Archives for August 30, 2007

My companions at Martha’s Vineyard, Hortense and Boozy, used to work together as editors at a publishing house in New York. One of their work jokes was a video concept called “Girls in Publishing Gone Wild,” which would feature scintillating footage of girls who wear glasses unbuttoning their cardigans and struggling to extricate themselves from their turtlenecks as buds of crumpled Kleenex emerged provocatively from their shirt cuffs.
Our weekend together had a similar quality. We drank a lot of tea, and stayed up late watching Room With A View and eating candy-colored macaroons from Chelsea. At the beach, we clambered around talking about Enid Blyton and Isabella Blow. We visited three bookstores, and my souvenirs from the trip are roughed-up copies of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and a book called The Sea-Horse and Its Relatives. The latter, written by two Australian museum curators and published in 1958, reads like something a character in Wodehouse might write. A chapter called “Interesting Habits” begins, “What is the most remarkable member of the Animal Kingdom? Few would disagree with awarding the palm to the female of the human species, but of all the marine creatures, as Sir J. Arthur Thomson has written, Sea-horses … ‘are the most “kenspeckle” creatures of the sea, and this is saying a good deal …'” Indeed.
This weekend I’m traveling again, this time to the Wienerschnitzel family reunion. This is a reunion of my mom’s umpteen brothers and sisters held biennially on my grandfather’s farm in southern Indiana. Lots of croquet and volleyball, and gathering in the living room to hear my musical cousin pound out “House of the Rising Sun” on the piano. As the finale, the uncles, who will have been drinking beer in the barn all afternoon, will troop out to a distant field and set off fireworks for the delight of the crowd that is watching, amid fragrant clouds of bug spray, on the lawn — a display that always marks for me the official close of summer.

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)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• Grease (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (play, G, suitable for very bright children, reviewed here)

“Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn’t answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs. I didn’t have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger’s breath.”
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep