May 16, 2008
TT: Toga party
The 2007-08 Broadway season (about which more here) is over at last, and I'm on the road again. My first stop was Washington, D.C., where the Shakespeare Theatre Company is performing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in repertory in its new theater. I saw both productions last Saturday and reviewed them in this morning's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
What does a "traditional" Shakespeare production look like? If the phrase still makes you think of Brits in tights, then it's a pretty safe bet that you haven't been to a theater lately. Ever since Orson Welles tossed convention out the window in 1936 and turned "Macbeth" into a voodoo orgy set in Haiti, the old-fashioned way of staging the Bard has grown less and less common with every passing season. Nearly all modern-day directors now treat his plays as unfinished canvases on which they paint their own up-to-date theatrical pictures, sometimes to unforgettably individual effect and sometimes to unforgettably fatuous effect. Most of the best Shakespeare productions I've reviewed in this space--and all of the worst ones--have been revisionist stagings executed along Wellesian lines. As far as my generation of playgoers is concerned, this is what it means to be traditional.
That's why I was excited to hear that the Shakespeare Theatre Company would be performing "Antony and Cleopatra" and "Julius Caesar" in repertory at its brand-new 775-seat downtown theater here--and that the two productions would feature a single cast dressed in traditional Roman costumes. The idea of presenting these plays in tandem may seem obvious, since they share some of the same characters, but I've never seen it done before, and Michael Kahn, the company's artistic director, has opted to emphasize their commonality still further by using the same costume designer, Jennifer Moeller, for both shows and performing them on the same unit set, a stylized rendering of an Elizabethan open stage created by James Noone....
Mr. Kahn, who directed "Antony and Cleopatra," is a smart craftsman whose past productions include a straight-down-the-center "Othello" that ranks high on my list of memorable Shakespeare productions--as well as an unintentionally comical Gen-X "Hamlet" that ranks near the bottom. This time around he's skipped the nonsense and opted for a speedy, uncommonly vivid staging in which Suzanne Bertish plays Cleopatra as a woman of a certain age who is sexually besotted with a visibly younger Mark Antony (Andrew Long). Ms. Bertish, who made a tremendous splash on Broadway a quarter-century ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's stage version of "Nicholas Nickleby," gives a performance of thrilling and alarming intensity...
David Muse, the company's associate artistic director, has staged "Julius Caesar" to somewhat less potent effect, in part because his production lacks the clean, uncluttered directness of Mr. Kahn's "Antony and Cleopatra." But the results still work very well, and the cast is every bit as impressive....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success."
Sigmund Freud (quoted in Ernest Jones, Life and Works of Sigmund Freud)
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May 15, 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)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
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May 14, 2008
OGIC: So eternally Green
There's a lot that's amazing about Henry Green's novel Loving, which I continue to read in small doses. I pick it up infrequently enough that my grasp of many plot points is less than firm, but no matter. The draw is Green's minute observation and inimitable style. Rendering the teeming emotional and social life below stairs on an Irish estate during the second world war, Green goes right to the verge of sensuous overload in his impressionistic descriptions but pulls back in his plainspoken, practical dialogue. In a way his characters' talk functions itself as description or atmosphere--doggedly true to the way he heard people talk, it's not meant to explain anything and in fact often serves to obfuscate the matter.
In this terribly moving small vignette from the novel, I'm interested in how colors run a little wild. To say they have symbolic weight is an understatement; more than symbolic, they're active players in the miniature drama that plays out here, seeming to struggle with each other for supremacy over the mood of the scene and ergo its outcome.
Edith feared for Raunce's neck. She said those draughts in the servant's hall might harm him. Now coal was so short it was only a small peat fire she could lay each morning in the butler's room, and she insisted that the grate Raunce had was too narrow for peat. This no doubt could be her excuse to get him to take his cup along with her to one of the living rooms where huge fires were kept stoked all day to condition the old masters.So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce's heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed french windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith's curls a trifle. Between the books the walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought to the draught.
