Archives for September 2007

Sorry for the dust here. Terry has his cold, OGIC has been entertaining, and last night was my first jazz class. It was wonderful, and I spent the rest of the night in an elated state working on the little routine we learned which, if I can get it super spruce, may be my ticket to Broadway. Fingers crossed.
Seriously, the class was great. My two things to work on for next time are to stop trying to insert relevés everywhere (ballet you go up, jazz you stay down) and to stop giggling every time someone either says or demonstrates “jazz hands.” The instructor was nice about it, but it’s clearly going to be a liability if I can’t get over it.
I have to tap away at the book for a few hours, but more soon. In the meanwhile, here’s my favorite pop culture invocation of jazz hands from the summer (goodness begins around the 1:30 mark; warning: it’s from a show that makes some people’s souls bleed).

“The presence of death makes itself felt in the sadness of beauty.”
Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious

I came down with a rip-roaring chest cold last Tuesday, no doubt in part because of all the stuff I’ve been doing lately. Alas, I had to keep on writing and traveling throughout the week. An unwritten column in The Wall Street Journal waits for no man, even when he feels crappy. Neither does an out-of-town opening.
This morning I’m returning from yet another theater-related trip, this one to Washington, D.C., and I need some rest.
Later.

“A man of action rarely keeps a journal; it is always later on and in a period of prolonged inactivity, that he does his recollecting, makes his notations, and, very often, has cause to wonder at the course his life has taken.”
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

• Reading list from Lawrence Weschler’s Literary Nonfiction class at NYU.
• The online bookstore of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. (subject of Weschler’s excellent Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder).

• You write orgastic, I edit orgiastic: Fact-checking Fitzgerald. For more on Fitzgerald’s editing and revision process, see also.
• Reading list for Joseph Campbell’s mythology class at Sarah Lawrence.

It’s highly unusual for me to devote my entire Wall Street Journal drama column to a single production, but after seeing Hartford Stage’s new production of Our Town on Wednesday night, I didn’t hesitate to shoot the works:

If I were to pick a handful of works of art that, taken together, embody the American experience, one of them would be Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” That was Wilder’s purpose in writing his best-known play. “This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying,” says the Stage Manager, the character who narrates his fictional chronicle of life in a small New England town not long after the turn of the 20th century. It is a claim that only the most self-assured of artists would dare to make–and one that “Our Town” satisfies to the fullest degree. So, too, does Hartford Stage’s revival of “Our Town,” in which the 82-year-old Hal Holbrook gives the performance of a long lifetime as the Stage Manager. This is the finest “Our Town” I have seen or hope to see, a production masterly in its self-effacing understatement and satisfying in every possible way….
Part of what makes a classic play classic is its ability to stand up to an infinite number of approaches and still remain recognizable. At the same time, few things are so compelling as a revival of a well-known play that offers you nothing more (or less) than the thing itself, unadorned and direct. This is the way that Gregory Boyd has treated “Our Town” in his Hartford Stage production, and the results are as illuminating in their own straightforward way as the most radical of reinterpretations. Not all of Wilder’s stage directions are taken literally–Mr. Holbrook’s Stage Manager doesn’t smoke a pipe–but at no time do you feel that Mr. Boyd and his actors are getting in the way of the text. Instead they revel in it, taking Grover’s Corners at face value and lettiing us draw our own conclusions about the plain people who live there.
Such an approach requires first-rate acting to make its effect, and Hal Holbrook is the man for the job. His Stage Manager is very much in the tradition of Frank Craven, who created the role on Broadway in 1938 and filmed it two years later in Hollywood. His accent is purest New England, his manner spare and flinty. You could, I suppose, call it conventional, but that would be missing the point: Like Mr. Boyd, Mr. Holbrook trusts the play, and is content to let it make its points without superimposing any of his own. The simplicity with which he delivers his oft-quoted curtain speech (“Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners….You get a good rest too”) is an object lesson in how to act without seeming to do so….

No free link, so go buy Friday’s paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent arts coverage–in the twinkling of an eye. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

The Wall Street Journal asked me to write about Luciano Pavarotti for Saturday’s paper. I responded with a column about the tenor at his best (the miraculous Bohème that he recorded with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1972) and worst (the public performances of his later years). It is candid, as I think all obituaries should be, and I’m sure some readers will find my frankness discomfiting. On the other hand, I covered Pavarotti’s New York performances for the Daily News throughout the Nineties and thus am in a position to speak with some authority about how he sounded toward the end of his career.
If you’re up for it, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read this column by going here.