Archives for April 2006

Time once again for the regular Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I have mixed tidings to report. I liked some parts of Stuff Happens, but no part of Festen:

Like so many British artists, David Hare is drunk on politics, and believes the world is waiting to know how he thinks it should be run. At the same time he is, or can be, a talented playwright, acutely sensitive to the demands of the stage. These two impulses are at odds in “Stuff Happens,” which had its New York premiere last night at the Public Theater. In fact, “Stuff Happens” is two plays in one. The first is a Shakespeare-style history play in which Mr. Hare tries to imagine how George W. Bush and his advisers might have decided to go to war with Iraq. It’s pretty good–at times quite good–and on occasion almost convincing. The second is a documentary play about the Bush administration’s conduct of the war. It’s a flop, full of coarse caricatures and stiff with smugness.

The star of Play No. 1 is Colin Powell (Peter Francis James), whom Mr. Hare portrays as a “tragic hero” (his phrase) who knows the war is a mistake but lacks the courage of his convictions and so crumbles into tight-lipped pusillanimity when put to the test by President Bush (Jay O. Sanders). This is a dramatically promising situation and Mr. Hare makes much of it…

Oh, dear, incest again: David Eldridge’s “Festen,” a stage version of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film “The Celebration,” is another of those extravaganzas in which the members of a dysfunctional family get together for dinner and suddenly start blurting out long-suppressed truths….

No link, so buy the damn paper, O.K.? I’m tired of telling you. And if you’re really feeling ambitious, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instantaneous access to the complete text of my review, along with loads of additional art-related coverage.

UPDATE: The Journal has now posted a free link to this review. To read the whole thing, go here.

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

Remember the “Mozart effect”? That was the shorthand phrase for a group of studies purporting to show that playing classical music to children raised their IQs in later life. The actual research made no such claims, but such was the simplified version that found its way into the public domain, achieving such wide circulation that Zell Miller, then the governor of Georgia, actually proposed in 1998 to earmark $105,000 to buy a classical album for every child born in that state. Alas, later research left the original findings in doubt, and though the phrase entered the language, the actual concept went into the scientific wastebasket.

Even so, there remains something irresistibly seductive about the notion that listening to Mozart might actually make you smarter. William Safire, who gave up political punditry to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic group (the Web site is dana.org) with an interest in brain research, gave a speech last month in which he reported on the latest studies into the relationship between arts education and brain function. That may not sound sexy, but it is–at least potentially–a public-policy bombshell….

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

I may be quiescent, but I’m not altogether inert. Here’s some of what I’ve collected while trolling the blogosphere during the past few weeks:

– Further proof that I’m soooo behind the curve: it took an Indianapolis-based art blogger to clue me in to the coming release of Terry Zwigoff’s new movie, Art School Confidential, starring John Malkovich. (To view the trailer, go here.)

– In other film-related news, Mr. My Stupid Dog reports on the Criterion Collection DVD of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln:

The Lincoln of this film seems more a product of the 1930s than the 1830s–and in that respect, more like the sainted Democrat FDR than his own Republican self. In Trotti’s script, the rail-splitter has nothing whatsoever to say about race, and the closest he comes to acknowledging the reality of slavery is a not-quite throwaway line: Lincoln states that his family had to leave Kentucky because “with all the slaves comin’ in, white folks had a hard time making a living.” Except for an occasional servant, African-Americans are completely invisible in Ford’s Springfield. Class displaces race in the film’s mythic universe–to the point that when the title character, played by a startlingly young Henry Fonda, faces down an angry lynch mob, both participants and intended victims are White. Like Fritz Lang, who famously used lynch mobs as a metaphor for fascism in his film Fury Ford suggests a parallel between thuggish leaders who goad a mob to violence and equally grotesque forces poised to plunge Europe into a second world war. That Lincoln is singlehandedly able to quell the angry mob points to one of the film’s deepest contradictions: In Young Mr. Lincoln, democratic society is saved from fascist control through the actions of a single Great Leader. (Lang didn’t let America off the hook so easily.)

– Speaking of race, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New has found an online-viewable video of Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, a miniature masterpiece of animation which is nonetheless banned from TV broadcast on TV because it’s jam-packed with racial stereotypes. See for yourself.

– Mr. Think Denk eats a plate of dumplings and reflects on the meaning of the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata:

I have a hard time seeing where the opening of the Kreutzer “comes from.” There are no easy sources for its particular beauty. The sort of question I feel it asks is Why Do I Exist? or How Did I Come Into Being? And that is what gives it, for me, a kind of surreal beauty: an oddly certain question, a fragment that is strangely and prematurely complete. The piece is mature beyond its measures….

My favorite recording of this wonderful work, incidentally, is a live performance from 1940 by Joseph Szigeti and B

“‘I did think I could have trusted Boko not to make an ass of himself just for once,’ she murmured with a wild regret.

