May 24, 2013
TT: Truth is scarier
In today's Wall Street Journal I review two major off-Broadway revivals of Conor McPherson's The Weir and Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder. The first is extraordinary, the second very problematic. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
Theater starts with storytelling, of which ghost stories are the most primal kind. This helps to explain the long-lasting appeal of Conor McPherson's "The Weir," whose successful 1999 Broadway run introduced New York playgoers to the most admired Irish playwright of his generation. "The Weir" consists of four ghost stories told by a quartet of drinkers who find themselves spending a stormy evening together at a rural Irish pub. On the surface, that's all there is to it, but scratch the surface and "The Weir" proves to be a profound meditation on the twin themes of loneliness and community, told so theatrically that you'll savor each peat-scented phrase. The trick is to get the details right, and the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival, staged with sure-footed simplicity by Ciarán O'Reilly, is totally believable. From the inch-thick brogues of the actors to the neon signs on the walls of the barroom set, it's as convincing as a deathbed confession.
Deceptive simplicity is the hallmark of "The Weir," which has just five characters, a bartender (Billy Carter), three regulars (Dan Butler, Sean Gormley and John Keating) and an outsider, a young woman named Valerie (Tessa Klein) who has moved to the rural village where the play is set to find peace and quiet. Small-town life, of course, is never as quiet as it looks from the outside--Mr. McPherson hints at the daily vexations that arise from seeing the same small group of people day after day after day--but Valerie has brought her own turmoil with her, and no sooner do her new friends tell their elaborate stories of spooky doings than she ups the ante with a tale of terror that turns out to be both true and tragic.
"The Weir" is carefully structured to build up to Valerie's big scene, and Ms. Klein knows how to deliver the payoff. Even during the first part of the play, when she does little but react shyly to the other characters, your eye keeps flicking to her, and you won't be able to look anywhere else once she takes center stage....
John Turturro is an actor so distinctive in style that he can easily swamp a play to which he isn't closely suited. While he couldn't have been better as the pathetically ludicrous Lopakhin of Andrei Belgrader's 2011 Classic Stage Company revival of "The Cherry Orchard," the two men have fired wide of the target with Henrik Ibsen's "The Master Builder," in which Mr. Turturro plays an aging architect whose comfortable life is disrupted by a surprise visit from a pretty nymphet (Wrenn Schmidt) with mayhem on her mind. The seven members of the cast are all highly accomplished performers, but no two of them seem to be acting in the same show, and Ibsen's uneasy but thought-provoking mixture of naturalism and symbolism (who is that girl, anyway?) has been transformed by Mr. Belgrader into a cartoonish stage portrayal of a midlife crisis...
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for The Weir:
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Modernism and the test of time
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I reflect on two recent opera productions, one modern and the other postmodern. Here's an excerpt.
* * *
The Metropolitan Opera recently presented a three-performance run of "Dialogues of the Carmelites," Francis Poulenc's 1957 opera about a group of nuns who were guillotined in the French Revolution. It was a revival of John Dexter's 1977 production, not a new staging, but I didn't hear anyone complaining. Mr. Dexter's "Dialogues" is universally regarded by connoisseurs as one of the Met's greatest theatrical achievements....
In a way, "Dialogues" is a kind of operatic time capsule. Long an international byword for artistic conservatism, the Met was notoriously slow to embrace contemporary stagecraft. Not so the modern-minded Mr. Dexter, who had become the company's director of productions in 1974 and was endeavoring to update its creaky style. The stark, monumental-looking set for "Dialogues," which was designed by the late David Reppa, was a slap in the face to old-fashioned operagoers who preferred big, fancy sets with imitation trees. Today it looks classic...
I thought of the Met's "Dialogues" when I read about Burkhard C. Kosminski's recent Deutsche Oper am Rhein production of Richard Wagner's "Tannhäuser," a postmodern staging that was set in the Nazi era. Yes, there were gas chambers, and yes, the public was so scandalized that the company responded by scrapping the production....
