May 17, 2012
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.
BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, reviewed here)
• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, extended through Sept. 9, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Columnist (drama, PG-13/R, extended through July 1, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Evita (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)
• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)OFF BROADWAY:
• 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)
• 4000 Miles (drama, PG-13, extended through July 1, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)
• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)IN CHICAGO:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, closes June 17, reviewed here)
• Timon of Athens (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes June 10, reviewed here)IN LOS ANGELES:
• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, transfer of Kennedy Center/Broadway revival, closes June 9, original run reviewed here)CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Death of a Salesman (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, all performances sold out last week, closes June 2, reviewed here)CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:
• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, closes June 3, reviewed here)CLOSING SATURDAY IN EVANSTON, ILL.:
• After the Revolution (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Read Jennette Lee's 'The Ibsen Secret,' perhaps the most successul of all the Ibsen gemaras in English, if you would know the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation. And so in all the arts. Whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever is facile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color, we embrace. Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignation precisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonic realism, his unsentimental logic. But the moment a meretricious and platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how he protested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabby culture."
H.L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces
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May 16, 2012
TT: See me, hear me (cont'd)
The latest episode of Theater Talk, in which Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, and I discuss the current Broadway season with Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel, is now available for viewing in streaming video. Here it is:
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TT: The other America
A friend who sent flowers to my mother's funeral writes:
I was the white roses, because your mother seemed like white roses to me. When I called the local florist, it was early Monday morning, nine a.m. I figured out where your mother might be from Google, and called around. When I got the flower shop that starts with P, I tried to explain who I was and what I wanted, and who the flowers were for. The woman who answered the phone asked for the family name, and when I told her she sucked in her breath: "Oh, she was a lovely woman, a wonderful woman." And then in this little Midwestern way, she managed to tell me she was not claiming closeness, just declaring what was obvious. It was so touching, and we had a nice talk.That's what my mother was like--and what small towns are like.
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TT: Snapshot
The Louvin Brothers sing "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby":
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence."
Oscar Wilde (quoted in Laurence Housman, Écho de Paris)
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May 15, 2012
TT: Milestone
I reviewed two Shakespeare plays in last Friday's Wall Street Journal. That piece was my five hundredth drama column for the paper. My first column, a review of David Ives' Polish Joke, appeared on April 4, 2003, three months before I launched this blog. It was the first theater review I'd ever written, and it was an experiment: Paul Gigot invited me to try my hand at being a drama critic, and I said I was game.
I think of myself as a lucky man, but that invitation may well have been the biggest and best piece of professional luck ever to come my way. I had no idea--none at all--that I would spend the next decade reviewing shows on and off Broadway and all across America, or that I had discovered, at the age of forty-seven and entirely by accident, what seems to be my vocation.
I didn't realize in 2003 that drama criticism was the ideal line of work for a dilettantish aesthete with unusually wide-ranging artistic and cultural interests, since it allows you to make use of everything you know. Nor did I suspect that it would also prove to be an inexhaustibly interesting job. Two of New York's senior drama critics warned me shortly after I made my debut in the Journal that I was bound to burn out sooner or later, most likely the former. It never happened. I still get excited every time the lights go down, and I learn something from every show I see.
One of the things I learned along the way, much to my surprise, was how to write a play. That, too, I owe to the Journal's willingness to take a chance on me--and vice versa. If you don't learn something from seeing and writing about two or three plays a week, you're in the wrong business.
It's helped--a lot--that Eric Gibson, Barbara Phillips, and Adrian Ho, my longtime editors, are perfect colleagues, helpful and knowledgeable and unfailingly supportive. If my reviews are worth reading, they deserve much of the credit.
In case you're curious, this is what I wrote about Polish Joke nine years ago. Who knew?
* * *
Anyone, so the saying goes, can write the first act of a play--it's the last act that does you in. David Ives has heretofore finessed this problem by specializing in one-act comedies in which he pulls the rug of reality out from under his hapless characters and watches with glee as they stagger and lurch. By his own admission, he is "not very fond of writing full-length plays," and though two evenings of his surrealistic sketches, "All in the Timing" and "Mere Mortals and Others," have had solid off-Broadway runs, he's never had much luck with more ambitious projects. Now, though, Mr. Ives' luck is about to change, for the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of "Polish Joke," a two-act play about the misadventures of a self-hating Polish-Catholic seminarian from the south side of Chicago, is pulverizingly funny from snout to tail.
