Archives for August 2004

“Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it begins.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography

Here’s what I blogged a year and eight days ago:

A funny thing happened on the way to the theater yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, sending one last e-mail before I departed for a Fringe Festival performance of a musical about Robert Blake, when the lights quivered, dimmed, and died. Figuring the power on my Upper West Side block had gone out, I put my shoes on, walked downstairs in the dark, caught a cab…and realized by the time we’d gone 20 blocks that it wasn’t just my neighborhood. Assuming that there wouldn’t be any shows to see that day, I told the cabby to turn around.

Eighteen hours later, here I am, very sweaty and insufficiently slept but otherwise none the worse for wear. The power’s back on in my neighborhood, some of the restaurants are open, and I’m in the process of figuring out what to do next….

I never did get around to seeing that musical about Robert Blake. Instead, I took refuge in a neighbor’s apartment, not caring to be alone, and spent the night listening to a wind-up radio and sweating. Had it not been so hot, it would have been fun. Like most New Yorkers trapped in the blackout of 2003, I’d briefly feared that 9/11 was repeating itself, and once I knew it wasn’t, I was so relieved that nothing else mattered.

A year later, I find myself doing much the same thing, minus the flashlights and candles. I’m sitting at the same desk, clicking away at my iBook and putting into order my first impressions of the five plays I just finished seeing at the New York International Fringe Festival. I’ll be reviewing those plays, and three others, in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, so I mustn’t jump the gun, but I can say that I got quite a bit of pleasure out of my weekend of nonstop playgoing. Unlike last year, the weather in Manhattan has been intermittently temperate, though I did come close to smothering once or twice, few places in the world being less pleasant than a black-box theater without air conditioning on a humid August day. I got caught in a cloudburst on Saturday afternoon–but I don’t mind getting wet. I had to trudge up six flights of steep, slippery stairs to see one show–but I didn’t fall, and in any case I needed the exercise. Most of the seats in which I sat were variously uncomfortable–but there’s nothing like a good show to make you forget a bad seat.

Truth to tell, I love the Fringe Festival, even when it’s not so good. Seeing live actors in a small theater performing a new play by a writer about whom you know nothing can be one of the most exhilarating experiences imaginable. It can also be unutterably tedious, but my batting average so far has been excellent. Either I’m just lucky, or I’m starting to get the hang of picking Fringe shows (I endured a couple of stinkers last year).

I’ve been doing more than perching myself on folding chairs in black-box theaters. Last night, for instance, I went to the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York nightclub, to hear Gene Bertoncini and Michael Moore, who for many years were the best working guitar-bass duo in jazz. Back in the Eighties, they were all but joined at the hip. You could hear them most Sundays at a now-defunct, much-lamented Italian restaurant called Zinno, and they cut a number of first-rate CDs as well. Alas, Bertoncini and Moore called it quits in 1989–Whitney Balliett wrote a lovely New Yorker essay about their decision to part–and though the separation was perfectly friendly, it’s been years since they last played together in a New York club.

Not surprisingly, the Jazz Standard was crawling with musicians all weekend long, it being that kind of place, comfortable and welcoming. (Among those present on Sunday were Peter Washington, Bill Charlap‘s indispensable bassist, and Luciana Souza, who needs no introduction to regular readers of “About Last Night.”) Musicians usually play especially well for their peers, and Bertoncini and Moore obliged with a vengeance, kicking off the first set with a medium-tempo version of Neal Hefti’s “Li’l Darlin'” that swung like the whole Count Basie band rolled into two.

After the set was over, I climbed the stairs to the street and walked a few blocks before hailing a cab, accompanied by two musician friends in no more of a hurry to get home than I was. We headed up Fifth Avenue, refreshed by the unexpectedly cool night air, and gazed with delight at the Empire State Building, whose upper stories were brilliantly lit in green and white in honor of the independence of Pakistan, those being the colors of the Pakistani flag. As we strolled past the shuttered storefronts, looking for all the world like the three happy sailors of On the Town, I remembered a conversation I’d had earlier in the day with another friend. We’d seen a Fringe matinee, then taken high tea at Tea and Sympathy and done some window shopping in Greenwich Village.

“This is absolutely the only place to live,” I told her. “Nowhere else.”

“Oh, I guess it’s all right to visit other places,” she replied. “And you could live somewhere else for six months, if you had to. Or maybe even a year.”

“But only if you don’t give up your lease,” I said firmly.

We giggled, knowing perfectly well that neither one of us had the slightest intention of going anywhere else for more than a week or two.

Were we being heedless? As I thought of our exchange, a familiar stanza that acquired ominous new overtones not so long ago popped unbidden into my head:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

But I shook it off, knowing that I was neither unhappy nor afraid of the cool, clear night. Instead, I was glad to be exactly where I was, living my life instead of waiting for it to begin. I still am. So long as the lights stay on and the music keeps playing, this–right here, right now–is home.

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”

I’ve seen most of Alfred Hitchcock’s major films, but for some reason Rope had eluded me until last week, when it popped up on Turner Classic Movies as part of a Jimmy Stewart marathon. Like most cinephiles, I didn’t find it very impressive, though I was fascinated to see John Dall camping it up as one of the two gotta-be-gay murderers, having only recently watched his straight-down-the-center performance as the hapless bank robber-victim of Gun Crazy.

