Archives for June 2006

“Art permits you to accept illogical immediacy, and in doing so releases you from chasing after the distant and the ideal. When this occurs, the effect is exalting.”

Fairfield Porter, Art in Its Own Terms

Richard M. Sudhalter, the distinguished trumpeter, biographer, and jazz scholar, needs your help.

Dick (he’s a friend) suffered a stroke three years ago. Though he subsequently recovered from many of its effects, he has now fallen victim to a rare, equally debilitating illness of the nervous system called multiple system atrophy. It’s hitting him hard, and his medical bills are piling up.

Alas, good works don’t always reap financial rewards, and Dick has spent the whole of his long, productive life laboring in important but unrenumerative cultural vineyards. He is the author of such essential works of jazz and popular-music scholarship as Lost Chords and Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael. In addition, he co-wrote Bix: Man and Legend, one of the first truly scholarly jazz biographies, and has played on any number of fine recordings, including two of my favorite jazz albums, The Classic Jazz Quartet: The Complete Recordings and his own Melodies Heard, Melodies Sweet. Needless to say, Dick didn’t make a whole lot of money out of any of these undertakings, but he thought they needed doing, so he did them anyway.

Some of Dick’s friends are organizing an all-star benefit concert to help pay his medical expenses. It will be held at seven p.m. on September 10 at St. Peter’s Church in New York City. Mark your calendar–it should be a memorable evening.

In the meantime, though, Dick is scheduled to go to the Mayo Clinic on August 24, and he needs immediate assistance in order to pay for the trip (among many other urgent things).

As you know, I don’t make a habit of posting appeals like this, but Dick Sudhalter’s case is special. Even if you aren’t familiar with his work, take my word for it–he deserves your help.

To find out what you can do, go here.

Here are the winners of this year’s Tony Awards.

Here are my predictions.

You do the math.

I’ve come down with a horrible summer cold, the kind that makes your head feel like a chunk of moist concrete. Though copious consumption of piping-hot fluids has kept me alive, I can’t claim much more than that: I had to go see Paper Mill Playhouse’s revival of Hello, Dolly! on Saturday night, but all I was good for on Sunday was sitting on the couch and watching old movies.

The good news, of course, is that I have nothing worse than a cold. This is, in fact, the first time I’ve been sick since I got out of the hospital in December. Lousy as I feel–and I do feel lousy–it’s comforting to know that this bug won’t force me to call an ambulance.

For the moment, though, I don’t feel like doing anything but watching TV and pointing you to my contribution to Coudal Partners’ Field-Tested Books series. (For Our Girl’s contribution, go here.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go blow my nose. I’ll be back when I’m back.

“War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. ‘Art and nothing but art,’ said Nietzsche, ‘we have art in order not to die of the truth.'”

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Charlie Victor Romeo is playing through June 25 at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. I reviewed the original New York production a couple of years ago in The Wall Street Journal:

Forget reality TV. If you want to watch raw slices of real life–and death–transformed into the highest possible drama, go see “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six airplane crashes. (The title is military alphabetic code for “Cockpit Voice Recorder.”) “Charlie Victor Romeo” holds you in a hammerlock for 90 unforgettable minutes. It’s the most frightening show I’ve ever seen….

“Charlie Victor Romeo” was created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious, a Manhattan-based experimental theater group. It’s a low-budget, unabashedly unglamorous affair. You stroll into a grubby black-box theater (talk about ironic!) in which a nondescript mock cockpit is placed at center stage. The house goes dark and a slide flashes on a screen overhead, telling you the flight number and date and how many people were on board, followed by a stark description of what went wrong: ICING. EXPLODING ENGINE. MULTIPLE BIRD STRIKES. Then the lights come up and all hell breaks loose.

Not always at once, though. Instead, you might find a pilot and co-pilot chatting away agreeably, flirting with a flight attendant, griping about this or that minor nuisance. But sooner or later–always without warning–something terrible happens, and in an instant the theater becomes a sweatbox. You watch in horror as the crew scrambles to save the ship while alarms beep and buzz, the radio crackles urgently and passengers scream on the far side of the cockpit door. Sometimes the crisis is protracted, sometimes shockingly brief (one flight lasts for just a minute and a half). Then the theater is filled with the clamor of a crash landing, abruptly cut off by a sharp click as the house goes black. After a seemingly endless pause, the slide shown at the beginning of the flight is flashed on the screen again, this time with an additional line at the bottom: NO SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS. 4 SURVIVORS. NO SURVIVORS.

If any of this sounds gimmicky–or, worse yet, exploitative–be assured that “Charlie Victor Romeo” is deadly serious from takeoff to landing. The transcripts have not been altered in any way. We learn nothing personal about the men and women who are fighting for their lives, not even their names. All we see is what happens when they are plunged into chaos. Once or twice they panic. (In one hair-raising sequence, the pilot and co-pilot quarrel furiously over what to do next.) More often, though, they conduct themselves coolly, even heroically. And though the clipped dialogue is as unpretentious as a conversation overheard on a crosstown bus, it’s full of lines that stick in your head like bloody thorns….

I have a special perspective on “Charlie Victor Romeo”: I became afraid of flying a few years ago, and went into psychotherapy in order to cope with the problem. Not surprisingly, I found the first part of the show so alarming that I wanted to hide under my seat. But as I watched each flight unfold, I found myself drawn ever more deeply into the drama of brave men and women doing their best to buck the odds. Sometimes they did, more often not. Yet at evening’s end I felt oddly reassured by the knowledge of how hard they had tried. So will you.

I’m no longer afraid to fly, but I still can’t recommend Charlie Victor Romeo strongly enough. If you’re anywhere near Washington, go see it.

(To read a Washington Post profile of the show’s creators, go here.)

Today I devote my entire Wall Street Journal drama column to a glowing report on my recent visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:

Founded in 1935 by Angus Bowmer, a local college teacher who presented “The Merchant of Venice” and “Twelfth Night” in a rundown old Chautauqua theater, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has since blossomed into a full-scale operation with an eight-month season, a staff of 450 and an annual budget of $22.5 million. Each year’s productions are presented in rotating repertory, making it possible to take in a lot of theater in a short span of time (I saw five plays in two and a half days). Add in the natural beauties of the Rogue River Valley, which offers visitors to Ashland endless opportunities for outdoor fun, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a stage-oriented vacation.

None of this would matter if the shows weren’t worth seeing, but the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which won a Tony Award in 1983 for outstanding achievement in regional theater, turns out to be well worth the time and trouble it takes to get there….

No link, so if you care to read the whole thing–of which there’s much, much more–pick up a copy of today’s Journal at your local newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review, plus other reviews and art-related stories.

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take a look at the Arnold Friedman retrospective currently on display at Hollis Taggart Galleries, along with several other recent museum-quality gallery shows. Why were these important exhibitions presented by commercial art galleries instead of major museums? Partly because America’s great museums have become too money-conscious–and partly because their curators are locked into narrow-minded “narratives” of art history that leave no room for mold-breaking mavericks of genius.

To learn more, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.