"Polish Joke," which opened Tuesday at City Center's Stage II, is a fresh take on one of the oldest of theatrical themes. Second-generation American immigrants have been grappling on stage and on screen with the question of assimilation ever since "Abie's Irish Rose," and Jasiu (Malcolm Gets), who is struggling to break free from the stranglehold of his heritage, is cut from broadly similar cloth. Warned by his godfather (Richard Ziman) that "all Polish jokes are true" and that the only way for a Pole to get anywhere is to "impersonate somebody who is not Polish," he changes his name to John Sadler, drops out of the seminary to become a novelist, dates a rich Jewish girl (Nancy Bell), even tries to pass himself off as Irish. Naturally, none of it works, and Jasiu finally learns that the only thing worse than being Polish is trying to pretend you're not.
Described this way, "Polish Joke" sounds rather like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," only with an IQ of 200. But instead of turning out a conventionally carpentered three-act Problem Play, Mr. Ives has structured his loosely autobiographical tale as a series of related sketches, a set of picaresque variations on a comic theme--and it works, not least because of his uncanny ear. I laughed so hard at Jasiu's encounter with a cliché-spewing Irish travel agent (Nancy Opel) that I thought I might rupture myself: "Sure, isn't the breeze today as fine and lovely and grand and blessed as the first good fart after a plate o' cooked cabbage?"
It isn't news that Mr. Ives is funny. What is surprising about "Polish Joke" is the sustained intensity of its heartfelt moments, especially the vignette in which Jasiu tells his urbane priest-professor (Walter Bobbie) that he has lost his vocation and is dropping out of the seminary. Typically, Mr. Ives detonates one of the show's biggest punch lines in mid-scene. Asked if he ever had any doubts about his own calling, the priest replies, "Well, there are those Saturday nights when it's just you and the pastor singing 'The Mikado' together in the rectory. Times like that you start to wonder." (Mr. Bobbie puts a wicked spin on this line.) But instead of shying away from the emotion of the moment and vanishing into an inky cloud of one-liners, Mr. Ives plays it to the hilt, screwing up the tension in such a way as to leave no doubt of his underlying seriousness of purpose. For "Polish Joke," like every first-rate comedy, is really about the human condition--the ethnic joke as metaphor for man's fate--and the louder you laugh at its verbal skyrockets, the closer you'll come to crying at evening's end.
The five-person cast, egged on by director John Rando, tears through the script like a bullet train, and the effect is crisp and exhilarating. Mr. Rando, of course, won a Tony last year for "Urinetown," which I happened to see for the first time a few weeks after 9/11. I still remember the rush of relief I felt as I shook off my fears and surrendered myself to that delicious show. New Yorkers were sorely in need of laughter back then, and I dare say they will need it no less in the coming days, for which reason we owe a great debt to David Ives. Alas, "Polish Joke" is set to play only through April 20, so go while you can--but cross your fingers. The Manhattan Theatre Club has a good thing going, and I hope they change their minds and let it run and run and run.
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TT: Lookback
From 2005:
I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I'm still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely at home in a city to which you move at the ripe old age of twenty-nine....Read the whole thing here.
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TT: Almanac
"Whenever people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong."
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
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May 14, 2012
TT: Yes, The New Yorker
Alec Wilkinson, a protégé of William Maxwell whose New Yorker articles have long been one of the very best reasons to read that magazine, has now written a profile of John Douglas Thompson, who is currently appearing in the Goodman Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and will be starring later this summer in my own Satchmo at the Waldorf.
Not at all surprisingly, the piece, which is called "Stage Secret," is first rate, and it includes a vivid and accurate account of the day that I took John to the Armstrong Archives to listen to Satchmo's private tapes for the first time. It also contains this amusing confession:
Thompson is a little nervous about playing a man who was so widely known, "because people might judge me on my ability to portray him as they recall him," he says. "When you don't look like him, you don't sing like him, and you don't play the trumpet like him, then, yeah, I got a lot to worry about."I'm not worried.
