Archives for December 1, 2005

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Orson’s Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:

– Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)

– Bach in Leipzig (comedy, G, too complicated for any but the brightest children to follow, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)

– Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 11, reviewed here)

As Christopher Hitchens reminds us, Lolita Haze would be 70 this year.

Now I really feel old!

Everybody’s talking about new ways to present classical music, but now the Manhattan-based Thalia Music Series is, er, putting its music where your mouth is. Here’s the scoop, straight from the press release:

In December and January, if you try a new dish at a participating restaurant and attend one of the composer=performer: plugged & unplugged concerts (Thalia Music Series, Thursday evenings, December 15, 2005 and January 19, 2006, at 7:30 p.m. at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway), you are entitled to a free CD. Just present your receipt from one of the participating restaurants along with your ticket stub to receive the disc at the end of the performance.

Expand your musical palette and hear composers talk about and share their own works in an evening of chamber music. Clarinetist Derek Bermel, flutist Valerie Coleman, and pianist Beata Moon will perform their compositions on December 15, 2005.

Participating restaurants:

– Ouest: 2315 Broadway (at 84th St., 212-580-8700)

– Regional: 2607 Broadway (at 98th St., 212-666-1915)

– Saigon Grill: 620 Amsterdam (at 90th St., 212-875-9072)

– Mill Korean Restaurant: 2895 Broadway (at 113th St., 212-666-7653)

– Turkuaz: 2637 Broadway (at 100th St., 212-665-9541)

January’s concert features electric guitarist John King, vocalist Joan La Barbera, and electro-violinist Todd Reynolds. Tickets are $21, or $30 for a pass to both performances. For more information about the programs, go to the Symphony Space Web site.

I should add that I recently heard Beata Moon’s Dinner Is West, a new piano trio that will be performed on December 15, and liked it enormously. I’ve also eaten at Ouest and the Saigon Grill, and can endorse both places no less enthusiastically.

This is a great idea. Give it a try, won’t you?

Mr. Rifftides has Randolph Scott on his mind. Me, too, so mark your calendar for December 21 at eight p.m. EST, when Turner Classic Movies will be airing the premiere of Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, a documentary about the great Hollywood director who made a series of Westerns starring Scott that rank high on the list of insufficiently known classic American films. A Man Can Do That will be followed at 9:30 EST by Seven Men From Now, the first of the Boetticher-Scott collaborations, digitally restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and soon to be released for the first time on DVD. (I’ve seen a screener of the documentary, by the way, and it’s a solid piece of work.)

To commemorate these twin events, American Cowboy has made the text of my essay “What Randolph Scott Knew” available on its Web site:

Scott was secure enough to let his colleagues do the talking, knowing that his gritty, hard-faced on-screen presence would speak for itself. The dashing young leading man of the Thirties now looked as though he’d been carved from a stump, and every word he spoke reeked of disillusion. Yet he continually found himself forced to make moral choices that were always clear but rarely easy. What Scott should do at any given moment is never in doubt, but we also understand that doing it will never make him “happy” in any conventional sense of the word: he must do the right thing for its own sake, not in the hope of any immediate reward….

If you don’t own a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader (and if not, why not?), you can read the complete essay by going here.

– Top ticket price for a performance of New York City Ballet at City Center in 1948: $2.50

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20.68

(Source: Lynn Garafola with Eric Foner, Dance for a City)

“Celebrity: the advantage of being known by those who do not know you.”

Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization (trans. W.S. Merwin)