Archives for September 2006

“‘It’s just that there is nothing to discuss.’

“‘From your point of view,’ Wolfe conceded, ‘there probably isn’t. And naturally, for you, as a consequence of the peculiar constitution of the human ego, your point of view is paramount. But your ego is bound to be jostled by other egos, and efforts to counteract the jostling by ignoring it have rarely succeeded. It is frequently advisable, and sometimes necessary, to give a little ground.'”

Rex Stout, Before Midnight

This week my Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to an account of my recent visit to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, where I saw Othello, As You Like It, and Macbeth:

In theater, seeing is believing, and the best way to learn about 17th-century theatrical performance practices is to watch a Shakespeare play acted on a modern re-creation of an Elizabethan-style stage. The most famous of these is the replica of Shakespeare’s own open-air Globe Theatre that was built on the banks of London’s Thames River in 1997. The U.S. is home to a half-dozen such houses, including the indoor theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and the open-air theaters that I saw earlier this year at the Oregon Shakespeare and Utah Shakespearean Festivals. Most of the American replicas, however, are variously modernized structures that incorporate such anachronistic devices as theatrical lighting. If you want to see the real thing–and to see it used in a convincing way–the place to go is Staunton, home of the American Shakespeare Center, whose performances are given in a dazzlingly exact re-creation of the Blackfriars Playhouse, originally built in London in 1596….

To pass through the lobby doors into the 300-seat auditorium is like jumping into Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and setting the controls for 1600, with some allowances made for fire safety. Actors and audience are lit by the same electric chandeliers–there are no spotlights–and if you’re fortunate enough to hold a ticket for one of the 12 “Lord’s Chairs” placed on either side of the stage, you’ll be close enough to the players to reach out and touch them.

All this would be of purely historical interest were it not for the high quality of the ASC’s fast-moving productions, which are authentic (no sets, no scene breaks) but not antiquarian. The company consists of 11 mostly young men and women who perform in a cheerfully eclectic mishmash of period and modern dress. They speak their soliloquies and asides straight to the audience, and the uncomplicated stagings give the impression that you’re seeing the play itself, naked and self-sufficient….

No free link, but you can read the whole thing by buying today’s Journal or–better yet–going 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.)

ELSEWHERE: To read what Mr. My Stupid Dog wrote about the same performance of Othello I attended, go here.

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take a second look at last week’s much-discussed announcement by the Metropolitan Opera:

Following extensive, groundbreaking negotiations with its three largest unions, the Metropolitan Opera announced plans today that will revolutionize the live electronic distribution of its productions. In an historic first for any major performing arts institution in this country or abroad, this season the Met will use advanced distribution platforms and state-of-the-art technology to attract new audiences and reach millions of opera fans around the world. Beginning on December 30, the Met will transmit six of its performances live in high definition into movie theaters in the United States, Canada, and Europe that have been equipped with high-definition projection systems and satellite dishes. In addition, over 100 live performances will be broadcast either over the internet or on digital radio….

Naturally, the movie-house broadcasts got the headlines–but the real news was buried in the fine print. The Met, it turns out, is on the verge of making a major move into the brave new world of online, on-demand music. To learn what Peter Gelb has up his sleeve, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

I’m either reading or about to start reading these books:

– Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans

– Peter Carey, Theft: A Love Story

– Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir

– John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life

– Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer

– Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life

– Michael Streissguth, Johnny Cash: The Biography

– Aleksander Wat, My Century

– Michael Webb, Modernism Reborn: Mid-Century American Houses

UPDATE: A friend writes:

Nine out of ten of your book titles include a colon.

I’m soooo not going there….

“You’re television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy.”

Paddy Chayefsky, screenplay for Network

I often have occasion to write or speak about the new media and their effects on our culture, and I find myself repeating the same basic concepts over and over, sometimes fluently and sometimes fumblingly. For this reason, it occurred to me today to distill them into a soundbite:

The common culture is dead, and the middle class is busier than ever before. Consumers under forty–and, increasingly, under fifty–want what they want when they want it.

If you’re not already doing this, or figuring out how to do it, you’re asking for trouble.

I think that covers everything, don’t you?

If you read my Wall Street Journal drama column, you know that in addition to Broadway and major off-Broadway openings, I review theatrical performances throughout the United States. I’m the only drama critic in America who does so on a regular basis, and it’s made me a passionate believer in the significance of regional theater. As I wrote in my “Sightings” column back in June:

When a museum in Los Angeles or Philadelphia puts on a major exhibition, nobody in the world of art assumes it to be second-rate merely because it doesn’t travel to the Metropolitan Museum. The same thing ought to be true of a theatrical production. That’s why the time has come for American playgoers–and, no less important, arts editors–to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don’t know what’s hot in “the stix,” you don’t know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.

