Archives for 2007

If you read the New York papers, you know that most of Broadway has been shut down by a stagehands’ strike. Eight shows remain open, two of which, Pygmalion and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, were praised by me in my Wall Street Journal drama column. (Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline is still in previews–I won’t see it for another couple of weeks.)
Shows playing off Broadway are unaffected by the strike, though The Fantasticks is the only one to which I’ve given a favorable notice. I plan to see two new off-Broadway shows later this week and review them in Friday’s Journal. On Saturday I’ll be flying out to Chicago to look at a pair of interesting-sounding productions, a revival of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw and a new play by Nilo Cruz called A Park in Our House, about which I’ll be reporting next week.
How long will the strike last? Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll let you know what I know when I know it. In the meantime, though, keep in mind that at any given moment, most of the good shows in America are playing way off Broadway. In recent weeks I’ve praised productions I saw in Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. You don’t have to go to New York City–or anywhere near it–to spend an unforgettable night at the theater. What are you waiting for?
UPDATE: If you bought an advance ticket to a Broadway show that’s been closed by the strike and want to know how to get a refund, go here.

“You look troubled,” my houseguest told me.

“I have an appointment with the cardiologist,” I replied. “I don’t have any reason to think I’m not all right, but I know that he could tell me something bad.”

And so he could–though so far he never has. Still, no day goes by that I fail to recall the fact that I, like you, am working without a contract, and that my continued tenure in the land of the living is subject to termination without notice. In my case, of course, this arrangement ceased to be mere theory two years ago next month, and since then I’ve looked upon my cardiologist in somewhat the same way that the fighter pilots in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff look upon flight surgeons:

As a result all fighter jocks began looking upon doctors as their natural enemies. Going to see a flight surgeon was a no-gain proposition; a pilot could only hold his own or lose in the doctor’s office. To be grounded for a medical reason was no humiliation, looked at objectively. But it was a humiliation, nonetheless!–for it meant you no longer had that indefinable, unutterable, integral stuff. (It could blow at any seam.)

Kindly don’t bother to point out how irrational this attitude is. I know that should my doctor ever have reason to warn me that my heart is exhibiting symptoms that might (as he puts it) impact on my longevity, he will doubtless also tell me to do certain things that will have a equal and opposite impact. Or maybe not. Because sooner or later, the right stuff that keeps us all flying is destined to blow at one seam or another, and when that happens…well, you can only take so many pills.

I wish I were able to look upon the prospect of my ultimate demise with the same jaunty equanimity that Frank Skeffington, the septuagenarian hero of Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, succeeded in preserving throughout his latter days. At one point in the novel, Skeffington lights up an expensive cigar, turns to his nephew, and says, “One over the limit. A happy shortcut to the Dark Encounter.” I sometimes affect a similar jauntiness, but I’m just kidding. The truth is that I love my life, more so since the arrival of Mrs. T than ever before, and I am absolutely not prepared to give it up, or even see it significantly diminished by ill health. Which is why my thrice-yearly visits to the doctor always make me feel prospectively nervous–even when I have no objective reason to be anything other than confident.

Not to worry, by the way: I got my usual thumbs-up report from Dr. Minutillo, the East Side specialist who keeps track of my ticker. I expected good news, and this time I just about took it for granted. It was different when I learned last year that my 2005 brush with death had left my heart unscarred. That time the news that I’d dodged the bullet left me feeling briefly disoriented: “Two minutes later I was standing on East End Avenue, basking in the bright blue sunshine and hailing a cab. My mind was unexpectedly empty. Thank you, I kept saying to myself over and over again. Thank you, thank you.”

I’m no less thankful this year, but somehow it doesn’t seem as urgent–which is a good thing. Only a fool goes around constantly muttering to himself, I’m not dead yet–better make the most of this day. Yes, the sentiment is right and proper, but the more time you spend thinking about it, the less time you have to think about other things. I’m alive and well and happy to be both, and (as Dr. Johnson said in a very different context) “there’s an end on’t.” The point of life is living, so on to the next play, the next painting, the next lunch with a friend, the next trip to a place I’ve never been–and, come March, the next visit to East End Avenue.

