Archives for October 2004

A question for anyone who’s read Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America: is H.L. Mencken mentioned anywhere therein?

UPDATE: A reader writes: “No Mencken, but plenty of Winchell.”

I may blog about this next week….

Braglet: Our Girl and I have been updating the right-hand column (including the Top Fives) more or less regularly for the past couple of weeks, as well as emptying our blogmailboxes every day or so.

Gold stars for us!

I reviewed Richard III, Bryony Lavery’s Last Easter, and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Craig Lucas’ Reckless in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Richard III is a bit of of a one-man show, but a good one:

Peter Dinklage, who has never before played a major Shakespearean part, takes on one of the biggest, juiciest ones in the Public Theater’s new production of “Richard III,” and emerges cum laude, if not quite summa. At first glance it may look like a piece of trick casting, with Mr. Dinklage, who is a dwarf (his word), playing the hunchbacked killer-king who’ll do anything to anyone in order to get ahead. But the star of “The Station Agent” is no theatrical stuntman. He’s a magnetic, eye-grabbing actor who just happens to be four-foot-five, and when he strides from the wings, glowers into the middle distance and announces that “I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion…am determined to prove a villain,” you can all but hear the audience shuddering with prospective dread….

To be sure, his inexperience in classical repertory can’t be overlooked. He’s not always comfortable with Shakespeare’s verse, which he sometimes articulates overcarefully, and the upper register of his dark, grainy bass-baritone voice is barely developed. (If you want to hear what a real classical actor sounds like, take note of Isa Thomas’ awesome Queen Margaret.) Perhaps his performance is best regarded for now as a work in progress–but oh, the places he’ll go!

Unlike most of my critical brethren, I gave a rave to Last Easter:

Bryony Lavery, the British playwright who hit the jackpot last season with “Frozen,” crapped out when she was accused of plagiarizing part of that mesmerizing play about a serial killer. (A settlement is reportedly in the works.) Undaunted by the hullabaloo, MCC Theater is now presenting Ms. Lavery’s “Last Easter,” the printed script of which anxiously credits every possible source, up to and including “the wonderful jokers who told me all the jokes.” No matter where she got the jokes, “Last Easter,” which runs through Oct. 23 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, is thoroughly watchable, acted by a fine cast and given a pitch-perfect staging by Doug Hughes (who also directed “Frozen”).

Like “Frozen,” “Last Easter” is a problem play that uses its hot topic–euthanasia–as a means, not an end. It’s about June (Veanne Cox), Gash (Jeffrey Carlson), Leah (Clea Lewis) and Joy (Florencia Lozano), four theatrical types who communicate exclusively in brittle, witty repart

No, this isn’t another posting about film noir. I just got back from the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, where I heard a set by Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap that I expect to stay with me for a long, long time.

Stewart is an old pro who slipped between the cracks during the transition from Sinatra-style pop to Beatles-style rock (she got her big break a century or two ago on Perry Como’s TV show). As for her pianist, she said all that needed to be said when she introduced him as “the best of the best…my son.” They played the Oak Room together last fall to delightful and memorable effect, and for their return engagement they’re offering a program of such ultra-standard standards as “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe,” “Just in Time,” and “Nobody Else but Me.” No cutesy-pie surprises, in other words, nor is there anything eccentric or offbeat about Stewart’s uncomplicatedly beautiful singing. Her warm, secure contralto is a shining example of what a singer who lives on her interest instead of squandering her capital can hope to sound like on the far side of middle age. I know plenty of junior-miss vocalists who’d kill to be able to draw out a long, fine-spun pianissimo phrase the way Stewart can. As for her understated but eloquent way with a lyric, it occasionally reminded me of Mabel Mercer–with chops. “Thanks for the singing lesson,” I told her after the show, and she smiled knowingly.

My escort was a singer who is lucky enough to know what it feels like to be accompanied by Bill Charlap, an experience she summed up in five heartfelt words: “He’s the best there is.” The only catch is that if you don’t give of your best all night long, he’ll reach over and eat your lunch right off your plate. His playing on “Dancing on the Ceiling,” for all its self-effacing discretion, was so precise and concentrated that a lesser singer would have vanished in the glow of its iridescent harmonies. It’s a tribute to Sandy Stewart that she glided serenely atop them as though she were sliding down a rainbow.