"You ever noticed that little place this side of the East Gate?" he was asking.
"Well can't say I've looked over it if that's what you're after," she replied. He hooked a finger into the bandage round his throat as though to ease himself.
"Next time you pass that way you have a look, see."
"Why Charley?"
"It's empty that's why."
"It's empty is it?" she echoed dull but with a sharp glance.
"The married butlers used to live there at one time," he explained. Then he lied. "Yesterday mornin'," he went on canny, "Michael stopped me as he came out of the kitchen. You'll never guess what he was onto."
"Not something for one of his family again?" she enquired.
"That's right," he said. "It was only he's goin' to ask Mrs. T. for it when she gets back, that's all. The roof of their pig sty of a hovel 'as gone an' fallen on 'is blessed sister-in-law's head and's crushed a finger of one of their kids."
"The cheek," she exclaimed.
"A horrid liar the man is," Charley commented. "But it's not the truth that matters. It's what's believed," he added.
"You think she'll credit such a tale?" Edith wanted to know.
"Now love," he began then paused. He was dressed in black trousers and a stiff shirt with no jacket, the only colour being in his footman's livery waistcoat of pink and white stripes. He wore no collar on account of his neck. Lying back he squinted into the blushing rose of that huge turf fire as it glowed, his bluer eye azure on which was a crescent rose reflection. "Love," he went on toneless, "what about you an' me getting married? There I've said it."
"That's want thinking over Charley," she replied at once. Her eyes left his face and with what seemed a quadrupling in depth came following his to rest on those rectangles of warmth alive like blood. From this peat light her great eyes became invested with rose incandescence that was soft and soft and soft.
"There's none of this love nonsense," he began again appearing to strain so as not to look at her. "It's logical dear that's what. You see I thought to get my old mother over out of the bombers."
"And quite right too," she answered prompt.
"I'm glad you see it my way," he took her up. "Oh honey you don't know what that means."
"I've always said a wife that can't make a home for her man's mother doesn't merit a place of her own," she announced gentle.
"Then you don't say no?" he asked glancing her way at last. His white face was shot with green from the lawn.
"I haven't said yes have I?" she countered and looked straight at him, her heart opening about her lips. Seated as she was back to the light he could see only a blinding space for her head framed in dark hair and inhabited by those great eyes on her, fathoms deep.
"No that's right," he murmured obviously lost.
In the introduction to my edition (which is the same one linked above), John Updike points to Green's "love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss, of vitality within weakness" and points to a further contradiction: "with upper-class obliquity he champions the demotic in language and in everything."
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TT: The unsurprising Tonys
This year's Tony Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, and The Wall Street Journal asked me to comment on them in this morning's paper:
The nominations for the 62nd annual Tony Awards were announced yesterday morning. They weren't surprising. They almost never are. Take, for instance, the Best Musical category. Eight new musicals opened on Broadway this season, and one of them, "Glory Days," closed after a single performance. "A Catered Affair," "Cry-Baby," "The Little Mermaid" and "Young Frankenstein" got sharply mixed reviews, leaving "In the Heights," "Passing Strange" and "Xanadu," all of which received nominations, with "Cry-Baby" thrown in to fill the obligatory fourth slot. That's about as exciting as ordering a Big Mac and waiting breathlessly to see if it contains an extra pickle....The Tony nominations, in short, have become an exercise in ratifying the obvious--and how could they be anything else? Broadway consists of 39 houses, four of which are run by Lincoln Center Theater, the Manhattan Theatre Club and the Roundabout Theatre Company, a trio of non-profit outfits that are marginally more adventurous than their commercial counterparts. As for the remaining 35, they're so costly to operate that anyone who dares to bring a new show into one of them is all but begging to throw his money away. That's why today's theatrical producers usually play it very, very safe, importing road-tested productions that have been developed by out-of-town companies. The days when an unknown author could hope to take Broadway by storm are over.
