Archives for May 14, 2004

As those who know me are all too well aware, I harbor a number of variously morbid notions about work, the worst one being that I feel obliged to do it all the time. A blog is a dangerously efficient way to feed these notions, which is why I finally came to my senses and decided to stop posting on weekends. That, however, was only a start. On Wednesday night, I began Phase Two of my personal program of blog-related mental hygeine: I shut off my computer at 10:45 and didn’t turn it on again until Thursday morning. I’ve learned from experience that when I come home from a performance and go straight to my iBook, I invariably end up blogging, surfing, and e-mailing until two or three in the morning, a habit incompatible with long life. So I went cold turkey on Wednesday, and I’m doing the same thing today. The postings you’re reading now were written late Thursday afternoon and stored for publication on Friday. From now on, this computer is going to sleep no later than eleven o’clock each night, followed by its owner.

Needless to say, this may mean…oh, hell, I don’t have to explain myself, right? Repeat after me: The computer is my enemy. That’s my new mantra. Most likely I’ll post something or other every weekday, but it may not be waiting for you first thing in the morning. Instead, I’m going to blog when I blog, and you’ll read it when you read it, and we’ll both be happier. Cool?

“Those who can do, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach work in television.”

Sparkle Hayter, What’s a Girl Gotta Do

It’s Friday, so I’m in The Wall Street Journal, reporting on revivals of two oft-reworked shows. The first is Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, about which I had mostly but not entirely negative things to say:

Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul,” now playing through May 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Harvey Theater, runs for four hours (with two intermissions) and starts off with an hour-long monologue. That’s too damn long, even for an especially well-made play, which “Homebody/Kabul” isn’t. It is, in fact, three or four plays, none of them well made or mutually compatible, scrambled together into a rambling torrent of verbiage that goes on and on and on.

Would that a machete had been applied to Mr. Kushner’s much-revised script, for somewhere amid the domestic melodrama and arch drawing-room comedy is a strong, serious, intellectually challenging play about Islamic fundamentalism and its discontents, one in which the author of “Angels in America” contrives to steer cleer of the agree-with-me-or-burn-in-hell hysterics that are his number-one dramaturgical vice. Alas, his number-two vice, as “Angels in America” proved and “Homebody/Kabul” demonstrates yet again, is that he has no sense of proportion….

The second was the New York Philharmonic’s semi-staged concert version (now closed, alas) of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which I loved, not least for its Cunegonde:

I was overjoyed to learn that the New York Philharmonic was presenting a semi-staged concert version directed by Lonny Price (“Master Harold…and the boys”) and featuring a mixed cast of Broadway stars and opera singers. Might this perhaps be the perfectly gauged compromise that hitherto had eluded “Candide” buffs? Not quite–but almost.

Kristin Chenoweth, who took a week off from “Wicked” to appear in “Candide,” was the best of all possible Cunegondes, not excluding Barbara Cook, who created the role. Cunegonde, Candide’s shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for “Glitter and Be Gay,” her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat. I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star. Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and…well, let’s just say I’m no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth. After “Glitter and Be Gay,” I wouldn’t have boggled if she’d picked up the baton and conducted the second act….

No link. To read the whole thing, buy the paper. That’s what I do every Friday!

I kept my promise–I shut off the iBook at eleven o’clock last night and didn’t boot up again until after breakfast. Nor will I blog a single word this coming weekend. To all those who wrote to cheer me on in my newfound resolve, many thanks.

Now, on to yesterday’s art:

• I saw The Two and Only, Jay Johnson’s one-man show about his life as a ventriloquist, which I’ll be reviewing in next week’s Wall Street Journal.

• I spent a good chunk of the afternoon looking at a pair of shows currently up at one of my favorite Upper East Side art spots, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries (20 E. 79th St., through June 25). Downstairs is a delightful single-room display of early paintings by Corot. Upstairs is “Constable’s Skies,” a museum-quality exhibition consisting of two dozen cloud studies and finished paintings by John Constable, including several museum loans. Salander-O’Reilly is billing it as “the first sky studies show by John Constable in the United States,” which I think is right. In any case, it’s a dazzler. The paintings of clouds made by Constable in 1821 and 1822 rank high among his most compelling works, all the more so because so many of them seem to border on abstraction. (In fact, they’re so literally representational that Constable actually inscribed the date, time of day, and weather conditions on the backs of the canvases.)

I almost hate to blog about “Constable’s Skies,” since Our Girl is a huge Constable fan who will be royally vexed by its presence in New York, she being stuck in Chicago for the immediate future. The good news is that there’s an excellent catalogue, though so far it hasn’t yet turned up on amazon.com. When it does, I’ll post a link.

• I’m rereading Charlton Heston’s In the Arena: An Autobiography. Kindly omit boggling: In the Arena is one of the very few books by a movie star that is both intelligent and well-written. (Heston wrote it without benefit of a ghost, I might add–you can tell by the literary idiosyncrasies, including a decidedly shaky grasp of the Theory of the Parenthesis). Not only does Heston shed considerable light on the complex craft of film acting, but he was a class-A raconteur who dishes up polished anecdotes at every possible opportunity. Here’s one of my favorites, a story about Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, in which Heston played a Ringling Bros. manager:

DeMille and the circus was a marriage made in movie heaven. He picked up his Oscar for Best Picture the following spring, and I got an enormous boost in my career. When I went into his office the next morning to congratulate him, he said, “Chuck, you’ve gotten some fine personal notices for this picture, but I want to read you one that may be the best review you’ll ever get in your life.”

He then read me a letter from a man who was enchanted with the picture. DeMille had caught not only the look but the feel of the circus perfectly. The cast was wonderful, especially Jimmy Stewart as the clown. Betty Hutton had never been better, nor had Cornel Wilde. “And I was amazed,” the writer concluded, “at how well the circus manager did in there with the real actors.”

Isn’t that a wonderful story?

• Now playing on iTunes: Bill Evans’ recording of Alex North’s “Love Theme from Spartacus,” a track from Conversations with Myself, the 1963 album on which Evans plays three pianos simultaneously, two of them overdubbed. (Somehow it seemed appropriate–I’m currently reading the Ben-Hur chapter of In the Arena.)

• “Love Theme from Spartacus,” by the way, was my introduction to Evans, back when I was a junior in high school, and I’ll never forget the shock of hearing the exquisitely commingled arpeggios with which it begins. This is the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, I said to myself, and though I’ve heard a lot more music since then, I doubt I’ve heard anything more beautiful.

• On which note I’m off in search of further adventures. See you Monday.