Not having seen Mr. Kosminski's "Tannhäuser," I can't say whether it was any good or not. Nor am I reflexively averse to productions of the classics that seek to update them in provocative ways. (The funniest "As You Like It" that I've ever seen, Kurt Rhoads' 2007 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production, was mounted in the style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western.) But I've suffered through more than enough second- and third-rate postmodern opera stagings to be suspicious of any director who thinks that it's a smart idea to turn "Tannhäuser" into a Holocaust-themed exercise in Irony Lite....
What has always struck me about the Met's staging of "Dialogues of the Carmelites," by contrast, is its straightforward, unironic seriousness of tone. Messrs. Dexter and Reppa made no attempt whatsoever to superimpose an alien directorial concept on Poulenc's tragic tale of martyrdom. Instead they used the visual language of modernism to tell the terrible tale of the Carmelite nuns in as direct and universal a way as possible--and 36 years after the fact, the results still look timelessly true....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"'But Larry,' she smiled. 'People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they'd have been answered by now.'
"Larry chuckled.
"'Don't laugh as if I'd said something idiotic,' she said sharply.
"'On the contrary I think you've said something shrewd. But on the other hand you might say that if men have been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can't help asking them and have to go on asking them.'"
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 23, 2013
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:
• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, closes Aug. 11, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Sept. 1, reviewed here)
• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes July 28, original production 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)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Coriolanus (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Pal Joey (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen."
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 22, 2013
TT: Snapshot
Benno Moiseiwitsch plays excerpts from Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op. 12:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"I only wanted to suggest to you that self-sacrifice is a passion so overwhelming that beside it even lust and hunger are trifling. It whirls its victim to destruction in the highest affirmation of his personality. The object doesn't matter; it may be worthwhile or it may be worthless. No wine is more intoxicating, no love so shattering, no vice so compelling."
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 21, 2013
TT: Excelsior!
In 2010 Mrs. T and I moved to Hudson Heights, the highest natural point on the island of Manhattan. To get there from Washington Heights, you have to ascend a steep staircase, and in the spring of 2011 I incorporated it into my daily walk. Nothing could possibly have been better for a middle-aged man of decidedly sedentary habits. Alas, the winter just past was so miserable and prolonged that I fell off the wagon and gave up walking altogether. Today, though, spring returned to New York with so decisive a splash of sunshine that I put on my walking shoes and hit the road again.
I snapped this picture as I stood at the foot of the staircase, preparing to bite the bullet. You'll note the presence of an ambulance from our neighborhood hospital. It wasn't there for me, nor did I need it when I got to the top of the stairs, but it did serve as a pointed reminder of why I walk.
No, it wasn't easy for me to slog up those one hundred and twenty-eight steps after so long a layoff. Nevertheless, I did it--and I plan to do it again tomorrow.
* * *
The Ahmad Jamal Trio plays "Spring Is Here" in 1955:
Posted at 12:14 PM | permalink | email this entry
TT: The face of Duke
Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books just sent me the final version of the front cover of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. I posted an earlier version a couple of months ago, but the new image is the real thing: Duke will look like this when you see it in bookstores in October.
It was Steven Lasker, the great Ellington scholar-collector, who first showed me this rarely reproduced image and suggested that it would make an ideal cover for Duke, not only because it's so visually striking but because it shows the scar on Ellington's left cheek more clearly than any other photograph I know. Ellington acquired that scar in 1929, not long before he made his sound-film debut in Black and Tan, and in Duke I explain how he got it.
Here's the story, straight from the as-yet-unpublished pages of Duke. It is, if I do say so myself, quite a tale.