All this explains why the Tonys have grown so lackluster in recent years: Their unsurprising nature merely reflects the safety-first institutional culture of Broadway....
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
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May 13, 2008
CAAF: 5 x 5 Books Beloved Books I Fear Re-reading by Mark Sarvas
5 x 5 Books ... is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today's installment comes from my friend Mark Sarvas, proprietor of The Elegant Variation and author of the new novel Harry, Revised. New York magazine gave Harry a thumbs up, praising the author's "sure hand for vivisecting 21st-century absurdities." New York readers can catch Mark when he reads tomorrow night -- that's Wednesday! -- at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca (more info).
Here Mark shares five beloved books he's afraid to re-read for fear they won't hold up.
1. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck's legacy hasn't held up particularly well. Robert Gottlieb just took several thousand words in the New York Review of Books to bury him, not to praise him. "The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck," he began, "is how good he can be when so much of the time he's so bad." I have fond memories of Of Mice and Men, one of the first "serious" literary works I read at a young age. Besides being proud of myself for my leaps in reading comprehension, I was completely drawn in by Lenny, George and those damned rabbits. I cried for hours when I finished the book but felt I had glimpsed something about friendship that was rare and true. But I've had my own love/hate with Steinbeck since -- I think he's better than Gottlieb allows but he can frequently be astonishingly ham-fisted. So I think I'm going to leave this one untouched in the well of memory.
2. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I've read this one well over a dozen times but not in the last ten years or so. Rob Reiner famously did a fine job, but, for me as for many others, he simply could not compete with the Inigo and Fezzik of my own memory. Of course, in my first youthful reading, I didn't realize Goldman was funning with us with all that Florin/Guilder stuff -- until I went to Holland and handled actual florins and guilders. My fear here is all the stuff I thought was cool before -- the breaking of the fourth wall, the book within the book stuff -- is likely to just read like bits of business now and, knowing Goldman, the emotion I found back then would probably come off as mawkishness today. It's another one I daren't touch, though the hard-cover reissue sits proudly on the shelf.
3. The Tanglewood Murder by Lucille Kallen. Although I seem to have a reputation as an anti-genre snob, I retain very fond memories of this whodunit written by a former "Your Show of Shows" writer, who died in 1999. I actually enjoyed the whole C.B. Greenfield series so much that I had her sign first editions of all her books years ago at Murder Ink, the now-defunct New York mystery bookstore. But this one was always my favorite, and I'd picked up a paperback copy on my way up to Tanglewood one summer with my family. The mystery includes a Stradivarius, Ravel and Shakespeare and is forever associated in my mind with those summer evenings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- and I tend to be suspicious of reading experiences too steeped in nostalgia. But I do remember it as a witty and surprising mystery.
4. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Like most of the free world, I was completely blown away when I read White Teeth, and the initial first flurry of pages I wrote of my own novel came out in a sort of Zadie Smith-soaked haze. (Those pages, thankfully, no longer exist.) What I admired most was her sheer fearlessness -- no turn of phrase seemed to outrageous, no outré scenario off limits, and yet she had the chops to pull them all off -- or so it seemed at the time. Those are precisely the bits I fear might not read as well today. Smith herself has disavowed the book, characterizing it as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old," and though I think she goes overboard there, her prose has matured and quieted down in a way that fulfills the promise of her debut without making me eager to revisit it.
5. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I mentioned this "5 x 5" idea last week to a novelist friend, who immediately piped up with The English Patient, a book which wasn't in my original list but one she had recently re-read. But she was so convincing in her case, suggesting that what I fondly remember as the book's lush lyricism read to her as overripe, and that the absence of the plot that I swear I remember being there adds up to a book that's a lovely slog. I trust and respect her enough that I'm suddenly terrified to crack this one open.Posted at 12:02 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart."
Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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May 12, 2008
TT: Another envelope, please
The New York Drama Critics' Circle made its annual awards today. The best-play award went to August: Osage County, the best-musical award to Passing Strange.
