Archives for February 2005

Who’s that Girl?

It’s Friday, meaning that my drama column is in The Wall Street Journal. This week I reported on two shows, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days and City Center’s four-performance concert version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

The first I liked, with one major qualification:

“I know it’s supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags…I’m not sure, but the writer’s no phony.” So said Bert Lahr to his agent after reading “Waiting for Godot.” Six months later, Samuel Beckett’s avant-garde play opened on Broadway with the Cowardly Lion starring opposite E.G. Marshall, giving what by all accounts was the performance of a lifetime. (The production was recorded by Columbia in 1956, but has yet to be reissued on CD.) Now Lea DeLaria, another rubbery-faced comedian-singer who is best known to New York audiences as the high-voltage Hildy of the Public Theater’s 1998 production of “On the Town,” is starring in the Worth Street Theater Company’s Off Broadway revival of Beckett’s “Happy Days”…

Ms. DeLaria and Jeff Cohen, the director of this revival, have placed much (though by no means all) of their emphasis on the humor of “Happy Days,” an approach that plays to Ms. DeLaria’s formidable strengths. A superbly vital and aggressive comedian, she fills the theater with energy, and does it standing still. If the results aren’t always convincing, it’s because the cooks have overegged the pudding: Ms. DeLaria puts a fresh comic spin on each line, sometimes on each phrase, and Beckett’s carefully chosen words are too often buried under a hectic avalanche of twitches, tics and takes. Still, it’s a performance we’re seeing, not a reading, and if Ms. DeLaria is occasionally irritating, she’s never, ever dull….

I wanted to like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn more than I did, but the show was the problem:

Alas, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is a soft grape that’s been squeezed too hard. In turning her 496-page novel into a two-hour musical-comedy book, Betty Smith and George Abbott threw out the richness of detail that made it so memorable, and spooned sugar over Smith’s unexpectedly tough-minded portrayal of a misguided marriage gone sour. The score is similarly lacking in bite, though it contains two good songs, “Make the Man Love Me” and “He Had Refinement.” Better luck next time….

No link. Plan A: go buy a copy of today’s Journal. Plan B: go here and follow orders.

“Unlike John, I had come back, not to stay, but only for an hour or so–long enough to see and to savor again, for the first time in nearly five years, that small and surprisingly unchanged part of the city where I was born and had spent so much of my life, where I knew every building and back alley as well as I knew my own front yard, where I had been a young priest, where I had had my own parish, and where, as in no place else, I had belonged, I had been at home. I suppose it’s the mark of the provincial man, but in any case I find that I have a special and lasting love for this place which is so obviously just a place, which has no particular beauty or grace or grandeur of scene, but which is, quite simply, a neighborhood, my neighborhood, a compound of sights and smells and sounds that have furnished all my years. What kind of man is it who, after almost fifty years, can still spend half his time remembering the cry of the chestnut man, as it came floating down the street on a winter night…?

“And the people, all the people, the people one knew and understood almost by instinct, who had warmth and wit and kindness and an astonishing cascading rush of words–and who also had long and unforgiving memories, and tongues that cut like knives….”

Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness

A reader passes on this quote from Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and one of the artists I admire most:

For seventeen years, I lived in New York. It was a wonderful adventure, a great part of my life. But, after a while, it began to bother me that the whole purpose of living in those concrete canyons–the world of right angles–was all the cultural events that you could take in. That somehow seemed to put a lot of pressure on the cultural events. Unless you have attended three operas and five ballets and six new restaurants this week, you’re not keeping up. I found that people taking in these events weren’t thinking about them, but they were sure listing them. There was a lot of “have you seen this,” but not enough of “what was this like for you?” As I reach this advanced age [sixty], the luxury of having time to think, to savor it, has become important to me.

The quote was new to me, but the sentiment wasn’t. It’s something I think about often. (Well, fairly often.) New York is a cultural echo chamber, and it’s noisy inside. Especially if you do what I do for a living, you’re always aware that there’s exciting stuff going on every day, and you feel compelled to try to see and hear as much of it as you possibly can, since that’s the whole point of living here. Of course New York is full of wonderful people, too–I’ve never had so many good friends as I do right now–but we’re all here for the same reason, which is to be as close to the center of things as we can get. No doubt there are also plenty of hermits in Manhattan, but I tend not to run into them at intermission.

I don’t claim to be the most spiritual person in the world, but I’m very much aware of the dangers of living in a place that puts so many obstacles in the path of contemplation. Last year I posted an almanac entry by Santiago Ramon y Caj

“Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.”

Thomas Carlyle, diary entry (September 1830)

We’ve been getting a lot of fresh traffic lately (no doubt in part because Peggy Noonan mentioned us this morning in her OpinionJournal column about blogging and bloggers). So if this is your first visit, or even your second, welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from…Chicago.

(In case you’re wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you’re seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.)