In between these (mostly) happy occurrences, though, I expect I’ll spend a fair amount of time thinking about the Dark Encounter, and that, too, is right and proper, and even productive, up to a point. Not long after I got the good news from my doctor last year, I had occasion to reread Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, in which a character makes the following remark:

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

I still think that’s good advice–in moderation.

“The time in which a person lives gives him the opportunity of knowing himself as a moral being, engaged in the search for the truth; yet this gift which man has in his hands is at once delectable and bitter. And life is no more than the period allotted to him, and in which he may, indeed must, fashion his spirit in accordance with his own understanding of the aim of human existence. The rigid frame into which it is thrust, however, makes our responsibility to ourselves and others all the more starkly obvious. The human conscience is dependent upon time for its existence.”
Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema

I never thought much of Norman Mailer, and explained why in a 1998 essay called “Forgotten but Not Gone” that can be found in A Terry Teachout Reader:

Why is Norman Mailer still famous? He hasn’t written a good book since The Executioner’s Song. Except for The Naked and the Dead, none of his novels continues to be read, and his magazine journalism long ago curdled into self-parody. I’ve never met anyone under the age of forty who took him seriously….
So what is it about this seventy-five-year-old has-been that continues to make aging editors weak in the knees? The answer, I think, is that he is to literature what the Kennedys are to politics, a living, breathing relic of the vanished era of high hopes. Even though he was already washed up as a novelist by 1960, Mailer had retooled himself as a middlebrow journalist just in time to bang the drum for JFK. Talk about sucker bait: Mailer had spent the Fifties bemoaning the “partially totalitarian society” that was America under Dwight Eisenhower, and along came a handsome young Democratic philosopher-king, a glamorous millionaire who wrote books (or at least signed them), flattered susceptible authors (including Mailer), and hung out with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe. All at once the joint was jumping, and everything seemed possible, from racial equality to free love…
No doubt Mailer, like Kennedy, will never lack for bootlickers, at least while his generation is still alive. It’s hard to accept that a once-promising writer has become a burnt-out case, especially when the memory of his promise is part of your own lost youth. Who would have guessed in 1960 that the first literary star of the electronic age would end his days as a nostalgia act, the Glenn Miller of Camelot? Once again, Jack Kennedy got it wrong. Life is fair–all you have to do is give it time.

I haven’t changed my mind.
(To read the whole thing, go here.)
UPDATE: A reader writes:

Your feelings about Norman Mailer are clear. It’s fine, I suppose, that you haven’t changed your mind, but your timing makes the reiteration of your views from nine years ago seem merely mean-spirited. Nobody is asking you to praise Mailer, or to change your mind. But why not just stay quiet, instead of regurgitating something from a decade ago? Your timing caused the piece to reveal much more about you than about Mailer.

I replied to this e-mail avant la lettre in 2005. And no, I haven’t changed my mind about that, either.

A nice, unintentional pairing last night: The movie version of Young Frankenstein followed by a couple chapters of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a modern Frankenstein tale set in Scotland. (I have the Dalkey edition and, yes, it’s ugly. But still, a wonderful book that you should read!) The rental of Young Frankenstein was at the behest of Mr. Tingle whose been overworking and in need of a little Mel Brooks. This time the bit we latched onto is Cloris Leachman’s revelation about Dr. Frankenstein senior: “Yes, he was my … boyfriend!”
RELATED:
• Terry’s review of the Broadway adaptation of Young Frankenstein in today’s Wall Street Journal.
• NPR story about the show, which Mel Brooks says came about after the line he was my boyfriend got stuck in his brain. I know how you feel, Mel.

