Archives for April 15, 2005

I had a great week at the theater: three shows, three winners. Granted, I’d already seen and liked two of the shows in question, but good is good, right?

Anyway, here’s the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal drama column, which leads off with a slightly qualified but nonetheless definite rave for The Pillowman:

The National Theatre of Great Britain has shipped yet another show to Broadway, and unlike “Democracy,” this one’s a winner, if a weird one. Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman,” now playing at the Booth Theatre, is a loose-jointed, slightly rambling shocker by the author of “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” performed by a cast of American actors led by Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldblum. I had my doubts at intermission, but by evening’s end I’d succumbed–though perhaps that isn’t quite the right word–to Mr. McDonagh’s tale of a writer whose darkest fantasies come to messy life….

It’s not entirely clear what Mr. McDonagh is up to in “The Pillowman.” Is it a postmodern metanarrative? A black comedy about life under Stalinism? A parable of the unintended consequences of the writer’s art? Beats me, and in the first act the unclarity is extreme enough at times to suggest a switchboard whose plugs are stuck in the wrong holes. Not so the second, more closely woven part, which builds to a predictable but still horrifying climax that hits you like…well, like a bullet in the back of the head.

As for John Patrick Shanley’s splendid Doubt, which has transferred to Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize, I saw pretty much what I expected to see:

I’m pleased to say that it looks good, John Lee Beatty’s spare, suggestive set having been discreetly altered to fill the much higher opening of the proscenium stage of the Walter Kerr Theatre.

Br

My posting on Rupert Murdoch’s recent speech about new media and its implications for artists is starting to attract attention. In addition to links from such media-oriented sites as unmediated.org,
Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, and Jay Rosen at PressThink, I’ve also been getting some very interesting mail. One reader, a Hollywood agent, wrote:

Am sending as many of my agents and clients as I can to your posting today, “Memo from Cassandra.” I’ve been on the reinvention bandwagon with actors since 1995. In my trade the great lie is that once you are on the merry-go-round you are on it forever. Untrue! I’ve witnessed career after career dry up because of the actor’s fear, masked by smugness, of change. Uncle Rupert put this incredible culture shift entirely into perspective. Bob Garfield pointed out similiar changes in television that warrant complete reinvention of the medium in a groundbreaking Advertising Age article just last week.

Funny how it’s just as difficult to sell the “reinvention” concept in ’05 as it was in ’95, especially to actors. It’s odd too that the artists who portray characters that represent and sometimes even create cultural shifts wouldn’t know a cultural shift if they fell over it.

Thank you for this.

My pleasure (though perhaps that’s not quite the right way to put it!). I mean to keep writing about this, by the way….

I’m six thousand words into the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (I’ve already written the eight-thousand-word prologue), and I’m so pleased at how well it’s going that I’m almost afraid to admit it. Writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was agony in slow motion–sort of like spending a decade skinning yourself with a butter knife–and I wrote All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine so quickly that the pain didn’t have time to register until the book was in production. Not so Hotter Than That, which is coming very easily. Your response to the snippet I posted the other day has been wonderfully encouraging, though the truth is that I haven’t needed a whole lot of encouraging, at least not this week: I can hardly wait to sit down at my iBook each morning. I especially like a comment that Our Girl passed on from her father, who told her, “The beginning of Terry’s book reads like a novel.” Yes!

I know it won’t always go this well, if only because my reviewing schedule often prevents me from getting any work done on the book for a week or two at a time. For the moment, though, I’m still in the land of bliss, and with a little bit of luck I’ll have the first chapter finished by Monday, after which I plan to blow town for a couple of desperately needed days of untheatrical, computer-free down time at my favorite undisclosed location. (I called yesterday to make a reservation. The manager, bless her, asked, “Where’ve you been all winter?”)

As for today, I’m planning to write four or five pages of Hotter Than That, hit a couple of galleries and have dinner with a friend, then come straight home and knock out another couple of pages before crashing. Another thrilling night in the life of a cosmopolitan drama critic? Maybe not, but I’ve got the muse sitting on my shoulder, and I intend to make the most of her presence before she flies away.

Have a nice weekend.

“The one infallible symptom of greatness is the capacity for double vision. They know that all absolutes are heretical but that one can only act in a given circumstance by assuming one. Knowing themselves, they are skeptical about human nature but not despairing; they know that they are weak but not helpless: perfection is impossible but one can be or do better worse. They are unconventional but not bohemian; it never occurs to them to think in terms of convention. Conscious of achievement and vocation they are conscious of how little depends on their free will and how much they are vehicles for powers they can never fully understand but to which they can listen. Objective about themselves with the objectivity of the truly humble, they often shock the conceited out of their wits: e.g. Goethe’s remark ‘What do the Germans want? Have they not me?’ Knowing that the only suffering that can be avoided is the attempt to escape from suffering, they are funny and enjoy life.”

W.H. Auden, “The Double Focus: Sandburg’s Lincoln” (Common Sense, March 1940)

Take a look at the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column and you’ll notice some drastic changes, mostly inspired by the fact that our roster of artblogs had grown unmanageably long.

As an experiment:

– We’ve broken the first section of the blogroll, formerly known as Artblogs, into seven different categories: Litblogs, Randomblogs (i.e., blogs that roam unpredictably across the cultural map), Schoolblogs (i.e., art-oriented blogs with a specifically academic slant), Screenblogs, Sightblogs (i.e., blogs about the visual arts), Soundblogs, and Stageblogs (i.e., blogs about theater and dance). If “About Last Night” were part of our roll, it’d be a Randomblog.

– The second section of the blogroll now contains three kinds of art-oriented non-blog sites: Artists, Critics, and Art Links.

– The third section is devoted to Other Blogs (i.e., interesting blogs that occasionally touch on artistic matters but are primarily about something else).

– The fourth, media-oriented section contains three categories: Media/Gossip, Radio (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by radio stations or specific radio programs), and Print (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by magazines and newspapers).

– Last is a section of miscellaneous Useful Sites.

Recent additions to the blogroll are followed by an asterisk (*).

Once again, this is an experiment, and thus subject to extensive tinkering. No doubt some blogs belong in categories other than the ones in which they’re presently found, and we’ll move them there sooner or later. In addition, we’ll keep on adding promising-looking blogs and sites on a trial basis as we stumble across them. (Don’t hesitate to tell us about anything you’d like to see on our blogroll.)

Above all, our hope is that subdividing “Sites to See” into a larger number of categories will help you use it more effectively. Conversely, our fear is that organizing the artblogs by subject matter will cut down on the frequency with which you explore blogs that might be slightly off your beaten path. Remember that the whole point of “About Last Night” is to encourage cultural cross-pollination. Keep that in mind as you troll up and down our blogroll.

Let us know what you think. We want “Sites to See” to be useful to you–and we read our mail.

Happy hunting.

UPDATE: OGIC just had a brainstorm, as a result of which we’ve changed “Randomblogs” to “Omniblogs.” Much better.