“‘I doubt if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself,’ I responded gravely.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning

On Wednesday afternoon I finished writing my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, then decided to fly the coop. I ate lunch and got a closer-than-usual haircut at Antonio’s, the neighborhood barber shop about which I wrote last year. Then I marched briskly across Central Park and down Fifth Avenue to the Frick Collection, where I had every intention of looking at Goya’s Last Works. The Frick, like the Phillips Collection in Washington, is one of those museums that used to be a private residence and continues to reflect of the personality of its late owner, a nineteenth-century coal-and-steel baron. I like the Frick very much, but it’s been a couple of years since I last paid it a visit, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

I arrived at three-fifty-five and strode into the lobby, where a guard greeted me with the following brusque announcement: “Admission to the left. Next entry to the Goya show at five o’clock.” Not caring to spend a full hour perusing the permanent collection, I went next door to Knoedler & Company, one of my favorite Upper East Side galleries, which was showing a couple of dozen canvases by Judith Rothschild, a wealthy pupil of Hans Hofmann whose work was utterly unoriginal (her paintings look like a cross between Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn) but nonetheless accomplished and engaging.

After ten minutes it hit me that I didn’t especially want to spend the rest of a spring afternoon looking at paintings, so I returned to Central Park, strolled past the Loeb Boathouse, and plunged into the Ramble. I reflected–not for the first time–on how implausible and miraculous it is that there should be a place like Central Park in the middle of a place like Manhattan. I sat down on a park bench next to a young woman who had her nose in a book. I had Guard of Honor in my shoulder bag, but having just spent an entire morning and part of an afternoon writing, I was content to empty my mind of art-related thoughts and look at the trees, which had just started to put forth leaves, and the overcast sky, which was a pale shade of gray tinged with blue.

At length I found my way out of the Ramble, emerging at the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theatre, one of the many places in Central Park of whose existence I had hitherto been unaware. Had there been a show in progress I would gladly have stopped to watch it, but the theatre was shut up tight, so I left the park at Seventy-Ninth and Central Park West, across the street from the Beresford and around the corner from my own modest building. I climbed the stairs to my third-floor apartment, unlocked the door, gazed happily upon the Teachout Museum, and decided that I was through for the day.

So far this week I’ve seen a play, passed a nuclear stress test with flying colors, written two Wall Street Journal columns and the first half of the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, gotten a haircut, visited a gallery, and spent a couple of hours wandering through Central Park. I’ll be seeing Awake and Sing this evening at the Belasco and The Threepenny Opera on Saturday afternoon at Studio 54.

I think I earned my night off, don’t you?

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 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, extended through 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)

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

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

“Nathaniel Hicks was obliged to admire a simple, unlimited integrity that accepted as the law of nature such elevated concepts as the Military Academy’s Duty-Honor-Country, convinced that those were the only solid goods; that everyone knew what the words meant.

“They needed no gloss–indeed it probably never crossed General Beal’s mind that they could be glossed, that books had been written to show that Country was a delusive projection of the individual’s ego; and that there were men who considered it the part of intelligence to admit that Honor was a hypocritical social sanction protecting the position of a ruling class; or that Duty was self-interest as it appeared when sanctions like Honor had fantastically distorted it. In his simplicity, General Beal, apprised of such intellectual views, would probably retort by begging the question; what the hell kind of person thought things like that?

“Formal logic was outraged; but common sense must admit he had something there. Few ideas could be abstract enough to be unqualified by the company they kept.”

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

I took a look yesterday at a list of the twelve top-grossing movies in North America. I’d heard of four of them: I read the novel on which Thank You for Smoking is based when it came out a few years ago, and I’ve seen posters for Phat Girlz, Failure to Launch, and She’s the Man while walking to and from the gym. The other eight weren’t even names to me, nor do I plan to seek them out. As I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I haven’t been to a movie theater since last October, and it’s been at least a year since I last saw a first-run episode of any TV series (not counting cooking shows, which I regard as a species of soft porn). As for pop music, the only new songs I hear are the ones that happen to be playing on the radios of the cabs that take me to and from the theater district.

I can’t remember when I’ve been so completely out of touch. Reviewing films for Crisis and writing my “Second City” column for the Washington Post used to keep me more or less aware of the buzz, but I gave those gigs up last fall, after which I hurled myself into a spasm of workaholism that came to an abrupt end when I checked into the hospital. Once I got out I pulled into my shell, and I’ve been there ever since. I now spend most of my time going to new plays, writing my Wall Street Journal and Commentary columns, and working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. From time to time I watch an old movie on TV that I haven’t seen: I tuned in Delbert Mann’s Mister Buddwing
the other night, but only because James Garner was in it. Otherwise I look at the art on my walls, listen to familiar pieces of music, and reread old standbys (I just pulled James Gould Cozzens’ Guard of Honor off the shelf for the umpteenth time). In recent weeks I haven’t even been keeping up with the blogosphere, at least not very closely.

I suspect I’ve entered a fallow period, a necessary time of recovery after the frenzied events of the second half of 2005. I nearly died, then I turned fifty: that’s enough to knock anybody off his pins, and I’d say I was well and truly knocked. The other day I had occasion to quote to a friend the Spanish proverb that figures frequently in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, May no new thing arise. That’s for me. More than a few new things arose in my life in the past couple of years, and for the moment I’ve had enough.

This, too, shall pass, sooner or later. At some point I’m sure I’ll start to feel the tug of the new, bob to the surface, and start sniffing the air. I always have. But not just yet. I’m not quite ready to engage with the moment. I think I’ll stick to the tried and true for a little while longer. The world will have to take care of itself, for now.