Archives for April 2006

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order–willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The spring rush continues. Last week I saw five plays, four of them in a row. This week I have two new musicals on my plate, Hot Feet
and The Drowsy Chaperone, and three deadlines to hit between now and Thursday. It’s all a bit much, frankly, but I’m staying afloat–and I even managed to finish editing the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong in between last week’s shows.

Could I use a rest? You bet, and I’ve got one planned: I’ll be heading for one of my favorite undisclosed locations as soon as I file my last pre-Tony drama column, where I plan to spend a couple of uncomplicated days doing nothing even slightly gainful and thinking no theater-related thoughts. Until then, though, the joint will be jumping, so please continue to bear with me.

For the moment I’ll leave you with a freshly written snippet of Hotter Than That to chew on. See you tomorrow!

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In 1927 Aaron Copland, soon to emerge as America’s leading classical composer, declared that jazz might someday become “the substance not only of the American composer’s fox trots and Charlestons, but of his lullabies and nocturnes. He may express through it not always gaiety but love, tragedy, remorse.” But he later changed his mind, deciding that jazz “might have its best treatment from those who had a talent for improvisation.” By then the symphonic-jazz craze of which Copland was briefly among the most prominent exponents had started to dry up, and he had put his finger on the reason why. For jazz to reach its fullest expressive potential–as well as a truly popular audience–it would first need to find embodiment not in a composer, however gifted, but in a soloist of genius with a personality to match, a charismatic individual capable of meeting the untutored listener halfway.

Such a man existed, and there were those who had an inkling of his potential. When Bix Beiderbecke and Hoagy Carmichael first heard Louis Armstrong playing with the Creole Jazz Band in 1923, they were staggered. Carmichael set down his reaction in his memoirs: “‘Why,’ I moaned,

“As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.”

Samuel Johnson, The Idler (April 15, 1758)

Check out the new Top Five picks. I told you I’d be back….

It’s Friday! This week’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains my thoughts on three newly opened Broadway shows, Three Days of Rain, Awake and Sing!, and The Threepenny Opera:

“Three Days of Rain” is one of those trick plays in which (A) the members of the cast play two parts apiece, themselves and their parents, and (B) the action runs backward in time. In the second act, set in 1960, we meet Ned and Theo (Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper), a pair of budding young starchitects about to build their first house, and Lina (Julia Roberts), the Woman They Both Love. In the first act, set in 1995, we watch their grown children quarreling over who gets the now-famous Janeway House. This being a Richard Greenberg play, they all spend the evening foaming at the mouth with glib one-liners that aren’t half as clever as the author thinks (“My mother would be with us too, of course, but she’s, um, like, well, she’s sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister”), while we spend it trying to guess which one of them will turn out to be gay.

Mr. Greenberg’s plays bore me silly, but they sure are popular: “Three Days of Rain” is the second of three to be produced in New York this season. This one puts Ms. Roberts on stage for the better part of two and a half hours, which is asking too much of someone who’s never done any live theater, much less a Broadway show. She’s not bad in the first act, in which she plays a haggard Boston matron with two kids and a dull husband, but as for the second…well, you can still see the smoke wafting upward from the crash site….

Seventy-one years ago this February, the Group Theatre, a preternaturally earnest ensemble of Stanislavsky-worshipping leftists, set up shop at the Belasco Theatre, where they presented a new play by an up-and-comer named Clifford Odets. On Monday “Awake and Sing!” returned to the Belasco in its first Broadway revival since 1984, just in time for the Odets centenary, in a flawed but sumptuously well-acted production whose defects do not conceal the play’s enduring excellence….

The Roundabout Theatre Company has just opened a production of “The Threepenny Opera” aimed at theatergoers who’d rather be seeing “Cabaret.” Alan Cumming, who played the emcee in the Roundabout’s much-admired 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” is back again, this time as Mack the Knife, the toughest thug in Soho, who has been magically transformed into a bisexual punk whose “girlfriends” include a drag queen (Brian Charles Rooney). Most of his colleagues are dressed in leather, and the d

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.”

John Updike, Self-Consciousness

If you should happen to find yourself within reach of the 1996-2005 Best of the South collection of short stories, for goodness sake, pick it up and read the last story, Stephanie Soileau’s “The Boucherie.” It’s only cricket for me to disclose that I knew the author way back when, and it’s only true to say that way back then I already loved her writing, eagerly devouring any I could get my hands on, and foresaw great things for her. Her voice is fresh and easy and intoxicatingly funny in a way that’s both sharp and gentle. Here are the opening paragraphs of this entirely wonderful story:

Of course it would be exaggerating to say that Slug had so estranged himself from the neighborhood that a phone call from him was as astonishing to Della as, say, a rainfall of fish, or blood, or manna, and as baffling in portent. Still, as Della stood, phone in hand, about to wake her husband, Alvin, who was sleeping through the six o’clock news in his recliner, she sensed with a sort of holy clearness of heart that what was happening on the television–two cows dropping down through the trees and onto somebody’s picnic in the park–was tied, figuratively if not causally, to the call from Slug. “Mais, the cows done flew,” she thought.

The anchorwoman for the Baton Rouge news announced that a livestock trailer carrying over a hundred head of cattle on their way to processing had plunged over the entrance ramp’s railing at the Interstate 10 and Hwy 110 junction that morning. The driver had been speeding, possibly drunk, though definitely decapitated. More than a dozen cattle were crushed outright. Several others survived the wreck only to climb over the edge of I-110 and drop to their deaths in the park below, while the remaining seventy-or-so, dazed and frightened, fled down the interstate or into the leafy shelter of the surrounding neighborhoods, followed by a band of cowboys called in for the impromptu roundup.

As for the rest of the story, let’s just say that one of those cows brings a neighborhood together in the most unexpected way, and that you should read it. “The Boucherie” originally appeared in StoryQuarterly, where it was spotted by Shannon Ravenel and selected for New Stories from the South 2005 before being selected by Anne Tyler from among the last ten volumes of New Stories for this super-anthology and earning the anchor position therein. Brava! We’ll hear more from Ms. Soileau, I’m certain.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. 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 and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)

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

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, now in previews for a Broadway reopening on May 3)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)

– I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

– A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop (one-woman show, PG, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes April 30)