Archives for March 5, 2004

Our Girl has landed at LaGuardia and is en route to the home office of “About Last Night” via psychotic cabby. Lunch will follow. Additional blogging will follow that. Paul Taylor will follow that.

In other news, I await the imminent arrival on my doorstep of the first finished copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. I held up the dust jacket at Wednesday’s artsjournal.com get-together, and there were cheers. I’m hoping to be able to show off the Thing Itself to OGIC.

Watch this space for bulletins.

These three words, when used in the same paragraph, automatically turn my ears off:

(1) Offended

(2) Demand

(3) Apologize

It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, holding forth on Lincoln Center’s new production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer, plus an off-Broadway show, Tristine Skyler’s highly touted The Moonlight Room.

Lear didn’t do much for me:

I confess to not being much of a fan of Jonathan Miller, who has always struck me as rather too smart for his own theatrical good. That’s more or less how I’d sum up this well-bred, largely uninvolving “Lear,” which runs through April 18 on a limited schedule of performances. Shakespeare was no intellectual, and his plays don’t benefit from “thoughtful” stagings. Mr. Miller may think he’s given us a Shakespearean-style soap opera, but in his hands “King Lear” comes off more like a slide show on the perils of bad estate planning.

I had sharply mixed feelings about The Moonlight Room, but not about its young star:

As for Laura Breckenridge, she’s definitely worth watching. Like Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” the TV series that perfectly captured the same youthful anxieties Ms. Skyler has sought to put on stage, Ms. Breckenridge is a dark-eyed, tense-looking young woman whose very pores ooze adolescent angst. If she can play other parts as well as she plays this one, we’ll be seeing more of her. Totally.

No link. Buy the damn paper, O.K.?

Would you go see any of these plays, based on the way they’re described in their press releases?

– “A stylized, irreverent romantic comedy about loneliness and isolation

“Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn’t quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn’t really fill.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

As of mid-afternoon Friday, the activities of “About Last Night” will be temporarily centralized. Our Girl in Chicago is en route for a three-day visit to see the Teachout Museum and other cultural goodies. She’ll be doing a bit of blogging from here, and–brace yourself–her secret identity will be revealed to Supermaud in a ritual ceremony from which some participants may not return.

Me, I’ll be hacking away all weekend at the you-know-what, just like always, though I plan to pry myself away from the iBook long enough to take OGIC to a couple of cool performances. You’ll hear about it all in good time.

For now, here are some links to whisk you into the weekend:

– This one’s spreading across the Web like kudzu, with (alas) good reason. From L.A. Observed:

Here’s why reporters want newspaper corrections to make clear that an editor is at fault for an error introduced to their copy. Last week, the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed filed a review of the opera “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.

Swed was reportedly mortified, since the opera is not remotely about abortion….

There’s more–and believe it or not, it gets worse. Read the whole thing here.

In case you were wondering why I blog–and why the blogosphere is rapidly becoming a major center of serious arts writing–there’s your answer.

– Says Reflections in D Minor:

I was fascinated with Bolero for a short time when I was just beginning to explore classical music but it quickly became boring and then seriously annoying. Now it is one of the few pieces of classical music that I truly hate….

Actually, Bolero is kind of cool, at least in theory. But I had to play the bass part in a college performance–the same two notes, over and over again, for about six weeks, or maybe ten–and since then I’ve been unable to listen to it.

– Courtesy of Cinetrix, a chunk of Alistair Macaulay’s recent Times Literary Supplement piece about Fred and Ginger:

It’s dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet is being broadcast live, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles….

Is that perhaps coming it a bit high? Um…no.