came of it.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity."
Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen (trans. Harry Zohn)
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July 17, 2008
TT: Jo Stafford, R.I.P.
Jo Stafford, who died yesterday, is mostly forgotten now, save by those who were young a half-century ago, but back then she was one of the most popular singers in America, a wholesome beauty with a smooth, perfectly produced voice who sold millions and millions of records. Some of them were silly novelties, others bland period ballads, but when she had a good song to sing, nobody sang it better.
Stafford dealt in reassurance, a commodity much appreciated during World War II and in the Age of Anxiety that followed it, which may explain why she is not nearly so well remembered as Frank Sinatra (with whom she sang in Tommy Dorsey's band) or the hotter, sexier canaries of the Fifties. Her tasteful singing was rhythmically fluid without ever sounding self-consciously "jazzy," and her warm mezzo-soprano voice had a maternal quality that eased the troubled heart, though it didn't do much for the critics of the day. "I never made it with the critics," she once told Gene Lees. "I think what the critics didn't like was that it was simply singing."
Stafford went into semi-retirement in 1966. By then most of her records were out of print, and when I wrote a piece for Mirabella in 1994 occasioned by the release of a three-CD box set of her old Columbia recordings, she was very much a figure of the past. That hasn't changed. Most of the collections of her singles that are currently available are junky hit-oriented anthologies that give no sense of what she was like at her best. Fortunately Corinthian, her own label, put out two excellent CDs, Big Band Sound and Jo + Jazz, in which she sings blue-chip standards accompanied by some of the greatest jazz and pop instrumentalists of the Swing Era. Jazz musicians loved Stafford's voice and knew her worth--Lester Young was one of her biggest fans--and were always glad to play for her.
Stafford was only a vague memory of my childhood when a septuagenarian friend of mine played me a Columbia 78 of her version of "Early Autumn" a decade and a half ago. (It's on Big Band Sound, and you can also download it from iTunes.) The record, arranged by her beloved husband Paul Weston, couldn't be simpler. Stafford is accompanied by a clarinet choir and a soft-spoken rhythm section, and she sings Johnny Mercer's haunting lyric in the most direct and unmannered way imaginable:
There's a dance pavilion in the rain
All shuttered down
A winding country lane
All russet brown
A frosty window pane
Shows me a town grown lonely.That deceptively uncomplicated-sounding performance hit me with the force of revelation. All at once I knew that good old Jo Stafford was a great artist, and I resolved to spread the word about her artistry in any way I possibly could. A couple of years later I wrote about her in Mirabella, and after that I made a point of mentioning Stafford whenever I had occasion to write about golden-age popular song and its interpreters, but never again did I have occasion to write a full-length piece about her. I wish I had, and I wish I'd sent it to her while she was still alive. Perhaps she would have enjoyed knowing that her quiet, unpretentious art was still giving pleasure long after her fame had faded.
* * *
The Daily Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, New York Times and Washington Post now all have long, well-informed obituaries.
Chris Albertson passes along this snippet from an interview he did with Lester Young in 1958.
YOUNG You know, I can tell you this, really, my favorite singer is Kay Starr. No, that's the wrong name. What's that other lady's name? Her husband has a band.
ALBERTSON It's not Jo Stafford?
YOUNG There you are! Yeah, I'll go there.
ALBERTSON Jo Stafford is your favorite singer?
YOUNG Yeah, and Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. And I'm through.
ALBERTSON But Jo Stafford does not sing jazz, does she?
YOUNG No, but I hear her voice and the sound and the way she puts things on.
Enough said.
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CAAF: Morning coffee
• Jessa Crispin considers the glut of biographies out there about the various members of the James family and considers the omissions to be found in the latest bio of the family, House of Wits. That biography, written by Paul Fisher, also received an unfavorable review from Hermione Lee.
• La belle et la bête: Eloisa James writes interestingly about the spate of recent romances featuring beastly metamorphoses. (Via Galleycat.)
• And the Translators Association of the Society of Authors (good old TAOTSOA) gives us its list of the 50 outstanding translations of the last 50 years and validates my preference for the Michael Glenny translation of Master and the Margarita. (Via The Lit Saloon.)
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TT: So you want to see a show?
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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County * (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in alternating repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:
• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind's eye the notion of a better life ahead."
Edward Hoagland, "The Ridge-Slope Fox and The Knife-Thrower"
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July 16, 2008
TT: Snapshot
Jackson Pollock, filmed by Hans Namuth in 1951 and accompanied by the music of Morton Feldman:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
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TT: Overpressed with sail
It's too hot and I'm too busy.
Later.
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TT: Almanac
"How much time, approximately, can a worker in a hectic, speeded-up world give to his work and be a sane, all-round, informed, and recreated citizen?"
Mary Barnett Gilson, What's Past Is Prologue
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July 15, 2008
CAAF: Morning coffee*
• Maud finds the online annotated Moby Dick. Suitable for reading on your iPhone during passive commutes then rising exalted to peer over your fellow subway passengers.
• Not a fresh link but of interest if, like me, you're a fan of Sarah Hall's Daughters of the North: Galleycat's interview with Hall where she discusses the novel's start as a short story.
* Still a cruel reminder of what once was. But I will not surrender to "morning green tea."
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