Stewart and Charlap are at the Oak Room through Saturday. If you’ve never heard cabaret there, you can’t imagine what you’re missing. As I wrote a few years ago in a profile of Wesla Whitfield:

What makes the Oak Room so special? Obviously, the singers who perform there are the heart of the matter, though the room itself contributes significantly to the effect they make. Cabaret is an intimate art, and the 80-seat Oak Room, with its amber sconces and red velvet banquettes, is as up close and personal as a love seat at midnight: there is no finer place to listen to songs of passion and despair. “It’s nice singing in a room this small,” Whitfield says, “because I get feedback from the people. I know what works–and what doesn’t work. When they’re bored, you can hear them scrunching up their toes in their shoes. You can get that kind of response in a larger room, but it’s very slow, and very limited.”

Go, if there’s still room. For more information, click here.

“I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

I’m up too late, still buzzing from hearing Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap at the Algonquin. To tranquilize myself preliminary to rapid eye movement, I’m now listening, courtesy of iTunes, to Luciana Souza’s “Doce de Coco,” from Brazilian Duos. Mmmmm….

Later.

“

A reader writes:

I appreciate your reviews and your guidance. I must also say that I am so surprised that I agree with you so frequently because my politics are very different.

I hear this kind of thing a lot, by e-mail as well as face to face, and I never quite know what to say in response. I’m sometimes tempted to reply, “I know you think you’re paying me a compliment, and I appreciate your good intentions, but I wish you’d take a closer look at what you just said. I’m surprised that anybody who thinks the way you do about politics could possibly think the way I do about art. Isn’t that what you meant? If so, it’s not complimentary, it’s condescending. Besides, my aesthetic views aren’t governed by my political views. Why should they be? Are yours?”

If this blog has a credo, it is that the personal is not political. Anyone who believes it to be, or tries to persuade other people that it is, will find no comfort here. Needless to say, my own political views are far from secret (or simple), but I check them at the door of “About Last Night.” I think it’s important that there be at least one politics-free space in the blogosphere where people who love art can read about it–and nothing else.

Beyond that, I believe deeply that art and politics are essentially separate enterprises. Essentially, I say, and I chose that word carefully. Of course an artist who lives under a totalitarian regime cannot help but engage with it in some way or other, as Dmitri Shostakovich did in his music. But it’s one thing to seek to evoke the terror of life under Stalin in a symphony and another to write a novel (or paint a painting or choreograph a ballet) whose purpose, whether in part or whole, is to encourage its audience to take some specific form of political action. To do that, as Kingsley Amis has argued, is to compromise the very essence of one’s art:

Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don’t crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we’ve all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes…

I can’t say it often enough: first comes experience, then understanding. I don’t think Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony is a great piece of music because it’s tonal–I think tonality is valid because it is the basis for great pieces of music like Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. No more would I allow my response to a work of art to be conditioned by my political convictions. If anything, it’s the other way round: my experience of reality, which includes the reality of art, is the ultimate source of my philosophy, from which my political convictions spring. In art, experience is truth, and there is no greater sin than to say, “I know I liked that novel when I first read it, but it can’t be good because it’s inconsistent with my theory of fiction, so I guess I won’t like it anymore.” That’s the trouble with political art and politicized criticism: they start with theory instead of experience. I can’t think of a more efficient way to make bad art.

The only time I engage with political issues as a critic is when I’m covering specifically political art, and even then I always try to start with the immediate experience. Did the play I just saw excite me? Was I moved? Puzzled? Bored? In my experience, most political plays tend to be boring, precisely because the political playwright voluntarily places himself in an ideological straitjacket and thus is rendered incapable of responding freely to the call of inspiration. That leaves me with nothing to talk about but his beliefs, which then become fair game for fisking. On the other hand, I don’t want to write about plays like that, and given the choice I won’t waste time going to see them in the first place. They’re too predictable, and usually too smug as well. (In my lexicon of critical invective, “smug” is the supreme pejorative, worse even than “dull.”)

I’m as imperfect as the next guy, and no doubt I’ve written a few reviews in which I let my political opinions color my critical responses. But I don’t think it happens very often. I can’t tell you, for instance, how many of my readers are surprised to discover how much I love the films of John Sayles (which at their best seem to me a touchstone of how “political” themes can be treated in an unpoliticized, open-minded way) or the dances of Mark Morris. A fellow critic whom I admire recently described me as “a strong personality–and spectacularly unpredictable.” I myself wouldn’t put it that way: I don’t think unpredictability is a virtue in and of itself, just as I don’t think my aesthetic opinions are arbitrary. Still, I know what he means, and I treasure the compliment, in part because it is a compliment and not condescension in disguise.

My criticism comes with a warranty: I can’t promise that you’ll like what I like, but I do promise that I like what I like–and not because I think I ought to, either.