Archives for December 2005

Time again for my weekly drama-column teaser, in which I post titillating snippets of today’s Wall Street Journal reviews of The Color Purple and Abigail’s Party:

Today’s musicals usually feature actors who can sing instead of singers who can act. LaChanze, like Kristin Chenoweth, does both with awe-inspiring conviction. I’d believe anything that came out of her mouth–anything, that is, except “The Color Purple,” which is best described as two hours and 45 minutes’ worth of high-priced phoniness….

I can’t say enough nasty things about the music, which consists of generic gospel, scrubbed-up blues and fake-fur jazz, all somewhat less memorable than the score to a made-for-TV movie….

It’s hard to believe that Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party,” originally written in 1977, is only now receiving its New York premiere. In England it’s considered something of a modern classic, a ferociously funny skewering of middle-class manners, but over here Mr. Leigh is mostly known–if at all–for “Topsy-Turvy,” his extraordinary 1999 biopic about the private lives of Gilbert and Sullivan. Fortunately, the New Group has produced several of his plays Off Broadway, all of them staged by Scott Elliott, the company’s artistic director, and this one belongs on your short list of shows that mustn’t be missed….

No link, so stick a dollar in your pocket and head for the nearest newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with all sorts of other cool art-related stuff).

UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to this review. You can read the whole thing here.

Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate–as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air. (Remember Daniel J. Travanti? I sure hope he had a good financial adviser.) If you’re in it for the long haul, you’ve got to make films or records. Otherwise, you’ll end your days as the answer to a trivia question, remembered only by a soft core of fast-graying fans who knew you when.

I had occasion yesterday afternoon to recall the name of Harry Reasoner, who at one time was quite famous indeed and now is almost entirely forgotten. Not only was he one of the smartest people ever to sit in an anchorman’s chair, but he was also a damned good writer, albeit in a genre that no longer exists: he used to wrap up his TV newscasts with a brief, pithy commentary on some aspect of the day’s news. A few of them made it into Before the Colors Fade: A Look Back, his graceful 1983 memoir, which is out of print but still worth reading. He died in 1991, and now he’s remembered, if at all, for having been one of the original co-anchors of 60 Minutes, together with a much better-known fellow by the name of Mike Wallace.

That’s the trivia question, and if you know that much about Harry Reasoner, you know a lot more than most people. For all his considerable gifts, his fame was almost entirely a function of the fact that he appeared on TV, and once the appearances came to an end, so did the fame. Such is the fate of everyone who chooses to spend his adult life talking into a TV camera. Time was when I admired Reasoner greatly, as I did his colleague Charles Kuralt–but how often do I think of them now that they’re gone?

At any rate, I thought of Harry Reasoner yesterday, and automatically did what all of us Web-dependent creatures do whenever a half-forgotten name floats into our stream of consciousness: I Googled him. The pickings, not surprisingly, were pitifully slim, but I did run across two things he said that made me smile:

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

If you’re a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously.

Nicely said–and anyone capable of speaking with such wry detachment about my line of work probably had a similarly realistic view of his own modest place in the grand scheme of things. So I’ll try not to let it bother me too much that Harry Reasoner has taken his place in the memory hole alongside so many of the celebrities of my youth. After all, I remember him, and the next time someone has occasion to Google his name, they’ll see these words. I wonder when that will be?

Actually, I don’t, so here we go again: I’ll be teaming up next Tuesday night with litblogger Maud Newton and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is “The Art of Online Criticism.”

Says the press release:

Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone’s a critic.

Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.

For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.

– Price paid by Chick Austin of the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1938 for Soap Bubble Set, the first work by Joseph Cornell to be purchased by a museum: $60

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $772.29

(Source: Eugene R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern)

“What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish.”

W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

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?