Archives for July 2007

Our new guest blogger Carrie Frye, a/k/a CAAF, will be back to entertain you tomorrow!

My Wall Street Journal column about the decline of regional arts criticism has stirred up quite a bit of comment in and out of the blogosphere. Among those who’ve posted about it to date are Mr. Playgoer, Alex Ross, Edward Winkleman, and one of the anonymous authors of Moreover, The Economist‘s new artblog.
I’m also getting a fair amount of e-mail about the column, of which this letter is typical:

Thanks for the thoughtful and (as always) incisive article about regional criticism. I’m working in the arts in one of those towns, Wilmington, Delaware, that doesn’t have regular arts criticism. We have a couple of good writers who cover things the best they can, but they can’t cover everything.
One of the responsibilities, as I see it, of critics is not only to say what they thought of something, but also–in the most simplistic terms–to let people know it was there. It’s important to build cultural pride, or at least a cultural consciousness. It’s hard to create excitement in audiences when they don’t even know what’s been in town. When I lived in Atlanta, the paper’s practice was only to review those things that had several performances, using the logic that if it was only one performance, it wouldn’t help to get audiences there because it was already gone. So…you know, Isaac Stern could come and no one would ever know he was there. I think the critic’s responsibility is to help excite and build the audience, as well as serve it.
Thanks for doing that.

This letter serves as a valuable reminder of something that working critics often fail to keep in mind: reviews are news. A good critic is also a reporter, and unless he gives his readers a clear idea of what happened at a performance–starting with the fact that it took place–he isn’t doing his job.
I also agree with my correspondent about the need to create excitement–or, rather, to communicate it. When a show thrills me, I do my very best to get that fact across to my readers, if at all possible in the first paragraph of my review.
Here’s what I sound like when I’m walking on air:

The only time I don’t think Brian Friel is the best living playwright is immediately after I’ve seen a play by Tom Stoppard. That both men should be represented on Broadway this season is a boon, and though Mr. Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” trilogy, being both new and spectacular, will likely get most of the ink, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of “Translations,” directed by Garry Hynes, deserves equal time. This production of Mr. Friel’s 1980 play, among the greatest written in the 20th century, is so comprehensively masterful that no critic, however enthusiastic, can do more than suggest its manifold virtues. Instead of reviewing it, I wish I could simply send you a ticket….

Was I gushing? Yeah, I guess so–but if a show like that doesn’t make you want to gush, even in the sober pages of The Wall Street Journal, you’re in the wrong business. Of course the trick is to call your shots: if you blow your top every week, people will stop listening to you. But a critic who isn’t capable of communicating his excitement should seek some other line of work.
In the immortal words of Constant Lambert:

After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) Above all no enthusiasm.

I know I have my faults, but that’s not one of them.

I just did something new: I wrote my very first introduction to the catalogue of a art exhibition.
William Bailey, whose Piazza Rotunda is part of the Teachout Museum, has a one-man show coming up at Betty Cuningham Gallery, and Betty called me up from out of the blue to ask if I’d write about him for the catalogue. Naturally I said yes, though not without a certain amount of apprehension, since I’d never written such a piece. I went down to the gallery a few weeks ago to see Bailey’s latest paintings, and last Monday I sat down and knocked out the introduction, which I called “Art of the Unreal,” in a single sitting. It’s not bad, if I do say so myself.
The show goes up on October 18. Come take a look–and buy a catalogue while you’re there!

Direct from Erin McKeown‘s publicist:

After five full-length albums, two EPs, hundreds of shows every year, reams of critical praise, and an incalculable number of fans served, where is Erin McKeown to go? She heads to Lafayette.
Named after the address of New York’s much-loved Joe’s Pub, Lafayette is the acclaimed songwriter’s first official live album and an on-record invitation into her other world, the stage, where she spends more than half of every year knocking ’em dead nightly. Over 13 tracks, Lafayette captures the energy and musicality of McKeown as a bandleader and entertainer extraordinaire.
Lafayette is one night in the life of a performer at the peak of her powers. With a singer’s natural gift and a guitarist’s serious chops (often overlooked on her studio albums), McKeown leads her band through their paces on songs new and old, fast and slow, boisterous and reflective. And the group returns the favor, playing the bandleader on and off stage like the elegant entertainers of yesteryear.
The album is also a return to Erin’s roots and Western Massachusetts neighbors, Signature Sounds, the exceptional imprint who last worked with Erin on 2000’s Distillation. A national tour is in the works for the Fall, with dates to be announced shortly.