I should point out, however, that the profile does contain a small but significant error that somehow escaped the notice of the magazine's vaunted fact-checking department: John is not "creating" the double role of Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser. That was done last September by Dennis Neal, who starred in the first professional production of Satchmo at the Waldorf in Orlando, Florida, giving a wonderful performance that I will never forget.
If you subscribe to The New Yorker, you can read "Stage Secret" on line by going here. Otherwise, you'll have to buy a copy of this week's issue.
UPDATE: I just heard from the relevant person at The New Yorker, who wrote to apologize for the error. "The checker on that piece is new and didn't know the theatrical meaning of 'creating' a role," he told me. I'm impressed that I received so prompt a response.
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TT: In the midst of life
The world keeps on turning, no matter what may happen to you or your loved ones. A week ago tonight I was in Smalltown, U.S.A., mourning the loss of my beloved mother, instead of New Haven, Connecticut, where I'd planned to be present at the public announcement of Long Wharf Theatre's 2012-13 season. I don't usually attend such ceremonies, but this one was different, for it was in part a celebration of the news that Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, will be transferring directly to Long Wharf after completing its run at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts.
The production, starring John Douglas Thompson and directed by Gordon Edelstein, kicks off Long Wharf's 2012-13 season, the first in its newly remodeled theater complex. Previews start on October 3. The show opens on October 10 and runs through November 4.
Regular readers of my Wall Street Journal drama column will know that I am a longtime admirer of Long Wharf (whose artistic director, not coincidentally, is Gordon Edelstein). It is a tremendous honor for Satchmo at the Waldorf to have been chosen to open the season there. It pleases me greatly that I learned about Long Wharf's plans in time to tell my mother, who was no less pleased for me.
Here's what I would have said had I been in New Haven:
I'd say this was a dream come true, except that I never dreamed of any such thing. To get to work with Gordon and John, and to have my show produced at Shakespeare & Company and Long Wharf Theatre, goes far beyond anything I ever imagined for Satchmo at the Waldorf. It's like Benjy Stone says in My Favorite Year: "You don't get years like that anymore." Only I'm getting one--and I still can't quite believe it.Watch this space for further details.
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TT: On the road again
Mrs. T and I returned to New York on Friday, and on Sunday we flew to San Francisco, there to begin a two-week-long reviewing trip in California. We'll be driving down Highway 1, seeing shows in various parts of the state.
I plan to post from time to time, but I'm not yet in the mood to restart full-scale blogging activities (except for the usual almanac entries, videos, and theater-related postings, which resume today after a week of mourning). This is as close to a vacation as Mrs. T and I will be getting this summer, and we need it.
Many of you have sent us messages of condolence in recent days. I'll answer them in due course, but for now I simply want to say that they mean more to me than you can possibly imagine. My humble thanks for your concern.
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TT: Just because
Boris Karloff is profiled by Ralph Edwards on This Is Your Life:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
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TT: Almanac
"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple."
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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May 11, 2012
TT: The show...
In today's Wall Street Journal I review two Shakespeare productions, Chicago Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Classic Stage Company's Midsummer Night's Dream. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
In Barbara Gaines' version of the rarely performed "Timon of Athens," the title character (played with coolly arrogant panache by Ian McDiarmid) becomes a high-rolling futures trader who gets caught in a credit crunch and finds one day that his closest "friends" have stopped returning his calls. What brings Ms. Gaines' idea to life is the boldness of her theatrical gestures, coupled with the clarity of her thinking. For her, Timon is a vain, self-centered fool who makes the mistake of thinking that the smooth sycophants who surround him like blood-sniffing sharks care for him, not his money. Give them iPads and put them in bespoke suits and you get a "Timon of Athens" that plays like a cross between "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "Citizen Kane."
The comparison to "Kane" is of the utmost relevance, not only because the fast-moving cross-cutting of Ms. Gaines' staging is conspicuously cinematic but because she and Mr. McDiarmid have trimmed Shakespeare's text as ruthlessly--and creatively--as did Orson Welles, "Kane"'s maker, when he edited "Julius Caesar" for his 1937 Broadway production. This "Timon" has been similarly compressed and reshaped in such a way as to give it the shadowless simplicity of a fable....