How do I decide which out-of-town companies to visit and what shows to see–and how might you go about persuading me to see your company?

When I first started attending theatrical performances outside New York, it was on an ad hoc basis not too far removed from throwing darts at a map. I started with Chicago because it’s where Our Girl lives, followed by Washington, D.C., to which I routinely travel three times each year to attend meetings of the National Council for the Arts. Every time I saw a show I liked, I looked up the director’s bio, made a note of the other companies with which he’d worked, checked out their Web sites, and put them on my list. I did the same thing with actors who impressed me.

Once the Journal decided to cover regional theater in earnest, I became more systematic in my information-gathering process. I started with the members of the League of Resident Theatres, the thirty-one winners to date of the Tony Award for regional theater, and the various companies and summer festivals participating in the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities project. I combined these overlapping rosters into a single list, then visited and bookmarked the Web sites of all the companies on it, later adding dozens of others that I discovered by combing through the online database of the American Theater Web.

How did I winnow the resulting list to a manageable size? Here are the standards I used:

– No amateurs, please. I only review professional companies. I’m also more likely to review Equity productions, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule, especially if I’m already coming to your city to see another show.

In addition, I don’t review dinner theater, and it’s unusual (but not unprecedented) for me to visit children’s theaters or companies that produce only musicals.

– Web sites matter–a lot. More often than not, your site will be my introduction to your company. You don’t have to cram it full of cutesy-pie bells and whistles, but the smarter the design, the greater the chance that I’ll give it a second glance.

Two words to the wise:

(1) Sound bites = death.

(2) If you can’t spell, hire a proofreader.

For more tips on what I look for in a theatrical Web site, go here.

– You must produce a minimum of three shows each season… This doesn’t apply to summer festivals, but it’s comparatively rare for me to cover a festival that doesn’t produce at least three shows a year.

– …and most of them have to be serious. I promise not to put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if you specialize in such regional-theater staples as Tuesdays With Morrie, the collected works of Larry Shue, and anything with the word “magnolias” in the title, I won’t go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

I’m looking for an imaginative, wide-ranging mix of revivals of major plays–including comedies–and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whom I admire. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Nilo Cruz, Horton Foote, Amy Freed, Brian Friel, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Warren Leight, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Austin Pendleton, Harold Pinter, Oren Safdie, John Patrick Shanley, Stephen Sondheim, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older plays I’d like to see that haven’t been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you’re doing The Beauty Part, The Cocktail Party, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, Man and Superman, Present Laughter, Rhinoceros, Six Characters in Search of an Author, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, What the Butler Saw, or anything by Jean Anouilh or Terence Rattigan, drop me a line.

– Been there, done that. As a rule, I don’t cover new or newish plays I’ve previously reviewed in New York, especially if I panned them. The chances of my coming to town specifically to see your production of Bad Dates or Rabbit Hole are well below zero–though I might drop by if I’m going to be in the area for some other reason.

– April is the cruellest month. Many Broadway shows open between the middle of March and the middle of May, in time to qualify for that year’s Tony nominations. During that period, I have neither time nor space to review out-of-town openings, no matter how enticing they may sound. On the other hand, I’m usually looking for interesting shows to review in late December, January, the first half of February, the second half of May, June, and September.

– I group my shots. It isn’t cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don’t all have to be in the same city. In October, for instance, I’ll be seeing two shows in Seattle and one in Portland, Oregon.) If you’re the publicist of the Podunk Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of The Glass Menagerie, your best bet is to point out that TheaterPodunk just happens to be doing Our Town that very same weekend. Otherwise, I’ll probably go to San Francisco instead.

Remember, too, that I write about all the arts, and on occasion I can be lured to your show by the additional prospect of seeing an important non-theatrical cultural event during my stay.

– Send me no paper. I prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don’t want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

– It pays to advertise–if you do it right. I’m flying to Chicago next week to see two shows. One of them is being put on by a company of which I’d never heard prior to January, when I picked up a copy of its well-written, stylish-looking flier in the lobby of Chicago’s Court Theatre, one of my favorite regional companies. I went to their Web site, liked what I saw, and decided to pay them a visit. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

As of today, I’m watching the Web sites of 146 theater companies in the continental United States. So far I’ve visited thirty-three of them. Keep these simple rules in mind and you, too, could move from column A to column B.

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. (Note the rare absence of asterisks!)

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)