Archives for August 17, 2007

I gather from a number of recent news stories that it’s considered bad form to edit your own Wikipedia entry. As far as I’m concerned, that’s hogwash. Ever since I noticed that people in search of biographical information about me were cribbing it from my entry, I edited it carefully, started watching it like a hawk, and have continued to update it regularly. I didn’t write the original entry, however, and have done my best to ensure that its tone remains neutral and purely informational (except for the last sentence of the second paragraph, which is the work of the original author!).
Earlier today a radio host on whose show I’ll be appearing next week–watch this space for details–asked me to send him my bio.
“I’d be glad to,” I said, “but you can just check my Wikipedia entry.”
“Those things aren’t very trustworthy, are they?” he asked.
“This one is,” I replied grimly.

One more from the road: my Wall Street Journal drama column is about two regional-theater musical revivals that make use of Jerome Robbins’ original choreography.
From New Hampshire, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s West Side Story:

Of all Robbins’ shows, “West Side Story,” in which the plot of “Romeo and Juliet” is transplanted to a New York slum circa 1957, is hardest to revive without his choreography. To be sure, it can be done–Joel Ferrell re-choreographed the show to fine effect for Portland Center Stage last year–but to do so is inevitably to invite comparison with the finger-popping dances that made it into the 1961 film version and so became familiar to millions of moviegoers who would never see “West Side Story” on stage. For most of us, these vaulting, vibrant sketches of teenage passion are as much a part of “West Side Story” as Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy score, and any director who omits them does so at his own risk.
Brian Swasey, the man at the helm of the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s revival of “West Side Story,” has opted for modesty over daring. “Who am I to think I can create something better than Jerome Robbins?” he writes in his program note. I admire his good sense–and I also admire the way in which he has managed to cram Robbins’ dances into a downstairs theater whose stage isn’t much larger than my Manhattan living room. My third-row seat was no more than 10 feet from the action. To see “West Side Story” in so intimate a setting is viscerally thrilling in a way that no big-house performance can possibly hope to rival….

From Maine, the Ogunquit Playhouse’s King and I:

Steven Yuhasz directed the revival of “The King and I” now playing at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse, a 75-year-old purveyor of resort-town musical comedy that bills itself as “Broadway on the Beach.” He has wisely chosen to stick with the original choreography, and Susan Kikuchi’s (mostly) faithful recreation of Robbins’ Thai-style dance-and-mime version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is one of the production’s highlights. The dancing isn’t up to Broadway standards, but Robbins’ conception is so strong and vivid that it needn’t be executed perfectly in order to be perfectly charming….

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of Friday’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my drama column and all the rest of the Journal‘s arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

I recently paid a visit to the Gropius House, not far from Walden Pond, which Walter Gropius designed for himself in 1938. Touring this remarkable house a few months after seeing Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the first time caused me to start thinking about why so many Americans dislike midcentury modern architecture–even though they respond enthusiastically to other forms of modern art. The end product of these speculations was my next “Sightings” column, which will appear in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Regardless of how you feel about midcentury modernism, I think you’ll find it interesting.
Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and give it a read.

• I usually sleep deeply and well, and so tend not to remember my dreams. On the rare occasions when I do recall them after waking, they’re almost always commonplace, nothing like the elaborate doozies that some of my friends regularly bring back from the Land of Nod. Every once in a while, though, I manage to eke out something interesting. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I dreamed that I sat in with Louis Armstrong (we played “Mack the Knife,” and the piano player was rushing). He was performing in the large, anonymous-looking waiting room of a hospital located on a hill, and when I awoke I realized with a start that it was Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missouri Hospital, the place where I was born. Pretty good for an Armstrong biographer, huh?

Last night’s dream was similarly exotic, as well as similarly related to my childhood. I dreamed that the studio of Helen Frankenthaler (whose Grey Fireworks is part of the Teachout Museum) was located in the basement of my mother’s home in Smalltown, U.S.A., the house where I grew up. My mother, it seemed, had somehow neglected to share this fact with me–apparently she didn’t find it unusual enough to mention–and I only happened to discover it when I went downstairs during a visit and found a tall stack of unfinished canvases next to the water heater.

After I woke up, I realized that the woman who played Frankenthaler in my dream was Illeana Douglas, who had a nice little role in Ghost World but whom I haven’t seen on screen for a number of years. (That’s pretty good casting, actually.)

As usual, the part of the puzzled middle-aged dreamer was played by me.

• Max Roach is dead. He was a great and influential jazz drummer, one of the very best who ever lived, though I can’t say that he was one of my personal favorites–I always found his sound to be flat and grey. Still, he made far more than his share of memorable recordings, of which Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, a 1956 album to which I return at least once a year, shows him off to particularly good effect. His solo on “Blue Seven” (which exists in notation in the second volume of Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men) is a classic by any reckoning, mine included.

Mr. JazzWax pays a heartfelt and intelligent tribute to Roach here.

“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
Robert Towne, screenplay for Chinatown (spoken by John Huston)