That said, one thing about Rope struck me quite forcibly. In fact, it astonished me. About ten minutes or so into the first reel, Hitchcock’s wandering camera came to rest in front of a painting hanging in the dining room of the elaborate breakaway set on which Rope was filmed. As Dall and Farley Granger chatted away, I said to myself, “By God, that’s a Milton Avery.” To be exact, it appears to be a portrait of March Avery, the artist’s daughter, painted some time in the mid-to-late Forties. What’s more, it looks like the real thing, not a reproduction. Rope dates from 1948, the same year that Avery made March at a Table, a copy of which hangs in the Teachout Museum. Hence it’s well within the realm of possibility that I saw exactly what I thought I saw.

Why was I surprised? Because one rarely if ever runs across important modern American paintings in Hollywood movies. When a painting is seen in some millionaire’s living room, it’s almost always a fairly obvious copy of a French Impressionist or post-impressionist canvas. To be sure, I’ve spotted mock-Rothkos once or twice, nor is it uncommon to encounter Andy Warhol-type eye candy, but the only bonafide example of high American modernism that I can recall off the top of my head is the Morris Louis that hangs in Walter Matthau’s apartment in Elaine May’s A New Leaf. (It’s definitely the real thing—André Emmerich, Louis’ gallery, even gets screen credit.)

So what’s the story? Beats me, but given the fact that Hitchcock is known to have owned an Avery, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t that one. Would that I could tell you more, including what happened to the painting in question, but for now it must remain, appropriately enough, a mystery.

I arrived at the New York State Theater last night in a state of near-exhaustion. I’d been racing the engine pretty hard for several days in a row, shorting myself on sleep in the process, and that day had been especially long (I went out to Brooklyn to interview Madeleine Peyroux, a singer whom regular readers of “About Last Night” know that I greatly admire). Under normal circumstances I would have been taking better care of myself, especially since I have to see eight plays and write five pieces between now and next Friday. Alas, I’d grown a little self-neglectful, and by the time I fell into my seat I was running on fumes.

The curtain went up on the Mark Morris Dance Group, and within minutes I realized that I was having trouble making sense out of A Lake, the first work on the program. I didn’t have much more luck with Marble Halls, a lovely ensemble piece set to the Bach Violin-Oboe Concerto. At that point I leaned over to my companion for the evening and whispered, “I’m going home at intermission.”

Needless to say, I don’t normally bail out of performances, and I never leave a play that I’m reviewing for The Wall Street Journal, no matter how awful it may be, until the bitter end. The idea of missing the second half of a Mark Morris performance would normally be horrifying to me. This time around, though, I knew I wasn’t all there, and as much as I hated to miss Jesu, Meine Freude, which I’ve never seen, I figured I’d better quit while I was behind. So I did.

The rest of the story is quickly told: I went straight to bed and slept for eleven hours. Now I feel surprisingly human again. And while I have a New York International Fringe Festival performance on my plate today, it’s a matinee, meaning that I can and will do the same thing tonight.

To all of you who’ve been writing to urge me to take it a bit easier: I read you loud and clear.

I got a trifle intemperate in today’s Wall Street Journal, where I reviewed Dracula: The Musical, not very affectionately:

Frank Wildhorn, the Rodney Dangerfield of Broadway, is no more likely to get any respect for “Dracula: The Musical,” which opened last night at the Belasco Theater, than for his previous shows. I don’t wish to inflict needless pain on innocent bystanders, so if you actually liked “Jekyll & Hyde” or “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” my suggestion is that you stop reading now, since I bring not peace but a sword — or, rather, a wooden stake.

Actually, Mr. Wildhorn’s watery score isn’t the worst thing about “Dracula.” His is more a sin of omission, since he has neglected to write any tunes capable of being remembered for longer than 10 seconds at a time, meaning that you forget them before they’re over. (Believe me, it’s better that way.) No, the villains-in-chief are Don Black (“Bombay Dreams”) and Christopher Hampton (“Sunset Boulevard”), who share blame for the clich

“The big public likes interpretations that are explanations. For me, music is crystal clear and self-explanatory. Therefore, when I am performing I only propose my feelings.”

G

“Apart from emulative envy, the only aspect of envy that does not seem to me pejorative is a form of envy I have myself felt, as I suspect have others who are reading this book: the envy that I think of as faith envy. This is the envy one feels for those who have the true and deep and intelligent religious faith that sees them through the darkest of crises, death among them. If one is oneself without faith and wishes to feel this emotion, I cannot recommend a better place to find it than in the letters of Flannery O’Connor. There one will discover a woman still in her thirties, who, after coming into her radiant talent, knows she is going to die well before her time and, owing to her Catholicism, faces her end without voicing complaint or fear. I not long ago heard, in Vienna, what seemed to me a perfect rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and was hugely moved by it, but how much more would I have been moved, I could not help wonder, if I were in a state of full religious belief, since the Ninth Symphony seems to me in many ways a religious work. Faith envy is envy, alas, about which one can do nothing but quietly harbor it.”

Joseph Epstein, Envy