Archives for April 25, 2004

“Never play a guy at his own game; nobody makes up a game in order to get beat at it.”

Charlie Goldman, quoted in A. J. Liebling, The Sweet Science

I’m coming up on one of my four-deadline weeks. The difference is that after what I went through finishing the Balanchine book, I’m not eager to strip any more of my gears with overwork. Theater-wise, this is the busiest time of the season–every producer in town is trying to open a show in time to be eligible for the Tony Awards–so I’m seeing three plays a week on top of my usual hectic performance-going schedule. That’s why I decided not to blog yesterday (and kept my promise, glory be!), and it’s why you won’t be hearing much from me today, either.

Nevertheless, I do have enough steam in the boiler to let you know what I’ve been up to lately. To wit:

– I saw a press preview of the new Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, starring Phylicia Rashad, Audra MacDonald and Sean “Formerly Known as Puffy” Combs (what’s wrong with this picture?), which I’ll be covering in Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

– Courtesy of the Fox Movie Channel and my trusty digital video recorder, I watched the first part of Panic in the Streets (1950), a noirish Elia Kazan film in which Richard Widmark plays a totally good guy, a health inspector trying to keep New Orleans from being decimated by an outbreak of pneumonic plague. It’s pretty good (though I don’t know when I’ll have time to see the rest of it), but I can’t get over the sheer strangeness of Widmark’s being on the side of the angels. Like Dan Duryea, he’s one of those black-and-white actors who seems to have a crack down the middle, and I keep waiting for him to slap a dame around.

– Today I embark on my biennial rereading of W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson, my favorite modern biography. No special reason–I just looked at my bookshelves yesterday, hoping that a spine would cry out to me, and all at once I thought that it’d be good to spend a little time with my hero, Dr. Johnson.

– I showed the Teachout Museum to a friend yesterday, the same one with whom I’d just seen A Raisin in the Sun She had an interesting and unexpected reaction: “I don’t even like modern art, but I like this.” Even more surprisingly, she was especially taken with Joan Mitchell’s Tree, a multicolored abstract-expressionist lithographic portrayal of…a tree. (No matter how many times they’ve looked at my prints, I always ask my guests which one they like best today.)

– Now playing on iTunes: David Rose’s “Our Waltz,” played in the manner of Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana” by George Shearing and the Robert Farnon Orchestra (it’s on How Beautiful is Night). Not a few of my jazz-loving friends find Shearing’s orchestra-accompanied albums to be just this side of kitschy, but this one is iridescently soothing.

And now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I’m going to get breakfast, write a review (not of breakfast!), then go see the first of two performances, one or more of which will likely find its way into my Washington Post column next Sunday. Watch this space for details.