I assume this album was recorded at the McKeown gig I heard earlier this year, in which case it will be stupendous.
UPDATE: I just got an advance copy in the mail. It was, and it is. No street date yet–I’ll keep you posted.

“When you begin to teach jazz, the most dangerous thing is that you tend to teach style. I had eleven piano students, and I would say eight of them didn’t even want to know about chords or anything–they didn’t even want to do anything that anybody had ever done, because they didn’t want to be imitators. Well, of course, this is pretty naive, but nevertheless it does bring to light the fact that if you’re going to try to teach jazz, you must abstract the principles of music, which have nothing to do with style, and this is exceedingly difficult. So there, the teaching of jazz is a very touchy point. It ends up where the jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.”
Bill Evans, The Universal Mind of Bill Evans (courtesy of The Bill Evans Webpages)

You win some, you lose some. In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on Xanadu and Fables de La Fontaine:

Prior to this week my list of contenders for the title of Worst Musical I’ve Ever Reviewed consisted of “In My Life,” “Lestat,” “Lennon,” “The Times They Are A-Changin'” and “Ring of Fire,” in that order.
Then came “Xanadu.”
What’s so uniquely awful about this stage version of the 1980 flop that put an end to Olivia Newton-John’s Hollywood career? Start with the fact that it’s an elephantine spoof of a quarter-century-old movie so terrible that few people saw it and fewer still remember it. That strikes me as a pretty good working definition of pointlessness, not to mention a near-infallible recipe for boredom. Why bother making such elaborate fun of a forgotten film about a dopey freelance artist (Cheyenne Jackson) who is visited by a Greek muse (Kerry Butler) who inspires him to open a roller disco? Pure spoofery cloys quickly even when its target is familiar, and “Xanadu” has nothing else to offer….
The curtain went up an hour late on “Fables de La Fontaine,” the first production of Lincoln Center Festival 2007. (A malfunctioning light board was to blame.) Fortunately, the show was more than worth the wait. Robert Wilson, whose slow-motion surrealism put him on the avant-garde map in the ’70s, has collaborated with the Comédie-Française, Europe’s oldest theater company, on a pantomime-based French-language version of 19 of Jean de La Fontaine’s 17th-century animal fables. The result is a work of uncanny beauty and compulsion, one of the most entrancing spectacles ever to be presented on a New York stage….

No free link. What are you waiting for? Buy this morning’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you one-two-three-presto access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive and excellent arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of “About Last Night.” This was the first post, and this was the first almanac entry:

We must find out what we can about this place we’re living in–this place in time–but we’ve got to be awfully careful, it seems to me, never to make ourselves too perfectly a part of it. Modishness is the sure sign of the second-rate. We’re finally to be judged not by the degree of our involvement in the mainstream, but by our individual response to it.

Orson Welles said it, and I continue to believe it four years later. Most of our almanac entries are not intended as credos, but this one definitely qualifies.
Much has happened since 2003, both on this blog and elsewhere in the world, but the fact that “About Last Night” has been published continuously throughout that time–even during a week-long stretch when I thought I might be going out of business permanently–says something about the extent to which artblogging has become part of the landscape of American culture. To be sure, skeptics still abound, but I don’t know anybody who actually reads artblogs who doubts that they’re one of the best things to have happened to the arts in recent years. I’m very proud to be a part of the blogosphere.
To Our Girl in Chicago, my friend and co-blogger, and Carrie Frye, our friend and guest blogger–as well as the many artbloggers whom I’ve met and befriended since 2003–I offer heartfelt thanks for helping to create an online world where the arts are taken seriously. And to all of you who read “About Last Night,” thanks for sticking around. In case you’re wondering, we’re still having fun.
See you Monday!

“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On,’ has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race.”
Calvin Coolidge, broadside distributed to agents of the New York Life Insurance Company (1932).