“The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.”
George Santayana, Skepticism and the Animal Mind
Archives for January 2007
TT: Busman’s holiday
Now that I’m a drama critic, I rarely get to go to working rehearsals, which I love to do, so it was a great pleasure to fly into the Raleigh-Durham airport last night, jump in a car, drive straight to the stage door of the Progress Energy Center for the Performing Arts, and charge into the theater just in time to hear Robert Weiss, the artistic director of Carolina Ballet, speak the following words into a microphone: “Dancers, we’re going to try to go all the way through without stopping–unless there’s a train wreck.” I sighed with delight and plopped into a seat just behind Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, the choreographers of Monet Impressions, who were furiously dictating last-minute fix-this notes to their assistants as the dancers on stage ran through Weiss’ “The Gardens at Giverny” and Taylor-Corbett’s “Picnic on the Grass.”
The New York Times ran a half-page preview
of Monet Impressions yesterday, so I’ll let their excellent reporter walk you through the show:
After carefully trolling the North Carolina Museum of Art’s “Monet in Normandy” exhibition, seeking inspiration for a new dance, the choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett ended up using a painting not in the show: Monet’s D
TT: Reality is the word
No, I didn’t watch the debut of Grease: You’re the One That I Want–I was otherwise occupied–but I wrote a “Sightings” column about it for The Wall Street Journal last fall. In case you didn’t see that piece, here are some pertinent excerpts:
It was inevitable: “American Idol” is coming to Broadway. Not literally, of course, but “You’re the One That I Want,” the reality TV series in production at NBC, is the next best thing, a program whose viewers will pick a pair of unknowns to star in a Broadway musical. The musical in question is “Grease,” the rock-and-roll romp that ran from 1972 to 1980, then returned to the Great White Way in 1994 and played for four more years. It might actually be good–Kathleen Marshall, the director, staged the brilliant Broadway revivals of “The Pajama Game” and “Wonderful Town”–but even if it’s bad, it’ll be big. Six million Brits watched the BBC series on which “You’re the One That I Want” is based, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” If the NBC version is comparably popular in this country, it will be seen by 30 million Americans. That’s a whole lot of potential ticket-buyers.
Is “Grease” the future of Broadway? If so, it’s a “future” that to some extent has already happened. Many theatrical producers are using focus groups, tracking polls, and other sophisticated research tools to make marketing decisions about the shows they present. In the past, such information has only been used to develop ad campaigns–but as the public response to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” made clear, it can also be used to make artistic decisions….
Is that such a bad thing? After all, “Grease” isn’t Shakespeare, or even Neil Simon. It’s an innocuous confection whose sole purpose is to amuse, and I won’t get even slightly bent out of shape if 30 million TV viewers should suddenly take an interest in the burning question of who will play Sandy and Danny in the Broadway revival. As Samuel Johnson told us long ago, “The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice./The Drama’s Laws the Drama’s Patrons give,/For we that live to please, must please to live.” In any case, there are better places than Broadway to see serious theater, not only in New York but in Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and the countless other American cities where first-rate regional companies can be found. Anyone who looks to Broadway for creative leadership is looking under the wrong bushel.
I’m not a cultural relativist. I believe devoutly in the superiority of Shakespeare to Neil Simon. But I’m also a realist, and I keep a close eye on the myriad ways in which information-age capitalism is transforming American life by maximizing consumer choice. That’s why I’m interested in “You’re the One That I Want.” I don’t know whether “Grease” will be better or worse for having been cast by popular demand–but I have no doubt that its opening night will mark a sea change in the culture of commercial theater in America.
Needless to say, I’ll be there.
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows 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)
– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
– Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, 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 Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)
– Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes May 12)
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)
– Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, extended through Feb. 18)
– The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Feb. 10)
CLOSING SOON:
– Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Jan. 29)
– Two Trains Running (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Jan. 28)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
TT: Almanac
“Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.”
