Archives for 2007

I was in transit on Friday and couldn’t post the usual weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. My column, filed from the road, featured a pair of shows I saw in New Hampshire. The first was The Man Who Came to Dinner, performed by the Peterborough Players and starring James Whitmore:

Sixty years ago, a 25-year-old ex-Marine named James Whitmore made his acting debut at a summer theater in New Hampshire. From there he went straight to Broadway, won a Tony, got snapped up by Hollywood and became a familiar face, appearing in “The Asphalt Jungle,” “Planet of the Apes,” “The Shawshank Redemption” and countless other films and TV shows. But Mr. Whitmore never forgot where he came from, and in recent years he’s been performing once again with the Peterborough Players, the much-admired troupe that gave him his start. This month, at an age when most actors would be content to sit back and let the kids strut their stuff, he’s playing Sheridan Whiteside in “The Man Who Came to Dinner.” It’s a long, tough part, and I wondered as I drove up to New England whether an 85-year-old actor, however talented, could possibly summon up sufficient energy to make it work. I didn’t need to worry. Mr. Whitmore sailed through it like a youthful trouper, gleefully nailing each and every punch line to the back wall of the converted 18th-century barn in which the Players have been performing since 1933….

The second was Damn Yankees, performed by the Seacoast Repertory Theatre:

Ninety miles east of Peterborough, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre, whose home is a charming harbor town just across the Piscataqua River from Maine, presents a year-round schedule of familiar musicals and straight plays. Resort-town theater can be a dreary affair, but the Rep’s bare-bones revivals are unpretentiously engaging, in part because of the 230-seat basement auditorium in which they’re performed. The amphitheater-style seating is unusually intimate, and John McCluggage, the company’s new artistic director, makes the most of it. The young actors in his production of “Damn Yankees,” which is currently playing in repertory with “West Side Story” (more about that musical next week), do without microphones, scaling their singing to suit the size of the house. You wouldn’t think that a big, brash ’50s musical about a baseball team would work in such close quarters, but it comes off quite neatly….

No free link, and Friday’s Journal will already have vanished from most newsstands, so I suggest the smart option if you want to read the whole thing: go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent and extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, my column is here.)

Maybe I’ve been exposed to too much craft in the past few years — you can’t walk out your door in Asheville without falling over a potter’s wheel — but if I were a rich man all of my friends would be sleeping under these. My favorite is “Skullf***ed”.
(via Mighty Goods.)

With apologies for talking about the weather, but it’s like the steaming pampas here in the mountains. Walk anywhere in jeans and in about ten minutes it feels like you’ve got a pair of these strapped on top, and while that’s weirdly gaucho appropriate it’s also kind of a drag.
Full-body torpor aside, my plans for the weekend are mostly hermit-y. I’ve been a stressed-out monkey about work the past month but I have just one more deadline to hit this afternoon and then I’m caught up (chorus of angels say yay). So I can work on my book this weekend instead of doing work-work, and play with Scrivener, and go to the (air-conditioned) university library and race around the stacks doing weird little research projects, and it will be mole-like and good.
Because of work my reading’s been helter-skelter the past few weeks too — I’m currently about a quarter of the way through a half-dozen books, and loving none of them — so the other big project is to draw up a giant list of what I want to read in the next couple months and then commit to it with fiendish intensity. Good times.
The one social outing on the schedule is to see Paprika at the Fine Arts Theatre . In the Mountain Xpress, Cranky Hanke — who’s a friend, and it’s true, he is cranky! — gave it an explosion of stars. Also, I’ve rented The Goonies, because I’ve never seen it and my husband insists this represents a GIANT, incomprehensible gap in cinematic knowledge. (Speaking of GIANT, incomprehensible gaps, Terry, how is it that you’ve never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark?)
[Bracketed and possibly incomprehensible sports asides: I was jazzed to read about Ankiel’s homer last night. I follow the Braves so witnessed the Meltdown of ’00, which was so painful to watch I hid in the kitchen for part of it. Also great: Having Kornheiser and Wilbon back after an interminable vacation hiatus. True or untrue?: Dan LeBatard is to PTI what Donny is to Big Lebowski. Discuss.]
Have a great weekend, folks!

“On the tenth floor I was admitted by a uniformed female who took my hat and coat, put them in a closet, and conducted me through an arch into a room even bigger than Lily Rowan’s where twenty couples can dance. I have a test for people with rooms that big–not the rugs or the furniture or the drapes, but the pictures on the walls. If I can tell what they are, okay. If all I can do is guess, look out; these people will bear watching.”
Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang

For the past year my exercise regime has been to walk to a big hill near my house and then walk up and down it as long as I can last. It’s Nature’s elliptical! I take the dog and, in an arrangement we’re both probably too comfortable with, she gets carried after the second trip up the hill, looking, I imagine, like a tiny, disagreeable sultan riding on an elephant.
Somewhere on the 1,000th trip up the hill, I exhausted the music on my iPod and so I started listening to downloads of old episodes of “This American Life” instead. I know the show’s been around forever, etc., but I’d never really listened, and now I’m a little addicted.
Three of my favorite episodes:
• “Fiasco!“: Listen for the opening story by Jack Hitt about an amateur production of “Peter Pan” that goes terribly, terribly wrong. As readers of Tingle Alley know, I have a great weakness for the “amateur theatricals gone awry” genre of anecdote — traceable to a formative viewing of “Sweeney Todd” during which the prop knife kept misfiring, squirting gobs of prop blood as far as the fourth row — and this one is a doozy. (The first time I listened to this story I had to sit down mid-walk because it was so funny.)
• “Act V“: Another story by Jack Hitt, this one about a prison staging of “Hamlet.”
• “My Brilliant Plan“: Listen for the “Second Act,” about Ron Mallett’s decades-long quest to build a time machine in order to see his dead father again. His first time-machine model, built when he was only 11, was based on an illustration he found in a comic-book version of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

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)

• 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:
• Beyond Glory (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

• Old Acquaintance (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)

“‘But what happens to us?’
“‘Nobody knows. That’s why we have the institution called tomorrow.'”
Alan Plater, Oliver’s Travels