Archives for August 2006

Few things in life are more disagreeable than coming down with a bad cold when you have three deadlines staring you in the face. The human brain is a miraculous organism, but it doesn’t much care for being asked to generate stylish prose between sneezes. Instead of writing, I’ve spent the past four days watching TV, reading comforting books, sucking down endless mugs of hot tea, sleeping as much as possible, and waiting impatiently for my lungs to dry up.

Among other things, I watched Dumbo, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, and Twelve O’Clock High, which I’d never seen. Dumbo turned out to be even better than I remembered, and the pleasure I took in it was greatly enhanced by the fact that I watched it in the company of a nine-year-old boy whose sense of wonder has yet to be impaired by the onset of adolescent selfconsciousness. Not only is it wonderfully concise (sixty-four minutes, the shortest of all the classic Disney features) and animated with enduring freshness and charm, but the score is full of fetching details (I especially liked the Hammond organ in “Pink Elephants on Parade”).

What impressed me most about Twelve O’Clock High, by contrast, was the climactic bombing raid, which consisted for the most part of actual footage of aerial combat shot by American and German military photographers and assembled with skill and intelligence by Henry King. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that all old war movies are euphemistic: Twelve O’Clock High, like John Ford’s They Were Expendable, is startling in the frankness with which it portrays the hard choices that must be made by men in combat.

What books did I take with me to my sickbed? Rex Stout’s And Be a Villain, Prisoner’s Base, and Over My Dead Body, three of C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and Victoria Glendinning’s 1992 biography of Trollope. Only the last of these was new to me–I prefer twice- and thrice-read books when I’m feeling low–and I got much more pleasure out of it than a middle-aged man with a summer cold has any right to expect. I ran across so many fetching quotations in its pages that I thought at one point to devote all five of this week’s almanac entries to Trollope, but I’ve changed my mind. Instead, I’ll empty the bag in one fell swoop:

• “The getter-up of quotations from books which he has never read,—how vile he is to all of us!” (Travelling Sketches)

• “There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart,–and always to plead it successfully.” (Orley Farm)

• “God is good to us, and heals those wounds with a rapidity which seems to us impossible when we look forward, but which is regarded with insufficient wonder when we look backward.” (The Bertrams)

• “Can it be that any mother really expects her son to sit alone evening after evening in a dingy room drinking bad tea, and reading good books?” (The Small House at Allington)

• “He would use the simplest, plainest language, he said to himself over and over again; but it is not always easy to use simple plain language,—by no means to easy as to mount on stilts, and to march along with sesquipedalian words, with pathos, spasms, and notes of interjection.” (Framley Parsonage)

On the whole, it was a pleasant weekend–or would have been had I not felt so lousy–and the cherry on the sundae was a phone call from my brother in Smalltown, U.S.A., who reported first thing Sunday morning that my mother has profited enormously from a recent operation to relieve her chronic back pain. “She’s standing four inches taller,” he told me. I stood a bit taller myself when I heard the news.

I’m still under the weather, but deadlines wait for no man. On Sunday I made myself start writing again, and I’ll be spending the first part of this week doing the work I had to put aside last week. Come Friday I’ll be back on the road again, traveling to Virginia and Washington, D.C., to see plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen and paying a visit along the way to one of my favorite Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, the Pope-Leighey House. I’ll be blogging, too, but don’t expect anything too ambitious until next Monday. A busy blogger boileth no pots.

Later.

“Pieces of music are wormholes, which we can enter to escape our normal experience of time.”

Robert Spano, quoted in Justin Davidson, “Measure for Measure” (The New Yorker, Aug. 21, 2006)

I sometimes do too much fieldwork before seeing a movie, building up a whole structure of preconceptions that I then have to trundle into the theater with me and crane my neck to peer around at the thing itself. Long ago I recognized that this sport was spoiling perfectly good movies for me, or even preempting me from seeing some of them. So I stopped giving more than a skim to reviews of new movies until after I’d seen them. But at the prospect of an older movie, I still head straight to the bookshelf and, typically, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary and Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies: two critical voices that are always compelling to me if not infallible.

I didn’t make it this weekend to Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol, written by Graham Greene from his own story and starring Sir Ralph Richardson. It’s playing in a new print through Thursday at the Music Box. Despite being busy this week, I still have a chance to catch it on its final night. (The Music Box is always an added draw, as there’s live organ music on weekends and real butter for the popcorn all of the time.) Beyond the obvious appeal of the Graham Greene/Carol Reed partnership, which later produced The Third Man, I’m drawn to this one by what the bookshelf critics say. Kael sounds like she never really made up her mind:

The plot is just about perfect….There are terrifying, tense moments, too; the whole movie is very cleverly worked out. Maybe it’s too deliberate, though, with its stylized lighting and its rigid pacing–you wait an extra beat between the low-key lines of dialogue. It’s too deliberate and too hushed to be much fun. It’s a polite thriller–which is close to a contradiction in terms.

I’m not sure what, but something about that makes me think she did have fun, then talked herself out of it. In any case, it’s an interesting criticism that does nothing at all to dampen my wish to see the film. Thomson, on the other hand, has no such ambivalence, and says “The tone may be straight Greene–that drip of mortification, of agony vindicated–but Reed served it with understanding.” Nice precis of Greene there, one which will no doubt please my friend who spent all last week emailing me mordant quotes from Greene’s novels–just randomly trying to break my spirit, I guess–and whom I’m trying to get to accompany me to The Fallen Idol on Thursday. (People seem to love going to the movies alone, but I really don’t. In my life, I’ve seen one movie alone in the theater, a good one: California Split. That was five years ago, and not an uplifting experience.)

Then Thomson has this from Greene himself:

When I describe a scene, I capture it with the moving eye of the cine-camera rather than with the photographer’s eye–which leaves it frozen. In this precise domain I think that the cinema has influenced me. Authors like Walter Scott and the Victorians were influenced by paintings and constructed their backgrounds as though they were static and came from the hands of a Constable. I work with the camera, following my characters and their movements. So the landscape moves. When I turn my head and look at the harbor, my head moves, the houses move, the boats move, don’t they?

And that’s part of the reason Greene gets a two-page spread in the Biographical Dictionary. I like the quotation, and I know what he means. But, to nitpick only because he’s possibly my favorite painter, the choice of Constable as a painter of static images is a little strange: whose clouds move more than Constable’s? Nobody’s, that’s whose.

If I do find a victim…er, date, and do see The Fallen Idol Thursday, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

I’m still sick. Arrgh.

Have a nice weekend. One of us ought to.

P.S. Check out the new Top Fives. (I may be sick, but I’m not dead.)

I wrote about two plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Meryl Streep:

The New York stage has been infested by movie and TV stars this year, with wildly variable results: Ralph Fiennes was memorable, Julia Roberts and David Schwimmer memorably awful, while Cate Blanchett was a bit extreme but flamboyantly watchable. Now at bat is Meryl Streep, the star of the Public Theater’s outdoor production of “Mother Courage and Her Children.” Unlike Ms. Roberts, she knows her way around a theater, but her performance is a mess–though she’s probably not at fault….

Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece is set during the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought between 1618 and 1648. The Public, however, is performing it in a new “translation” (it’s really an adaptation) by Tony Kushner, who has put a thick coat of comic varnish on the blunt ironies of the original German text in order to make them more palatable to modern viewers. While some of his renderings are nicely pointed–he translates “Necessity knows no law” as “Necessity trumps the commandments”–the overall effect is too slick, and it doesn’t help that he’s littered the script with such anachronistic Americanisms as “It’s a go,” “Point taken” and “Butt out.”

I’m not opposed in principle to modernized versions of the classics, and Mr. Kushner’s gloss on “Mother Courage” might have been more effective in a less showbizzy staging, but Mr. Wolfe has glitzed it up to an enervatingly spectacular degree. I’m not exaggerating–this big-budget production contains fire, rain, snow, an onstage Jeep and flying by Foy, the “Peter Pan” people. Presumably Mr. Wolfe is also responsible, at least in part, for Ms. Streep’s bizarre decision to deliver her lines in the side-of-the-mouth manner of a take-my-wife-please comedian….

The second is the Berkshire Theatre Festival‘s revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles:

Like most of Wasserstein’s plays, “The Heidi Chronicles” is a soft-centered pseudosatire that pulls its punches, most of which are thrown at feminism, to which the play’s female characters subscribe unreservedly (if not unquestioningly) in spite of the fact that the play’s ostensible subject is the unhappiness it brings them. Instead of probing this apparent contradiction with the take-no-prisoners candor of the true satirist, Wasserstein settles for poking safe fun at such easy targets as consciousness-raising groups. As for the glib children of urban privilege with which “The Heidi Chronicles” is exclusively peopled, they all talk like escapees from the set of “Annie Hall” and appear never to have met anyone who disagreed with them about anything….

No free link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my review. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)

“Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice–and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.”

Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. 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)

– The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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 Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– 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 WEEKEND:

– Indian Blood (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Sept. 2)

– The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

– Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)

“Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.”

Vita Sackville-West, Passenger to Teheran