Brooks Atkinson, Theater Arts (August 1956)
TT: Almanac
“This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy–not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether–where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression
OGIC: Night thoughts
Heading toward the holidays, I anticipated being much more in evidence around here. Following the hectic build-up to Christmas, it seemed, a few quiet, blessedly blank days were in the offing–good for blogging as well as other essential activities too often deferred during life-as-usual: learning to knit; getting good and enveloped by the second season of The Wire, which has been sitting here keeping my Netflix subscription at a standstill for the last two or three months; and reading a book in longer sessions than the seven or eight minutes that expire, on a typical night, between when I shimmy beneath the covers and when my eyelids flutter, droop, and slam shut. For all these reasons, and for the overarching sense of exemption from many of life’s normal demands, that week between the holidays has always been a sweet little stretch of exceptions to most of the usual rules.
Sweet, this year, it wasn’t to be. Beginning with the scary but ultimately unharmful accident of an elderly relative on Christmas night, the last week of 2006 was crowded with illness and hospital visits. By New Year’s it seemed, at least, that all of these incidents had ended well. But last week my grandmother, who is ninety-two years old, wound up back in the hospital. Though she’s home again now, the doctors don’t believe her condition will improve. And I’d take workaday life as I used to know it, with all its impositions and little assaults on time and mind, gladly.
Somewhere during the six years since I last lost a grandparent, I realize, I’ve changed. Losing my grandfathers in 1996 and 2001 was difficult, of course. I mourned them and learned an absolute new way of missing someone. With my grandmother’s health failing now, I feel my own mortality implicated, and that of everyone I love–because I’m an older person now but also, I think, because past a certain age the end of a life ceases to seem premature, exceptional, unfair. There’s no sense of the injustice of circumstances to distract you from facing the necessity of the event: you can focus on the “why now?” instead of the “why?” It’s a colder, harder, more inexorable proof of the one inevitability. Besides which, you don’t miss someone any less just because they lived a long life.
Changing the subject, but only sort of, who out there saw Children of Men who has also read P.D. James’s book? I read perhaps a quarter of the book before venturing out to see the movie a couple of weeks ago. The latter experience was a frustrating one that has sent me back to the book fairly hungrily to see the founding concept of both book and movie–that the human race has gone almost two decades without being able to procreate–treated with some curiosity and imagination (I’m now about a third of the way through).
In Alfonso Cuar
TT: Goings on about (and out of) town
On Saturday I went to DC Moore Gallery to see the Jane Wilson exhibition about which I blogged last week. I was so taken with one of Wilson’s watercolors, “Breaking Light,” that I bought it on the spot–the first time I’ve ever bought a piece of art that was hanging at a show. You can’t view “Breaking Light” on line, alas, but it’s still hanging at the gallery, and if you should happen to buy the catalogue, you can see it reproduced in the “Works on Paper” section.
Also included in the catalogue is the transcript of an interview with Wilson that contains this illuminating remark:
Although I was thoroughly intrigued and influenced by abstraction per se and, in fact, painted quite a few works in the ’50s that might be considered Abstract Expressionist, I finally realized that I really liked subject matter and that I really liked the history of art. I wanted to pursue the natural world in ways that were meaningful to me and not ridden by theory or “position-taking.” This meant going directly to traditional subjects and finding out how I might develop them. I became an avid museumgoer and liked looking back. I was beginning to realize that all of the artists of the past whom I admired in a bone-deep way had used the past as a source of the future.
On Monday morning I wrote two pieces, a “Five Best” article for this Saturday’s The Wall Street Journal and a twenty-minute speech that I’ll be delivering tonight at an Actors’ Fund of America dinner. I then met an opera critic for lunch at Good Enough to Eat, during which we discussed the opera libretto I may or may not be writing.
I spent the afternoon booking travel (about which more below) and answering my mail, including an e-mail from the press rep of a theater company in Maryland who saw this posting and invited me to come see one of her company’s shows in May. I accepted. Talk about cause and effect!
After dinner I strolled down to the ArcLight Theater to catch the opening-night performance of an off-Broadway show, Jonathan Leaf’s The Germans in Paris, which I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Journal.
Today I write, go to the gym, and give my speech. Tomorrow afternoon I’m off to Raleigh to see the world premiere of Carolina Ballet’s Monet Impressions, an evening of dances by Robert Weiss and Lynne Taylor-Corbett, and take a peek at the North Carolina Museum of Art’s Monet retrospective.
I fly back to New York on Friday, then depart once more on Saturday morning to see shows in Boston, Washington, and Arlington. I plan to blog from the road, but irregularly, so don’t be surprised if I drop out of sight from time to time.
Over to you, OGIC!