* * *
Black and Tan marked--literally--a transition in Ellington's private life. From 1929 on his left cheek bore a prominent crescent-shaped scar that is easily visible in the film's last scene (and in the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book). Though rarely mentioned by journalists, it made fans curious enough that he felt obliged to "explain" its presence in Music Is My Mistress, his autobiography:
I have four stories about it, and it depends on which you like the best. One is a taxicab accident; another is that I slipped and fell on a broken bottle; then there is a jealous woman; and last is Old Heidelberg, where they used to stand toe to toe with a saber in each hand, and slash away. The first man to step back lost the contest, no matter how many times he'd sliced the other. Take your pick.None of Ellington's friends and colleagues was in doubt about which one to pick. In Irving Mills's words, "Women was one of the highlights in his life. He had to have women....He always had a woman, always kept a woman here, kept a woman there, always had somebody." Most men who treat women that way are destined to suffer at their hands sooner or later, if not necessarily in so sensational a fashion as Ellington, whose wife attacked him with a razor when she found out that he was sleeping with another woman.
Who was she? All signs point to Fredi Washington. The costar of Black and Tan had launched her theatrical career in 1922 as a dancer in the chorus of the original production of Eubie Blake's Shuffle Along. Sonny Greer later described her as "the most beautiful woman" he had ever seen. "She had gorgeous skin, perfect features, green eyes, and a great figure. When she smiled, that was it!" Washington was light enough to pass for white but adamantly refused to do so, a decision that made it impossible for her to establish herself in Hollywood, though she appeared with Paul Robeson in Dudley Murphy's 1933 film of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (for which her skin was darkened with makeup) and starred in Imitation of Life, a 1934 tearjerker in which she played, with mortifying predictability, a light-skinned black who passed for white.
Ellington never spoke on the record about their romantic involvement, but Washington later admitted to the film historian Donald Bogle that she and Ellington had been lovers: "I just had to accept that he wasn't going to marry me. But I wasn't going to be his mistress." Their relationship was widely known at the time in the entertainment world, enough so that Mercer Ellington could write in his 1979 memoir of "a torrid love affair Pop had with a very talented and beautiful woman, an actress. I think this was a genuine romance, that there was love on both sides, and that it amounted to one of the most serious relationships of his life."
Edna, Ellington's wife, was no more forthcoming than Duke, saying only that she was "hurt, bad hurt when the breakup came" and referring to the affair in an interview published in Ebony in 1959 with an obliqueness worthy of her wayward husband: "Ellington thought I should have been more understanding of him....Any young girl who plans to marry a man in public life--a man who belongs to the public--should try to understand as much about the demands of show business first and not be like I was." In point of fact, though, her lack of "understanding" extended to slashing her husband's face. That she did so is certain, but nothing else is definitely known about the assault. "Something happened between [Ellington] and his wife and he's been terrible with women ever since," Lawrence Brown said. "I mean, like he's always trying to make somebody's wife, because somebody made his wife and they got in such a fight, that slash he has on the side of his face, she cut him while he was sleeping, with a razor."
Brown was a presumptively biased witness, since he later married Fredi, becoming one of a number of Ellington sidemen (five, Mercer claimed) who took up with their boss's ex-girlfriends at one time or another. But Barney Bigard also testified that the Ellingtons were mutually unfaithful, describing Edna's boyfriend as "quite a figure in the music world." Regarding the act itself, an unnamed "close friend" of Ellington told a biographer that Edna had vowed to "spoil those pretty looks" before cutting him, a secondhand account that is obviously unverifiable but nonetheless sounds believable....
Posted at 10:03 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Lookback
From 2005:
Somewhere along the way, I muttered the all-too-familiar mantra of the busy New Yorker returned from a brief visit to elsewhere: It isn't worth it. You might as well stay home. Only I knew better. Even when you leave town on business, as I did this past weekend, at least you're somewhere else. No, it's not a vacation, but it's different, a stick of dynamite that blasts you out of your accustomed ways of doing things. Instead of dining on the Upper West Side and hailing a cab at exactly 7:20, I visit unfamiliar restaurants, sleep in unfamiliar beds, see actors I've never seen before, meet and greet new faces. I come home refreshed and inspired...and then I sit down at the kitchen table and start tearing open envelopes.Read the whole thing here.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"I saw a tall man, evidently an Englishman, come in with a young rough. He had the long, washed-out face with thinning wavy hair of the British intellectual and evidently suffered from the delusion common to many that when you are abroad no one you know at home can possibly recognize you."
Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 20, 2013
TT: In the beginning
When Mrs. T and I went to see Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera last week, the program contained a New York City Ballet ad that was illustrated by a still photograph of the finale from George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments, a ballet choreographed in 1946 to a score that Balanchine had commissioned six years earlier from Paul Hindemith. No sooner did my eye fall on the page than my mind filled with memories. I think that The Four Ts (as it is known to dancers and dance buffs) is the greatest of all ballets, and one of the greatest works of art of any kind, in any genre. I've seen it more often than any other ballet, and I've never done so without seeing new things in it.
I love what Jerome Robbins said about the coda of The Four Temperaments: "At the end, where there are those great soaring lifts, I always feel as if I am watching some momentous departure--like interplanetary travellers taking their leave of the world." This is what I wrote about the same moment in All in the Dances, my Balanchine biography: "To me, it is as if I have beheld the working out of a fearsomely complex equation whose triumphant solution causes the universe to explode into being."
If seeing a ballet can change your life, then The Four Temperaments changed mine. In the fall of 1987 I saw a PBS documentary about Balanchine that contained excerpts from several of his ballets, including a lengthy sequence from "Melancholic," the second section of The Four Temperaments. I was so fascinated by it--as I had already been fascinated by what Arlene Croce wrote about Balanchine in her New Yorker dance reviews--that I resolved to see for myself what his works looked like in the theater.
What followed was an instantaneous conversion: I bought a cheap seat for a New York City Ballet performance a few weeks later, and before the year was out, I was hanging out with dance critics and writing about dance for the late, lamented New Dance Review. Who would have thought that seventeen years later, I would write a Balanchine biography? Life is full of unimaginable surprises.
New York City Ballet taped a performance of The Four Temperaments for PBS in 1977, and it has since been released on home video. But Smalltown, U.S.A., was far beyond the reach of public television in 1977, and so I had to wait another decade before discovering Balanchine. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like had I seen The Four Ts on TV when I was eleven years old.
Mr. B, as his dancers called him, has been on my mind ever since I reviewed Richard Nelson's Nikolai and the Others, in which Michael Cerveris, one of my favorite actors, plays the choreographer. I had various problems with the script, but none with Cerveris, and watching him on stage filled me with an overwhelming desire to see Balanchine's choreography in the theater again.
Mrs. T, sad to say, has seen next to no Balanchine--we met after my duties as a drama critic made it difficult for me to attend dance performances--and so I checked the NYCB calendar and saw that the company will be dancing three of the best ones, Concerto Barocco, Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and Stars and Stripes on June 9. We'll be there.
Would that The Four Ts were on the bill, but this program will do quite nicely, especially since Barocco was the first dance that I saw on that fateful night in 1987 when I made Mr. B's acquaintance. It'll be nice to see it again, and nicer still to introduce it to Mrs. T. All pleasures are better when they're shared.
* * *
Choreography by Balanchine, Part One, originally telecast on PBS in 1977. The works performed are Tzigane, an excerpt from Divertimento No. 15, and The Four Temperaments:
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Just because
Donald Wolfit and Hildegarde Knef in a scene from Svengali, the 1954 film version of George Du Maurier's novel, written and directed by Noel Langley:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"The author should shut his mouth when his work opens its mouth."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed Opinions and Maxims (courtesy of Alex Ross)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 17, 2013
TT: "Thus I turn my back"
Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to a Washington show, the Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production of Coriolanus. Here's a excerpt.
* * *
Why has "Coriolanus" never been popular? It's only been mounted once on Broadway--in 1938. The last time that I reviewed a production in this space was eight years ago. Yet connoisseurs need no reminding of the immense stature of Shakespeare's most explicitly political play. T.S. Eliot ranked "Coriolanus" above "Hamlet," calling it "Shakespeare's most assured artistic success." A man I know who used to work for one of America's best-known politicians claims that it's one of only two pieces of literary art that tells the whole truth about politics (the other, he says, is "All the King's Men"). And if you should be lucky enough to see Shakespeare Theatre Company's new production, directed by David Muse and featuring a towering performance by Patrick Page, you'll come away wondering why it doesn't get done regularly by every drama company in America....