All our postings from the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Our Girl’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about “About Last Night,” by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You’ll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry’s most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and “Sites to See,” a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you’re curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you’ve come to the right site: “Sites to See” will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to “About Last Night.”

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The only other thing you need to know is that “About Last Night” is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren’t sure which way to turn.

If you’re one of the above, we’re glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.

I stopped saving printed copies of my published pieces long ago–I threw most of them out when I put together the Teachout Reader–but I recently pried open a half-forgotten cardboard box stuck in the back of a closet and found a short stack of fading newspaper clips, one of which I thought worth calling to your attention.

In 1999 I wrote a piece for the Sunday New York Times called “Loved the LP, Waiting for the CD” in which I listed “13 first-rate jazz albums recorded from 1955 to 1982, none of which has ever appeared on CD in the United States.” Since then, six of the albums I mentioned have finally made it to compact disc: Jim Hall Live!, Bobby Hackett’s Gotham Jazz Scene, Ahmad Jamal’s Chamber Music of the New Jazz, Roger Kellaway Cello Quartet (but not Come to the Meadow, the Cello Quartet’s second album for A&M), Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges, and Pee Wee Russell’s New Groove. (A seventh, Stan Getz’s Poetry, was reissued in 2001 but quickly went out of print, though it’s still available as a Japanese import.)

Here are the remaining albums, all of them still in limbo, along with what I wrote about them six years ago:

– Sidney Bechet Has Young Ideas (World Pacific, 1957). “The great New Orleans reedman spent much of the 1950s fronting bands made up of second-rate European musicians, but his last album, a quartet set in which he was accompanied by the French bebop pianist Martial Solal (with ur-bop drummer Kenny Clarke sitting in on six tracks), is a thrilling exception. Bechet always rose to a challenge, and Solal’s probing playing kept him on his toes.”

– JoAnne Brackeen, Keyed In (Columbia, 1979). “Ms. Brackeen’s lone flirtation with a major label produced two albums, both of which went out of print with unseemly haste (Columbia’s late-’70s commitment to serious jazz was momentary) and are now unjustly forgotten. This one, a vibrant collection of originals that teams her with the bassist Eddie Gomez and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, ranks among the most impressive piano trio albums of the past quarter-century.”

– Gary Burton Quartet, Easy as Pie and Picture This (ECM, 1980 and 1982). “Mr. Burton rarely works with horn players, but this superlative quartet, which featured Jim Odgren on alto saxophone, is the strongest working group the vibraphonist has led since the Larry Coryell-Steve Swallow-Roy Haynes lineup of the late ’60s. Why ECM hasn’t reissued its two studio albums is a mystery–they’re both gems.”

– Bud Freeman and Two Guitars, Something Tender (United Artists, 1962). “George Barnes and Carl Kress, who worked together from 1961 until Kress’ death in 1965, were the foremost jazz guitar duo of the postwar era. The tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman joined them in the studio for this exquisite trio album, ideally suited for after-hours listening.”

I’m still hoping to see these classic albums on CD–and Come to the Meadow, too. Is anybody listening out there in reissueland?

I went last week to hear the premiere of Morph, a wonderful new piece for string orchestra by Paul Moravec, whose Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy is now out on CD. A couple of days later, Paul sent me this e-mail:

A great experience for a composer to invent something–two-dimensional, in black-and-white in the studio, I-think-it’s-going-to-work-but-who-knows?–and then suddenly there it is in 3-D, living color, and it works like gangbusters. The piece made me listen as a disinterested audience member to a considerable extent. Of course I know how it goes, but as they were playing I was sitting there thinking, Gee, what happens next?

Boy, do I ever know how that feels. Writing a book is one thing, but holding it in your hand is something else again, though the really big moment comes when you first see the text set up in type. All at once your words have a life of their own–they’re not just pixels on a screen–and you can feel them slipping out of your control and into the world, there to make their way among strangers. It’s terrifying. It’s also thrilling.

All of which reminds me to do something I originally intended to do a couple of weeks ago. I wrote the liner notes for Paul’s Tempest Fantasy CD, and it occurs to me that those of you who haven’t yet heard any of his music might be interested in reading what I had to say about it. (If you’ve already bought the CD, pardon my redundancy!)

* * *

Paul Moravec lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two blocks north of me, and whenever I bump into him on the street, I say, “Is that a Pulitzer laureate I see strolling down the sidewalk?” He always laughs and looks embarrassed–but pleased, too, as well he should. Winning the Pulitzer Prize for music, as Paul did in 2004 for Tempest Fantasy, is no small thing, especially when you’ve been laboring in relative obscurity for years. To be sure, Paul is well known and respected within the tight little world of American classical composers, but a household name he isn’t. Yet not only did winning the Pulitzer get his name into every major newspaper in the United States, it also gave him permanent entr