When high-concept Shakespeare stagings go astray, you get something not unlike the scattershot first part of Tony Speciale's up-to-the-second modern-dress version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which feels more like a bag of tricks than a carefully thought-out production. It also feels like a vehicle for two biggish stars, Christina Ricci (as Hermia) and Bebe Neuwirth (doubling as Titania and Hippolyta), neither of whom appears to be at ease with the unsparing demands of classical acting. On the other hand, just about everybody in the cast is trying way, way too hard, going for easy laughs like a purse-snatcher goes for little old ladies with great big handbags.
Be patient: Things start looking up as soon as the sleeping lovers are discovered in the enchanted wood and Puck (Taylor Mac) pulls the donkey's head off Bottom (Steven Skybell) and turns him back into a human being. Mr. Skybell describes Bottom's dream with sweetly wide-eyed bemusement, after which he and his fellow "rude mechanicals" enact "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe," Shakespeare's brutal parody of a rustic staging of a classical tragedy, with a gentle gravity that is surprising in just the right way....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: ...must go on
My "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal reflects on the rarity of good novels whose principal characters are professional musicians. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Of all the major branches of human endeavor, the one that figures least prominently in serious fiction may be music making. I doubt there have been more than a dozen English-language novels of indisputable significance in which one or more of the central characters was a professional musician, and fewer still in which those characters were portrayed in a way that other musicians would find convincing....
I can think of only two novelists who wrote about music as though they were musicians, even though they weren't. One is Patrick O'Brian, the author of a much-loved series of adventure novels about Jack Aubrey, an early 19th-century British sea captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship's surgeon and best friend. Both men are devoted amateur musicians, and Mr. O'Brian brilliantly suggested the rough gusto with which they made music in between battles on the high seas.
The other novelist is Kingsley Amis, who threw critics off the scent by making the anti-hero of his first novel, "Lucky Jim" (1954), a culture-hating philistine who claimed to despise all forms of music, at one point going so far as to refer to the greatest of all classical composers as "filthy Mozart." Needless to say, nobody who truly loathed Mozart would bother to hurl such abuse at him, and you can't read far in "Lucky Jim" (which will be reprinted later this year by New York Review Books) without sensing that Jim knows quite a bit more about music than he's letting on.
Mr. Amis wrote two more novels in which he revealed himself completely. "The Alteration," published and set in 1976, is the story of Hubert Anvil, a boy soprano who lives in a parallel universe in which the Protestant Reformation never happened. Not only is Western Europe entirely Catholic, but it is still common for talented young male singers to be castrated so that their voices will never change, and Pope John XXIV, a Yorkshireman, wants Hubert to become the soprano soloist of the Vatican choir...permanently.
Even more striking is "Girl, 20" (1971), whose principal character, Sir Roy Vandervane, is a Leonard Bernstein-like conductor who is in the throes of a midlife crisis that has led him to lust after a 17-year-old hippie. When not chasing his teenage mistress, Sir Roy pursues his trade, and everything he says about it is squarely on the mark....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
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TT: On the air
I'm one of the guests on this week's episode of Theater Talk. Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, and I will be talking about the Broadway season just past with Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins. The episode will air on New York's CUNY-TV at eight-thirty tonight, with additional showings on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
For more information, or to view the episode in streaming video, go here.
(This telecast was taped prior to my mother's death.)
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TT: Almanac
Without you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.Elinor Wylie, "Little Elegy" (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)
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May 10, 2012
TT: Down a country lane
My mother loved to be taken for a drive in the country. We rarely went anywhere in particular, just as we rarely talked about anything in particular. She was content simply to ride along, chatting idly about the scenery and reminiscing about this and that. Somewhere along the way we'd stop for ice cream, and by the time we got home, she was perfectly happy.
It was on one of the last of these afternoon drives that I got a call from my agent in New York telling me that Satchmo at the Waldorf would be produced by Shakespeare & Company, a coincidence that delighted my mother (not to mention my agent) no end.
Our final outing was in November. By then my mother was so weak that I had to prop her up with one hand while steering with the other. Even so, she was visibly overjoyed to see the byways of southeast Missouri one last time.
Today I set out alone, driving down the back roads that my mother had loved so well, and I did in solitude what I had been unable to do at her funeral. Grief embraced me, and I mourned her loss.
And so goodbye.
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TT: In memoriam, Evelyn Teachout (IV)
Jim Hall and Ron Carter play "Skylark":
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