Mr. Muse has opted for a modified modern-dress staging ("suits and swords," in his neat phrase) that eschews cheap political point-making. He's gunning for bigger game. He understands that "Coriolanus" is not about any particular politician, or any particular war: Its real subject is pride. Is there room in a democracy for an aristocrat like Coriolanus who refuses to play the popularity game? Or is it his duty to don the hypocrite's mask in order to serve the greater good? Shakespeare leaves it to us to decide, and so does Mr. Muse.
All of which brings us to Mr. Page, who is known on Broadway as a specialist in villainy. In recent seasons he's done the dirty in "Cyrano de Bergerac," "A Man for All Seasons" and "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark," in which he played, of all things, the Green Goblin. But he's no second banana: Mr. Page is one of this country's leading classical actors, and in "Coriolanus" he shows you everything he's got, starting with a resplendent bass voice so well placed that he can fill the theater with a whisper, then make your seat shake. He is, in the very best sense of the word, an old-fashioned actor who has no fear of the grand gesture....
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Of all the cants that are canted in this world, though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting."
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 16, 2013
TT: In the mirror
Gotham Books sent me the "first-pass pages" of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington yesterday afternoon. Translated into English, that means a two-inch stack of photocopied pages containing the typeset text of Duke, fully designed and copyedited but as yet uncorrected by me. You may have heard these pages referred to as "page proofs," a term that I'm still in the habit of using.
No matter how many books you've seen through the press, you always feel a surge of excitement when you get your first look at a set of your own page proofs. (I actually got weak in the knees when I opened the envelope.) Until that moment, you don't know what the text of your book will look like to the people who read it. Then, in an instant, it becomes real--and fresh.
In my case, I spent so much time painstakingly editing and polishing the manuscript of Duke that it eventually went dead on me: I could still follow the text sentence by sentence, but I lost my ability to hear how it sounded. Now that the book is finally set in type, it's come back to life again.
I stayed up late last night reading the page proofs of Duke, and I liked what I read. Needless to say, it helped that they look so good--Elke Sigal's typographical design is flat-out gorgeous, and I'm no less happy with the illustrations--but I'll admit to being equally pleased with the text, at least for now.
To be sure, I doubt that Ellington himself would have cared for the book. He was far too secretive to appreciate a biography that told the truth about his complicated life. As I wrote in the prologue to Duke:
The rage, the humiliation, the unbridled sensuality: All were kept far from prying eyes. His fans saw only what he wished them to see, and nothing more. So did his colleagues. "I think all the musicians should get together one certain day and get down on their knees and thank Duke," said Miles Davis. Yet to Ellington's own musicians, he was a riddle without an answer, an unknowable man who hid behind a high wall of ornate utterances and flowery compliments that grew higher as he grew older.Still, I like to think that Ellington might at least have appreciated the fact that I took his life and work with the utmost seriousness, and tried to write about them in a way that mirrors, however dimly, the beauty of his music.
Can I make Duke even better? Maybe--but not for long. I have two weeks to make my final corrections to the text. After that, I'm done. It's time.
UPDATE: I started correcting the page proofs this afternoon, and the first thing I saw was a mixed metaphor...on the third page. It's going to be a long day.
Posted at 11:48 AM | permalink | email this entry
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:
• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, extended through Aug. 11, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, extended through Sept. 1, reviewed here)
• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, extended through July 28, original production 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)CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:
• Pal Joey (musical, PG-13, closing May 26, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Woman in Mind (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• The Dining Room (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Orphans (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
TT: Almanac
"Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense."
Samuel Johnson, The Idler (June 9, 1759)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
May 15, 2013
TT: Snapshot
"The Cat Concerto," directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, released in 1947:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Posted at 12:00 AM | permalink | email this entry