To find out how all the judges voted, myself included, go here.
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CAAF: Morning coffee
This is the world we made edition:
• Virginia Heffernan reports that the Oxford English Dictionary may soon be out of print as it moves to a web-only format. Luddites cry, "O.E.D. no!" Relatedly, in this week's Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond explores how Wikipedia's dominance is affecting the publishing model for encyclopedias and other reference works.
• Janet Maslin gives James Frey's new novel a rave. But the review is written in a bad James Frey imitation. Which made this reader squirm, cringe.
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TT: Conjugal leave
Now that Rhythm Man is finished and the Broadway season is over, I'm blowing town for a few days of much-needed rest. Tonight I'll be dining with Mrs. T somewhere in deepest Connecticut, and anybody who wants to get in touch with me there for any reason not involving a four-figure advance cash payment is out of luck.
Blogging? Fugedaboudit. Except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings, I intend to leave you in the hands of OGIC and CAAF all week long. If I break my word, throw stones.
See you next Monday.
P.S. I've freshened the Top Five and "Out of the Past" picks, and my colleagues will be adding still more new stuff this week. Take a peek.
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TT: Right turn at Albuquerque
"When I know how long a piece must take, then it excites me," Igor Stravinsky said to George Balanchine. That's sort of how I felt when I finally got a look at the stage on which the Santa Fe Opera will give The Letter its first performance next July.
The Crosby Theater is a 2,166-seat open-air house built atop a 7,500-foot-high desert mesa. Here's how the construction company that built the theater describes it:
The most unique feature of the project is the enormous, and very complex, steel roof structure. The roof rod tensioning system and huge mast assemblies support the roof structure and balcony steel, with the roof connected in tension, and resting on the four existing star columns.The opera seating is a concrete riser on grade and the balcony seating is a pre-cast riser set on structural steel. The architectural finish is the traditional New Mexican stucco. Special systems that were added include a state-of-the-art theatrical lighting system running throughout 750 lineal feet of catwalk erected above the stage, and computerized dimming capabilities both within the theater and throughout the plaza grounds.
All this is true enough, I suppose, but only in the limited sense that it would also be true to describe the Empire State Building as rather tall. It's more to the point, if less exact, to say that the Crosby Theater is the most gorgeous-looking open-air theater I've seen in my life--and I've seen some beauties. The setting is part of it, of course, but the theater itself is a humdinger, at once spacious and arrestingly intimate. Now that I'm a drama critic, I spend much of my time watching performances in small theaters, and in the process I've become impatient with giant-sized auditoriums like the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, where even the best seats are far removed from the singers on stage. Not so the Crosby Theater. When you stand on the stage, you feel as though you're in the lap of the audience, and when you sit in the orchestra seats, you feel as though you're being thrust toward the performers.
To build such a theater in so naturally beautiful a place all but ensures a festive atmosphere, and by most accounts the opera buffs who come to Santa Fe do so in the expectation of having a rip-roaringly good time:
I learned these things when I flew out to Santa Fe two weeks ago to attend the press conference at which the cast and production team of The Letter were announced. I'd never been to Santa Fe before, and didn't know how complicated it is to get there from New York: you fly into Dallas or Denver, change planes for Albuquerque, then spend an hour driving to Santa Fe. The connections can be dicey, and if you try to cut it close, you're likely to end up spending the night somewhere else. I flew out of Newark, and my flight left two hours late, the same amount of time I'd allowed myself to change planes in Dallas. Since I was booked onto the last flight to Albuquerque, I assumed that I wasn't going to get to Santa Fe until the next day, but American Airlines, God bless them, held my plane, and I made it to New Mexico in one piece, more or less on time.
