Archives for June 2007

She said to me about American compositions: “There is a picture that one sees, a picture with an old man, and a man, and a little boy–they have drums and he a piccolo, and they are all ragged. I do not know its name.”
I said, “It’s called ‘The Spirit of ’76.'”
“The part that I like least in your American compositions is the part where these people come into the piece. Why should a piano concerto, or a ballet, or a description of how dawn comes over your American prairies, need always a little march with a piccolo?”
I said, “It’s put into the piece to show that it’s an American piece.” Irene replied, “Ah, no doubt. It is like that little sign Made in America that one sees on objects–without it, perhaps, the piece could not be exported.”
Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

That’s what I’ve been doing all day in between packing my bags. Tonight I’ll be in New Jersey. (See next Friday’s Wall Street Journal for details.) Tomorrow morning I cast off and set sail for Greensboro, North Carolina, followed by points north, east, and west, not in that order. Along the way I’ll be seeing four shows, dining with Ms. Asymmetrical Information and Ms. Tingle Alley, and listening to new CDs in my rental car. And blogging. Maybe.
More from the road….

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
Elmore Leonard, “Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing”

I am, in theory, back in New York. The flies in the ointment number four:
(1) I spent twelve hours on the road yesterday and so am not entirely myself this morning.
(2) Neither is my iBook. The wonder-working women of Ms Mac are on their way over to my apartment at this very moment to pour Drano into its ports and make it happy again.
(3) Just in case the problem is more serious than it seems, I have to try to finish writing this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column before they get here.
(4) I depart for North Carolina and Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Between now and then, I need to see two shows and do all the stuff I left undone last week in Smalltown, U.S.A.
For all these reasons, I can’t promise that I’ll be doing a whole lot of blogging between now and my departure. If that changes, though, you’ll be the first to know….

“One time, years ago, the veteran Baltimore newspaperman, H.L. Mencken, was checking copy coming in from the night editor and sighing at the rising number of errors he was noticing, errors of fact but also of syntax, and even some idioms that didn’t sound quite right. He shook his head and said, as much to himself as to the editor at his side: ‘The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology.'”
Alistair Cooke, “Memories of the Great and the Good” (courtesy of George Will)

“Beauty consists of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, by turns or all together, the era, its fashion, its morals, its passions.”
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

In this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report from New York on the premiere of A.R. Gurney’s latest play, Crazy Mary, then look back to the last of the shows I saw during my recent swing through the Northeast, the Studio Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in Washington, D.C.:

Comparisons between playwrights and novelists are almost always misleading, but I’d say it’s more or less accurate to think of A.R. Gurney as the John P. Marquand of American drama. Like Marquand, Mr. Gurney writes about WASPs and their discontents, and his ruefully funny studies of a ruling class in decline are too often dismissed as trivial by critics who take no interest in the inner lives of the insufficiently underprivileged. Also like Marquand, he is prolific to a fault, and his work is as unevenly inspired as it is unfailingly professional. I’ve reviewed several of his plays in this space, always with pleasure–I like his best work very much–but rarely with outright enthusiasm. Thus I’m glad to report that “Crazy Mary,” Mr. Gurney’s new portrait of life among the white-bread set, is a highly impressive piece of work, a serious comedy that succeeds in wringing honest laughs out of an awkward subject.
The Mary in question is a middle-aged manic depressive (Kristine Nielsen) who has spent the past three decades stashed away in a high-priced Boston sanitarium to which her late father consigned her after she made the fatal mistake of sleeping with the gardener. In addition to being crazy, Mary is loaded–she inherited all her father’s money–and when Lydia (Sigourney Weaver), Mary’s second cousin once removed, becomes her legal guardian after a death in the family…well, you figure it out, if you can. Every twist in the plot of “Crazy Mary” took me by surprise, and none of them disappointed me in the slightest….
I’m spending the first part of the summer checking out regional productions of the plays of Tom Stoppard, whose “The Coast of Utopia” took New York by storm this past season. My most recent trip was to the Studio Theatre, which is putting on “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” as its contribution to “Shakespeare in Washington,” the city-wide, season-long celebration of the Bard currently underway in the nation’s capital. I’ve been hearing good things about the Studio Theatre for the past couple of years, and this revival confirmed them all. It’s the best “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” I’ve ever seen on stage….

No free link. Pick up a copy of today’s Journal to read my column, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to the and the rest of the Journal‘s arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

No self-respecting New York-based drama critic can fail to take note of the annual Tony Awards, and in this week’s “Sightings” column, published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I make a few predictions about who’s likely to win what–and reflect on what, if anything, those likely victories will tell us about the current state of American theater.
To learn more, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.