Archives for June 17, 2005

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I’m out of town and blissfully computer-free, but Our Girl has been kind enough to post it for me by remote control. I reviewed two shows today, one in New York (Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife) and one in New Jersey (Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of Ragtime).

Here’s the scoop:

What makes “The Constant Wife” so peculiar is that it starts out as one kind of period piece, then turns unexpectedly into another. Everyone wears oh-so-’20s outfits, and a poker-faced butler (Denis Holmes) announces the arrival of each character in turn. Then, midway through the second act, Constance starts delivering stilted orations that might have been lifted from a very different sort of play: “So long as John provides me with all the necessities of existence I wouldn’t be unfaithful. It all comes down to the economic situation. He has bought my fidelity and I should be worse than a harlot if I took the price he paid and did not deliver the goods.” Imagine Henrik Ibsen rewritten by Oscar Wilde and you’ll get some idea of what “The Constant Wife” sounds like….

I loved Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of “Ragtime,” the stage version of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, in which Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens got right everything they got wrong earlier this season at Lincoln Center with “Dessa Rose.” Directed by Stafford Arima along the lines of his 2003 London production, Paper Mill’s “Ragtime” is a small-scale rethinking of a large-scale pageant, one that strips away all visual superfluities to concentrate on Mr. Flaherty’s magnificent score. The result is little short of revelatory….

No link. Have you bought a Friday Journal lately? You can read all of me there, plus lots of other great stuff–or you can go here and subscribe to the Online Journal, which is ever so much hipper.

“So things are all right after all, and I shall wind up my defense of criticism by observing that excessively kind notices, coming from all sides and lasting a career, can sterilize an artist more effectively than the cold shower that wakes one up to real life. That must have been what Jean Paulhan had in mind when he wrote, ‘Bad reviews preserve an author better than alcohol preserves a piece of fruit.'”

Fran

A few stray notes and observations from last night’s Bloomsday reading, which I blogged about in a more official capacity at the site linked below:

– I freely admitted to everyone I spoke to that I’ve never read the damn thing. This made for some fun–in a room full of devotees and proselytizers, I was a cause! But the best argument on the book’s behalf were the readings themselves, some of them rip-roaringly funny.

– Because of my background and interests, I tend to think of Ulysses first as a monument of literary modernism and second as one of Irish literature. Last night went some way toward changing this habit, especially hearing the wonderful performances of Charles Sheehan and Rory Childers.

– My favorite sort of enthusiast is an enthusiast with a cocktail.

– What a view! Not only in the obvious ways–the 22-story birds-eye on Millennium Park, the Art Institute, Buckingham Fountain et al.–but also the cool sights at eye-level. To the south was the sign on D.H. Burnham’s Santa Fe Building, the letters large as life. The sculpted lion heads decorating whatever building sits to the north seemed close enough to pat, and more ferocious than you could know from any other perspective.

I’ve done a bit of it here.