Archives for 2007

“Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I often have occasion to make favorable mention in this space and elsewhere of Think Denk, Jeremy Denk’s witty blog about “the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.” Not long ago our mutual friend Anya Grundmann, who helps run the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Classical Music and Opera, invited the two of us to appear jointly at the next institute to talk about blogging. We live in the same neighborhood but had never met, so I invited Mr. Think Denk to tour the Teachout Museum and have lunch with me at Good Enough to Eat. It took us several weeks to come up with a mutually compatible date–we’ve both been on the road for much of the summer–but we finally managed to converge on Friday afternoon.
No sooner had I opened the door to my apartment than we started pelting one another with opinions, some of which we shared (four thumbs up for Verdi’s Falstaff) and some not (he likes Ives and Schumann a lot more than I do). The talk was more or less nonstop, though we did pause long enough to cram down lunch and listen to four records that came up in the conversation:
• Van Cliburn playing the first movement of the Barber Piano Sonata
• Gérard Souzay’s 1946 recording of Fauré’s “Clair de lune”
• A 1909 recording of Reynaldo Hahn’s “Offrande” sung by the composer to his own piano accompaniment
• A recording of “Quand’ero paggio,” an aria from Falstaff, made in 1907 by Victor Maurel, the baritone who created the role fourteen years earlier
Mr. Think Denk is every bit as smart and thoughtful in person as you’d expect from reading his blog. Time was when this might have surprised me, but experience has taught me that such is usually the case with the best bloggers. Alas, I’m afraid I talked his ear off about The Letter–I’d had an unusually productive work session with Paul Moravec the day before and was still booming and zooming as a result–but he was kind enough to act interested and ask leading questions, to which I obligingly responded by hosing him down with superfluous information. (At least I stayed off the subject of Louis Armstrong’s embouchure!)
No doubt one of the secondary reasons for my garrulity was that I’d finally managed to lick the case of allergy-heightened, stress-exacerbated sniffles that tore a hole in the past two weeks of my life. As usual I celebrated by revving up my engine: on Saturday I took a train to Baltimore to see CenterStage’s production of Arsenic and Old Lace, and the next day I was back in New York for a press preview of Dividing the Estate, Horton Foote’s new play. This week I’ll be writing three pieces, seeing two more shows, and paying a visit to the Armstrong Archives at Queens College.
Whatever else my life is or isn’t, it’s definitely not dull. Neither Mr. Think Denk nor I can still quite believe that people actually pay us to do what we do. Yes, I work too damn hard and don’t always take proper care of myself, but I suspect that the sheer pleasure of spending my days immersed in art up to the eyebrows offsets no small part of the resulting wear and tear.
It’s nice to be myself again.

I just got word that another book tentatively called Hotter Than That will be published around the time that my Louis Armstrong biography of the same name will be coming out from Harcourt. No, it’s not an Armstrong biography, but it is about jazz trumpet, which suggests that I may need to come up with another title. The prospect doesn’t unnerve me–my Mencken biography was retitled The Skeptic after I turned the manuscript in to HarperCollins–but it’s not too soon for me to be thinking about a new name, so I thought I’d share my problem with the readers of this blog.

“Hotter Than That” is, of course, the title of one of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings of 1928, so I went through the Armstrong discography to see if any other title leaped out at me. These caught my eye:

• King of the Zulus
• Fireworks
• That Rhythm Man
• You Rascal, You
• Laughin’ Louie
• Song of the Vipers (or, alternatively, “King of the Vipers,” which was one of Armstrong’s many nicknames)
• I’m Shootin’ High
• Jubilee

Your thoughts?

“Lost Illusion is the undisclosed title of every novel.”
André Maurois, The Art of Writing

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to out-of-town productions of a pair of infrequently revived shows, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life and Stephen Sondheim’s musical version of Merrily We Roll Along:

Few artists have been done dirtier by posterity than William Saroyan. For a time he was one of America’s best-known writers, and “The Time of Your Life,” his most successful play, won a Pulitzer in 1940. But then America fell out of love with Saroyan, and he had lapsed into half-remembered obscurity long before his death in 1981. Not even “The Time of Your Life” has held the stage, and when the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, one of the best companies in the New York area, announced a revival, I was eager to see what they would do with a play so completely out of favor. The good news is that it has turned out to be far more theatrically potent than I could possibly have imagined.
On paper there’s nothing much to “The Time of Your Life,” which is set in a seedy San Francisco bar just after the start of World War II. Joe (Andrew Weems) sits and guzzles champagne as a string of variously eccentric drinkers come and go. At play’s end he rouses himself from his sozzled torpor, does a good turn for an unhappy whore (Sofia Jean Gomez), and returns at last to the world he had renounced. That’s all there is to it, really–except for the goofy good humor with which Saroyan portrays the patrons of Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon. From Harry (Blake Hackler), the hapless hoofer who longs to be a comedian but is utterly unfunny, to Kit Carson (Edmond Genest), a half-senile old man who claims to have been a sharpshooting pioneer, Saroyan fills the stage with characters whose cockeyed charm wins you over….
Like the 1934 George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play on which it is based, “Merrily We Roll Along” runs in reverse: It starts in the present, showing us the hollow triumph of a songwriter who gave up music to become a Hollywood producer, then turns back the clock so that we can watch him selling out by installments. The score is one of Mr. Sondheim’s strongest, but the show’s unrelieved pessimism and structural trickery turned off Broadway audiences, and the original 1980 production closed after just 16 performances.
Fortunately, Mr. Sondheim and George Furth (who had previously collaborated on “Company”) kept on tinkering with “Merrily.” In time they came up with a much-altered version meant to make us care about the fate of Franklin Shepard (Will Gartshore), the Sondheim-like songwriter who, unlike his creator, betrays his art (and friends and lovers) by jettisoning his idealism and going for the gold. In this revised, slimmed-down version, the show’s ironic arc–it begins in bitter disillusion and moves “forward” to a happy “ending” full of youthful hope for the future–now makes dramatic and emotional sense.
Eric Schaeffer, who as artistic director of Signature Theatre has earned a well-deserved national reputation for his Sondheim stagings, has opted this time for a bare-bones production similar in feel to a semi-staged concert version. It is, alas, too obviously based on John Doyle’s recent Broadway revival of “Company,” right down to the big black piano at center stage…

No free link–yet–so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and the rest of the Journal‘s arts section–on the spot. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”
William Saroyan (quoted in the New York Journal-American, Aug. 23, 1961)

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)

• Iphigenia 2.0 (drama, R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here, closes Oct. 7)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 29)

“I talked with Louis Armstrong one night in Basin Street and mentioned his record of ‘When You’re Smilin” which I had early loved and too soon lost. ‘I was working in the house band at the Paramount when I was young,’ Armstrong said. ‘And the lead trumpet stood up and played that song, and I just copied what he did note for note. I never found out his name but there was kicks in him. There’s kicks everywhere.'”
Murray Kempton, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events