Paul Moravec, my collaborator on The Letter, picked me up at my hotel the following morning and drove me to the opera house, where the company's production chief gave us a tour of the grounds. The more I saw, the bigger my eyes grew. Of course I knew perfectly well that Santa Fe Opera is a large-scale operation, but you can't fully appreciate the implications of that statement until you see the company's headquarters spread out before you. As I explained to Mrs. T when I got back to New York, Santa Fe Opera is not so much a summer opera company as a major opera company that performs in the summer. Paul told me this after he went there last year--he compared it to Bayreuth--but it wasn't until I stood on the stage that I understood what he meant.
Paul and I did our best to act like grownups, but as soon as the tour was over and the production chief left us to ourselves, we looked at one other and broke out in mile-wide grins.
"Is this cool or what?" Paul said.
"Dude," I replied, "we have soooo hit the big time!"
Then we started laughing uncontrollably.
Once we got ourselves pulled together, we strolled over to the rehearsal hall. We had an hour to kill before the press conference, so Paul found a piano and played through his preliminary sketches for the last scene of The Letter. At length the reporters started drifting in, and we closed the piano and made ready to be introduced to the world. What followed was later described on the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican under the wonderful headline "Opera's 2009 Season Takes Film Noir Turn":
The Santa Fe Opera announced Wednesday that its 2009 season will include the world premiere of The Letter, an opera based on a 1927 stage adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham short story.The SFO commissioned the opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and critic, biographer and blogger Terry Teachout.
Tom Ford, fashion designer and legendary former creative director of Gucci, whose new house atop Talaya Hill is still under construction, is making his debut as a costume designer for The Letter.
The 90-minute opera in eight scenes has "blood and sex, everything you want in opera," Teachout said.
Patricia Racette and Anthony Michaels-Moore star as an unhappy couple whose life in the jungle of Malaya is torn apart by adultery that leads to murder, blackmail and revenge.
Moravec said he and Teachout intend the opera to be as "fast, concise and hard-hitting as a film noir."
The characters in the opera are more likely to be wearing khaki or white duck suits (including one soaked in blood) than Ford's signature cowboy boots, blazers, unbuttoned shirts (and 5-o'clock shadows). But, Moravec said, "anything Tom Ford wants to do is fine with us as long as the labels aren't showing."
Read the whole thing here--there's lots more, all of it accurate, including the quotes.
When the show was over, I wolfed down lunch, then headed back to New York by way of Albuquerque, Denver, and Newark. Paul stayed behind to work on the last scene and confer with Richard Gaddes, the company's outgoing general manager, and Charles MacKay, who will be replacing him this fall. I would have liked to stay on for a few more days, too, but I had four shows to see on Broadway and no time to spare, so I left with the utmost reluctance.
The good news is that I'll be returning to Santa Fe in July to spend a week seeing four of this season's productions (one of them staged by Jonathan Kent, who is directing The Letter) and meeting with more of the people with whom we'll be working next year. I can't wait. Paul and I have been thinking about The Letter for the better part of two years, but now, at long last, it seems absolutely real to us--and we're excited. Very, very excited.
UPDATE: A friend writes:
You said "Dude"? For realsies?Way.
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TT: MIA (concluded)
It took long enough and then some, but Elaine Dundy finally made it onto the obituary page of the New York Times last Friday. Kindly note the last paragraph:
The Dud Avocado, reissued last year by The New York Review of Books, remains Ms. Dundy's most popular book, flawed but vital, like its heroine. "The plot is helter-skelter, and the end trails off into vapor," the critic Terry Teachout wrote, "but the narrator's utterly feminine voice redeems all."Sure enough.
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TT: Almanac
"Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it."
Gustave Flaubert, Pensées
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May 9, 2008
TT: Seven girls grumbling
The 2007-08 Broadway season is now officially over, and in today's Wall Street Journal column I report on the last show to open in time for this year's Tony nominations,
Top Girls. I didn't think much of it. I also had a few words to say about Glory Days, the sensitive-teen musical that opened--and closed--on Tuesday.
Here's an excerpt.
