Archives for December 9, 2005

As promised, here I am again, just in time for the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. Today I review Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful and Eugene O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, one of which I liked much more than the other:

Mr. Foote’s play is an American classic, albeit one not generally recognized as such (it hasn’t been performed in New York in 45 years). Yet “The Trip to Bountiful” is fully as worthy of regular revival as “Our Town” or “The Glass Menagerie,” and this Off Broadway production, directed by Harris Yulin and acted with quiet skill by the best ensemble cast in town, leaves no doubt of its special quality….

The Peter Norton Space is small enough that the rest of the run, which ends Feb. 19, is likely to sell out very quickly, and while I have yet to hear any buzz about a transfer, this production clearly belongs on Broadway. My guess is that it has the potential to become a sleeper hit, just like “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and “Doubt.”…

Eugene O’Neill is one of those Great American Authors whose work leaves me cold. It doesn’t help that the difference in quality between his best and worst plays is vast, but even at his occasional best, I usually find him exhaustingly long-winded. As for his worst, well, there’s “A Touch of the Poet,” a 19th-century costume piece written between 1935 and 1942 as part of an unfinished 11-play cycle and newly revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54 as a vehicle for Gabriel Byrne…

Mr. Byrne plays Con Melody, a Byron-spouting soldier turned drunken innkeeper who has squandered the whole of his life pretending to a gentility he doesn’t possess by birth, sacrificing the happiness of his stage-Irish wife (Dearbhla Molloy) and hatchet-tongued daughter (Emily Bergl) to his pitiable pretensions. It’s a promising situation, but O’Neill smothers it in superfluous exposition–you could cut the whole first act and scarcely notice it was gone…

Two footnotes on The Trip to Bountiful:

(1) Here’s how moved I was by the play and production: Horton Foote was sitting three rows behind me. I wanted to say something to him after the show, but was so choked up that I didn’t trust myself to speak.

(2) This is the Signature Theatre Company’s fifteenth-anniversary season, and thanks to a generous subsidy from Time Warner, all tickets for all performances of all anniversary-season productions cost just $15 each. In this case, that’s an amazing deal.

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).

Regarding the Great Bloggers’ Convocation that had Our Girl in a tizzy, all I can tell you is that we talked a lot, enjoyed ourselves, and saw many familiar faces in the audience, one of whom posted briefly about the event after the fact. I don’t have a lot more to tell you, truthfully: I didn’t say anything there I haven’t already said here. The audience seemed interested, though, and asked lots of good questions. I was too tired to linger and went straight home when it was over, so if you want to know more, go here. (I’m still giggling at the thought of being compared to Jon Landau!)

Now, here’s a sneak preview of my next “Sightings” column, “Making Ideas Beautiful,” which will be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

Sometimes a heartfelt compliment can blow up in the recipient’s face, as when T.S. Eliot said of Henry James that he had “a mind so fine that no idea could violate it,” thus making him sound like a plot-spinning idiot savant. What Eliot really meant was that James understood how an artist who dabbles in ideas can lose sight of the true purpose of art, which is (as Renoir said) to “make everything more beautiful.” You can’t paint a picture of E = mc2, or compose a symphony about the law of supply and demand. Nevertheless, art is so effective at swaying men’s minds that there have always been cultural commissars prepared to enlist it in the service of ideas by any means necessary–including brute force….

Needless to say, there’s plenty more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

I note with pleasure the Grammy nominations of Luciana Souza, Nickel Creek, and the Pat Metheny Group. May they all bring home the bacon!

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)

– 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:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 1)

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

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 19)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, 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)

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

– Robert Frost’s fee in 1921 for a reading: $100

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $924.38

(Source: Library of America, Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays)

“Higher forms of leisure are no longer leisure but act come to completion.”

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America

“I don’t mind his gift (his genius, really) for sugarcoating. The problem is that he keeps forgetting to put the pill inside.”

James Marcus on Paul McCartney