Archives for September 29, 2007

Hangover Square/The Lodger. The first DVD release of John Brahm’s much-admired but infrequently screened mid-Forties thrillers, both featuring first-rate scores (Bernard Herrmann scored Hangover Square, Hugo Friedhofer The Lodger) and spectacularly sinister performances by Laird Cregar. The three-disc package also includes a third Brahm film, The Undying Monster, and a wealth of interesting bonus features. Splendid stuff (TT).

The Dining Room (Clurman, 410 W. 42, closes Saturday). A lovely revival by the Keen Company of A.R. Gurney’s 1982 play–it’s really a string of interlocking sketches–about the decline and fall of the American WASP. Most of the sketches are comic, but the effect is intensely elegiac, for Gurney has mixed feelings about the upper middle class that spawned him, and he isn’t afraid to let them show. The six actors in the excellent cast play a total of fifty-seven people, all of them portrayed with telling exactitude (TT).

Erin McKeown, Lafayette (Signature Sounds). Our favorite rocker, live at New York’s Joe’s Pub in January of 2007 with a smoking-hot band. If you’ve never seen McKeown on stage, this CD will give you a very good idea of what you’ve been missing all these years. I was there, and this is exactly how it was (TT).

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG, $30). A major new history of modern classical music, written from a passionately anti-ideological point of view by a critic-blogger with a lively style and an above-average endowment of common sense. By far the best and most reliable account of musical modernism ever to be published (TT).