* * *
I can't tell you how "Top Girls" looked in 1983, but today it is a creaky period piece, by turns clever-clever and brutally heavy-handed, in which Ms. Churchill strenuously endeavors to portray the upwardly mobile career women of the Thatcher era as bitchy, self-hating beasts who have fallen victim to the virus of American individualism and so lost their souls. Marlene (Elizabeth Marvel), the head of the bitch pack, runs an employment agency that finds high-paying jobs for monsters of ambition. In due course we learn that she has deserted her working-class family--and her illegitimate daughter--in order to come to London to shinny up the greasy pole. At play's end she visits her home in Suffolk, where her sister (Marisa Tomei) spits venom in her eye: "I suppose you'd have liked Hitler if he was a woman. Ms. Hitler. Got a lot done, Hitlerina." No doubt Ms. Churchill meant for us to be stunned into agreement by the pungency of this assault on the evils of Thatcherism, but all it did was make me look at my watch....
Many Broadway shows have closed after just one night, but only a few have been musicals. The last new musical to explode as soon as the key was turned was Alan Jay Lerner's "Dance a Little Closer" in 1983. Thus "Glory Days" has won itself a place in history: Henceforth it will be mentioned alongside such famous flops as Leonard Bernstein's "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" (seven performances), Mickey Leonard's "The Yearling" (four performances), Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle" (nine performances) and "Merrily We Roll Along" (16 performances), Charles Strouse's "Nick & Nora" (nine performances) and Jule Styne's "The Red Shoes" (five performances).
What all these older flops have in common is that, like "Dance a Little Closer," they were the work of distinguished artists, and some had memorable scores to boot. "The Yearling" actually yielded up a standard, "I'm All Smiles," while "Anyone Can Whistle" and "Merrily We Roll Along" have both turned out to be much hardier than they looked at first glance. As for Nick Blaemire and James Gardiner, the authors of "Glory Days," they are 23 and 24 years old respectively, young enough to someday earn themselves a second grab at the brass ring of theatrical success. Stranger things have happened: Six years after "Anyone Can Whistle" blew up in Mr. Sondheim's face, he wrote "Company" and became immortal. So I'll keep my opinion of "Glory Days" to myself and instead wish its makers the best of luck in their future endeavors. They'll need it, and maybe they'll get it.
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: The all-American choreographer
Jerome Robbins is all over the place these days. New York City Ballet is presenting a month-long Robbins Celebration at Lincoln Center, while Patti LuPone is burning up the stage of the St. James Theatre in an Arthur Laurents-staged revival of Gypsy that incorporates the dances choreographed by Robbins for the show's original 1959 production.
The coincidence of these two events struck me as a highly suitable occasion for a "Sightings" column in which I take a retrospective look at Jerome Robbins' place in postwar American culture. During his lifetime, Robbins was America's most famous choreographer--but ten years after his death, does the co-creator of Fancy Free, West Side Story, and Dances at a Gathering still matter? Or has the ever-changing Zeitgeist finally passed him by?
To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Wall Street Journal, turn to the "Weekend Journal" section, and see what I have to say in "Sightings."
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"I did deeply want to create, by means both austere and rich--means always disciplined by a central aesthetic--an experience that was entirely and only theatrical."
Peter Shaffer, preface to The Royal Hunt of the Sun (courtesy of Marissabidilla)
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May 8, 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)
• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, reviewed here)
• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)
• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)
• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Endgame (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)
• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 18, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON IN MILLBURN, N.J.:
• Kiss Me, Kate (musical, PG-13, far too sophisticated for children, closes May 18, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: MIA (III)
Finally, a major American newspaper has run an obituary of Elaine Dundy--and guess where it is? In Los Angeles. Another raspberry to the New York Times!
I note with pleasure the following paragraph about The Dud Avocado:
When the book was reissued last year in the New York Review Books classics series, critic Terry Teachout described Sally Jay as the "spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones," a characterization that Dundy relished.I'm glad to know that.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
