Archives for September 2006

“Up to a point, every film shot on location assumes the character of a war fought against the indigenous people.”

Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans

“In art, as in life, bad manners, not to be confused with a deliberate intention to cause offence, are the consequence of an over-concern with one’s ego and a lack of consideration for (and knowledge of) others.”

W.H. Auden, foreword, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957 (courtesy of Modern Kicks)

I’m sitting at a table in the food concourse (or whatever they call it) of Chicago’s Midway Airport, clicking away at my iBook instead of eating breakfast. Not only were Our Girl and I too busy to write anything this weekend, but I expect to find myself in a medium-sized tizzy shortly after I return to New York this afternoon. I have to write a Wall Street Journal column about my recent playgoing and a Commentary essay about Malcolm Arnold, the British composer who died over the weekend, and come Friday I’ll be on the road again. (Look out, Minneapolis!) For all these reasons, I figured I’d do better to knock out a quick what-we-did-this-weekend posting than cram down a Sausage McMuffin before bording my plane, a decision with which my cardiologist will no doubt concur.

My visit to the Windy City got off to a shaky start on Friday when OGIC and I showed up on time for an eight-thirty reservation at Blackbird, a Chicago restaurant we used to like. After spending a half-hour waiting in vain to be seated, during which time the snooty staff offered us nothing in the way of solicitude, reassurance, or liquid compensation, we took our trade to La Sardine, vowing as we departed to blog about our disagreeable experience at the earliest opportunity. (No, we won’t be back.)

You’ll have to wait until Friday to find out what I thought of the Goodman Theatre’s big-budget production of King Lear and Remy Bumppo’s small-scale revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, but in the meantime I can tell you that the buffalo sausage on which I lunched at Hot Doug’s was sensational. Alas, we didn’t make it to the Farnsworth House on Saturday–Laura figured it didn’t make much sense to visit a glass house on a gray, rainy day–but we did have tea with Ms. Litwit after our Sunday matinee, and can report that she is as clever and charming as her blog. As for music, we listened to Rachel Ries and Madeleine Peyroux in the car, about which more later.

The rest was talk, some of it over breakfast
at Hyde Park’s Original Pancake House and dinner downtown at Osteria Via Stato and some of it in between movies at Our Girl’s place, where we watched Kicking and Screaming and The Lady Vanishes. OGIC and I don’t chat on the phone as often as we should, so when we do get together we always have a lot to say and not enough time to get it all said.

That’s it for now–my plane is boarding and I have things to do in New York. See you in cyberspace.

I’m off to Chicago, where Our Girl and I will be seeing the Goodman Theatre’s King Lear and Remy Bumppo’s revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, dining on encased meats chez Hot Doug, and doing whatever else occurs to her between now and the time of my arrival. I’m hoping to persuade her to drive us out to the Farnsworth House on Saturday morning, but she’s the boss.

I don’t know whether either one of us will feel like blogging come Monday, when I return to New York. We might, and then we might not. Tuesday, yes–I promise something good on Tuesday–but Monday is anybody’s guess.

Till Tuesday. Or Monday. Or whenever.

I reviewed three shows in today’s Wall Street Journal theater column, one of them in New York and the other two out of town: Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre Center, a new translation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., and Richard II off Broadway at the Classic Stage Company. Here goes:

Samuel Beckett’s slippery style clearly inspired Mr. Pinter to write “The Birthday Party,” the story (if you want to call it that) of Stanley (Henry Stram), a frightened misfit who is hiding out (or is he?) in a grubby boarding house (or is it?) from which he is forcibly extracted by Goldberg (Allan Corduner), a slick thug in a sharkskin suit, and McCann (Randall Newsom), his inexplicably anxious cohort.

Why do they want him? Where do they take him? As is his now-familiar wont, Mr. Pinter leaves these questions dangling, and his deliberate vagueness enraged the London critics who covered the play’s premiere. Contemporary theatergoers, by contrast, grasp at once that “The Birthday Party” is (in the author’s words) “an extremely critical look at authoritarian postures–state power, family power, religious power, power used to undermine, if not destroy, the individual, or the questioning voice.” Indeed, therein lies its weakness: We’ve been subjected to so many authority-questioning theatrical jeremiads in the ensuing decades that Mr. Pinter’s over-purposeful ambiguities have become too clear for comfort.

What remains fresh about “The Birthday Party” is its snarlingly black humor. Emily Mann’s production catches every laugh…

Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company is currently performing a new translation of “An Enemy of the People” in which Rick Davis and Brian Johnston contrive to make Ibsen’s stodgy dialogue sound as though it was lifted from an episode of “The West Wing.” The production, directed by Kjetil Bang-Hansen, moves the action up to the ’30s and slathers it with an inch-thick frosting of nudge-nudge-did-ya-get-it point-making. The cast is great–I’ve never known the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s crack ensemble to put a foot wrong–but no amount of good acting could redeem so blatant a staging of so elephantine a script….

“Richard II” isn’t one of the more popular Shakespeare plays, no doubt because it lacks the stiff spine of plot that keeps us coming back to “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” time and again. Even so, its gorgeous versifying rarely fails to enthrall keen-eared playgoers, and I commend to your attention the beautifully spoken, intelligently mounted production now being presented by the Classic Stage Company…

No free link. To read the whole thing–of which there’s much more–buy today’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, where my theater column appears every Friday. For a smarter alternative, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review. (If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll find it here.)

“People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.”

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Our mailbox has been getting a huge amount of nasty spam in recent weeks. In response I turned up the spam filter too high, and only just discovered that a number of legitimate e-mails (including one from a fellow blogger) were mistakenly tossed into the wastebasket. I think I retrieved most of them, but if you haven’t heard back from me and are wondering why, that may be the reason.

Two tips for correspondents:

(1) If you’re forwarding an item to us, remove “FW:” from the subject header of your e-mail.

(2) Mail with neutral-sounding one- or two-word subject headers like “Thank you” sometimes gets flagged by the spam filter.

Sorry!

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:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

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

– Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

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