Yesterday afternoon I went to a Brazilian birthday party (my goodness, do those Brazilians know how to have fun!), after which I took the subway to Times Square to catch the opening-night performance of a revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof starring Ashley Judd, Jason Patric, and Ned Beatty as Big Daddy. I’ll be writing about it in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, so I mustn’t jump the gun, but I do have two preliminary observations to make:
(1) Ned Beatty (who got a hats-off review from Ben Brantley in this morning’s Times) is one of the finest character actors in the business. He isn’t famous, but he works all the time, and even if you don’t know him by name, I’ve no doubt that you’d recognize him instantly. He has 123 entries in the Internet Movie Database, starting with Deliverance, though it’d be a shame if he ended up being best remembered for the part he played in that shabby little shocker. When I think of him, it’s as Jack Kellom, the older cop in The Big Easy, one of my favorite not-quite-first-rate movies. Kellom is a quintessential Ned Beatty part, a genial glad-hander who turns out on closer inspection to be both dishonest and weak. I love that kind of two-faced acting, and Beatty is fabulous at it.
Because he’s short, chubby, and moon-faced, Beatty never gets to play film leads, and I gather that this production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is his Broadway debut. Not to give the game away, but it’s damned well about time.
(2) In New York City, drama critics don’t usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience–they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces…from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)
Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?
I got home, blogged a little, and decided I wasn’t sleepy, so I turned on the TV and started surfing. All of a sudden I found myself watching two familiar-looking ballet dancers cavorting around a studio stage, and quickly realized that I was seeing a performance of George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux by Jacques d’Amboise and Melissa Hayden. It was, needless to say, Classic Arts Showcase, the foundation-supported “network” that beams high-culture video snippets free of charge, 24/7, to any station in the world that wants to run them. In New York, they’re shown at irregular intervals on CUNY-TV, the station of the City University of New York, and I see them on occasion, usually in much the same way I did just now–at random, in other words.
To spend a half-hour or so with Classic Arts Showcase is to empty a wildly mixed bag of cultural bits and pieces. The performance of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, for instance, was originally telecast in 1962 on Voice of Firestone, a quintessentially middlebrow network TV series of a sort inconceivable today. Forty years ago it aired in prime time, where it might have been seen by an untold number of youngsters who could have said to themselves, “So this is ballet? Hey, that’s cool.” And so it was.
Next up was an encore, Novacek’s Perpetuum mobile, dazzlingly well-played in 1957 by Nathan Milstein, a very great violinist whose centenary is only a month away. (By an improbable coincidence, I’d just been reading From Russia to the West, Milstein’s witty, outspoken memoirs, and listening to his incomparably aristocratic 1959 recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which you can purchase for the preposterously low price of $3.98 by clicking here.) This clip came from the BBC, which used to present classical music in the most no-nonsense manner imaginable. No fancy sets, no swoopy camerawork, nothing but Milstein, the pianist Ernest Lush, and a page-turner. When did you last see a page-turner on TV?
Ten minutes’ worth of good solid black-and-white high-culture fare–followed by a stiff dose of nonsense. We heard a recording of the first movement of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and saw a painting by Berthe Morisot, across which the camera panned lovingly, tediously, and pointlessly, Morisot and Prokofiev having, so far as I know, nothing whatsoever in common. I lost patience after a half-minute and changed channels, having just been forcibly reminded that even at the height of the middlebrow moment, TV and high culture coexisted uneasily.
Today, long after the death of American middlebrow culture, they scarcely coexist at all, save on random, context-free occasions in the middle of the night. I wonder how many people in New York City saw that clip of Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux? Fifty? A hundred? Surely not much more than that, and probably less. And how many of them knew who Jacques d’Amboise was? Or George Balanchine? Or Tchaikovsky, for that matter?
And so at last to bed, having come to no conclusions whatsoever about the likely fate of Western culture. Fooled you!