Archives for May 21, 2004

I don’t usually reprint fan letters, but I got one about A Terry Teachout Reader that I had to share with all of you:

I just finished reading your outstanding book of essays and wanted to thank you for an unadulterated pleasure of a read.

You are currently my Fairfield Porter.

Thanks again for an act of literary kindness and beauty.

I’m still smiling.

Which reminds me: Harcourt’s on-line catalogue now includes a page for All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. Click on the link and you’ll get to see the dust jacket. I think it’s as good as the one for the Teachout Reader!

I’ve been out of town sans computer, accompanied by a change of shirt and two books, Michael Kennedy’s Portrait of Elgar and the first volume of the Library of America’s forthcoming set of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories, both of which I’m reading at the behest of Commentary.

Portrait of Elgar is an old friend–I’m revisiting it in preparation for writing an essay on Sir Edward Elgar, whom I’ve never before had occasion to discuss at length in print. He’s one of my favorite composers, and I’m trying to make sense out of the peculiar fact that his music has never been popular outside England. As for Singer, I’ve been up to my ears in his early stories, some but not all of which I knew. Not to tip my hand too far, but the author of whom he reminds me most strongly is Flannery O’Connor! About which much more later this summer….

In the meantime, I’ve got a couple of hundred e-mails to answer and three shows to see between now and Sunday, so I doubt you’ll be hearing from me again until next week, when I’ll file a report on my latest adventures in the world of art. In addition to seeing Here Lies Jenny, Chinese Friends, and Sight Unseen, I hope to visit a few galleries on Saturday, and maybe even listen to a bit of music!

See you Monday.

“One grows out of pity when it’s useless.”

Albert Camus, The Plague

I just this minute got back to New York and rushed to my waiting iBook to post “About Last Night”‘s weekly Wall Street Journal drama-page teaser. Today I reviewed a pair of off-Broadway one-person shows, Jay Johnson’s The Two and Only and Sarah Jones’ bridge & tunnel.

I liked The Two and Only without reservations:

Mr. Johnson is a ventriloquist (readers with long memories will remember him from the TV series “Soap”), and “The Two and Only” is a show-and-tell reminiscence of his life and work. He loves what he does, and so far as I could tell from “The Two and Only,” he is as well-adjusted as a man who talks to wooden dummies can hope to be. What’s more, Mr. Johnson is both extremely funny and a super-virtuoso of his mysterious craft. At one point he actually dispenses with props and “throws” his disembodied, wraith-like voice into thin air, a trick so impressive that I’m still agog at the memory of it….

As a boy, Mr. Johnson marveled at the witty ventriloquists who frequented the TV variety shows of yesteryear. Those shows are long gone, but Jay Johnson is still here, throwing his voice in all directions and making case-hardened Manhattan audiences laugh themselves silly without resort to cynicism or vulgarity (except for one FCC-disapproved word whose precisely timed detonation caused the audience to laugh so hard that I briefly feared for the roof of the Atlantic Theater). It says in the program that he “dreamed of this one-man show for most of his life.” I couldn’t be happier that his dream has finally come true.

I liked bridge & tunnel enormously, too, albeit with one important qualification:

The vibrant physicality of Ms. Jones’ nonstop body-snatching is if anything even more exciting than her uncanny ear for accents. I couldn’t take my eyes off her large hands, which she can transform in an instant from the air-sculpting precision tools of a mime to the palsied, trembling claws of an old woman. She’d be fun to watch even if she weren’t funny to hear, and her loving parodies of the sort of verse you’d be likely to hear at a meeting of Immigrant and Multiculturalist American Poets or Enthusiasts Traveling Toward Optimistic Openness (that’s I.A.M.A.P.O.E.T.T.O.O. for short) rarely fail to hit the target dead center.

I liked “bridge & tunnel” so much that I almost hate to point out that it is a risk-free, feel-good show masquerading as a hard-hitting piece of political theater. Ms. Jones would be a better playwright had she dared to challenge her viewers’ preconceptions by including even one unsympathetic character in her “cast.” Instead, the nominally diverse immigrants in “bridge & tunnel” are all staunch downtown liberals, none of whom would think of uttering a politically incorrect word about any subject whatsoever….

No link. If you want to read the whole thing (and I hope you do), buy Friday’s Journal. I’m there, together with a whole lot of other good stuff.