• Google the famous line from Madame Bovary — “… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity” — and you’ll find it rendered into English numerous ways. Reading the variations one after another it becomes amusing to imagine they’re the result of a writer fiddling endlessly with a single sentence: adding, deleting, shuffling, and then changing everything back again.
First draft:
… language is a cracked kettle on which we bang our tunes to make bears dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity.
After a little tinkering:
. . . human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
“Cracked tin black kettle”? No. Also, “long for”? Calm down there, Heathcliff:
“… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when what we want is to move the stars to pity.”
Strunk the end of that sentence and we’re there:
“… human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity”
At which point the author begins to wonder if the sentence didn’t really sound better with “hammer” after all.
• I was thinking about that quote last night. I’ve been reading Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya, which collects the letters of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson during the years of their “bilaterally condescending friendship.” The back-and-forth is entertaining, and reading it I feel great affection for both men but especially old Volodya, with his superciliousness and his puns and his gliding fleet-footedness. And yet admiring him sometimes makes me feel a little like a seal barking after an opera singer, all enthusiasm and flippers, which was what brought to mind Flaubert’s dancing bears.
A couple good bits from the letters to bark at you, the first from a 1942 letter:

I have just had a visit from the secretary of the man — whatever his name — who wrote something called Tobacco Road and who is now writing a novel of Soviet Life. Vous voyez ca d’ici. He wanted to know the English spelling of “nemetzky,” “collhoz” (which he writes “kholholtz”) and such things. The hero is called Vladimir. All very simple. I was half impelled by my private devil to palm him a set of obscene words which he would use for “good morning” and “good night.” (e.g. “Razyebi tvoyu dushu,” said V. gravely.)

In the annotations, the book’s editor Simon Kardinsky identifies this last phrase as “a violent but untranslatable Russian obscenity.”
Another letter, written that same year, describes various “aberrations of Homo sap” met during a lecture tour of American universities:

1) Woman teaching Drama. Hobby: resemblance to the Duchess of Windsor. The resemblance is rather striking. When the Duchess (according to press photos) changes her coiffure, she changes it too (keeping up with her model, as some mimetic butterflies are known to do). Classifies the people she meets into a) those who mention the likeness at once; b) those who take some time to realize it; c) those who speak of it only to a third party; d) (the best) those who, in her presence, automatically refer to Wally without consciously defining the association of thoughts; and e) those who ignore it — or do not see it. She is a spinster with a few Windsors in the past, and this hobby of hers is what makes life worth living.

I filed two Wall Street Journal drama columns this week, the first one on Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll and the second, which appears in this morning’s paper, on Mel Brooks’ musical version of Young Frankenstein:

Anyone who goes to “Young Frankenstein” expecting the musical of the year is in for an unpleasant surprise: It’s one of those promising but uneven shows that, had it been written in 1957, would have been heavily doctored out of town, then brought to Broadway for a solid run. Funny it is–sometimes–but bulletproof it ain’t….
Not only is the book sorely in need of deep cutting, but the songs are neither lyrically nor melodically memorable, though a couple of them, “Join the Family Business” in particular, work well enough in the context of the show. Still, Mr. Brooks is a pasticheur, not a true songwriter, and it says everything about his strictly limited gifts that the most effective production number in the show, “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” was written by Irving Berlin….
This brings us to the not-so-small matter of the cast. “Young Frankenstein” was one of the most vividly and distinctively cast film comedies of the ’70s. Because the musical is so similar to the movie, it’s impossible not to compare the two sets of performers, and the new ones mostly suffer by contrast…
I’m not saying that “Young Frankenstein” didn’t make me laugh, but it did so in a way reminiscent of a big, stupid German shepherd who knocks you down and nuzzles your face until you finally give in and scratch its ears. I prefer comedy that doesn’t try so hard–and doesn’t have to.

The drill remains unchanged: buy a paper to read the whole thing, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to all of the Journal‘s arts coverage, both of my drama columns included. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the Young Frankenstein review is here.)