Archives for 2007

“Eulogy is nice, but one does not learn anything from it.”
Ellen Terry, Ellen Terry’s Memoirs

As if to prove my own point about the place of enthusiasm in criticism, today’s Wall Street Journal drama column consists of a pair of flat-out raves. On tap are City Center’s Gypsy and Westport Country Playhouse’s Relatively Speaking:

Patti LuPone, who was last seen on Broadway puffing on a tuba in “Sweeney Todd,” stopped the show cold at her first entrance in Monday’s performance of “Gypsy.” No sooner did she march up the aisle of City Center shouting “Sing out, Louise!” than the sold-out house popped its collective cork. That’s how excited playgoers are about her “Gypsy”–as well they should be. Not only will Ms. LuPone be remembered as the Mama Rose of her generation, but every other aspect of this production is as good as it can be. Point for point, it’s the best revival of a golden-age musical I’ve seen, in or out of New York. Staging, casting, design, even the orchestra: All are gloriously, exhilaratingly right.
Not counting the show itself, Ms. LuPone is the very best thing about “Gypsy,” but the director comes in a close second. Arthur Laurents, who turned 89 last week, wrote the book of “Gypsy” and also directed the show’s 1974 and 1989 Broadway revivals. Though he’s never been much of a playwright, Mr. Laurents was a kind of genius when it came to writing the books of musicals. “Gypsy,” like “West Side Story” before it, is a fat-free masterpiece of compression that cuts to the chase in every scene, discarding all superfluous detail and sticking unswervingly to the main dramatic line. Needless to say, Mr. Laurents knows it cold, and his staging, which I gather is a close but not slavish copy of the 1989 revival, zips along like lightning, unfussily nailing every laugh and jerking every tear….
If the recent Brits Off Broadway production of “Intimate Exchanges” made you long to see another Alan Ayckbourn comedy as soon as possible, I strongly suggest you catch the next train to Connecticut, where “Relatively Speaking,” the first of Mr. Ayckbourn’s 70-odd plays to hit the box-office bull’s-eye, is being performed with pizzazz at Westport Country Playhouse….

No free link, blah blah blah. Buy the paper already, or (better yet) go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

My “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal takes a look at three books, Toni Bentley’s Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal, Michael Blakemore’s Arguments with England, and Glenn Kurtz’s newly published Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, that offer an insider’s perspective on the difficult life of the performing artist.
To find out what makes these books so memorable, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.
UPDATE: Subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)

Jerry Hadley’s suicide has set the small town that is American opera to buzzing. It was a surprise–I can’t think of another well-known classical singer who has killed himself–but on further reflection I didn’t find it all that shocking. Hadley’s career had been in decline for a number of years, and he’d long since dropped off my scope. The last time I saw him on stage was in the 1999 Metropolitan Opera premiere of John Harbison’s operatic version of The Great Gatsby, which didn’t make much of an impression on me. The New York Sun‘s obituary quoted something nice I’d said about him in my 1988 High Fidelity review of his recording of Show Boat, and it took me a moment to remember that I’d written the piece.
To outlive your own fame is a terrible fate, and it is all the more poignant for a performer. As I wrote when Johnny Carson died:

I wonder what he thought of his life’s work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

Alas, Hadley, unlike Carson, lost his fame comparatively early, and all too clearly longed in vain for its return. He was, of course, an operatic tenor, and as such the closest thing in music to an athlete, which suggests an appropriate epitaph: Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honours out,/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.
UPDATE: I’d also forgotten that I reviewed the premiere of Gatsby for Time:

The score is strictly mainline modernist yard goods, while the libretto is a filet of Fitzgerald containing all of the action, most of the famous lines (“Her voice is full of money”) and none of the elegiac, bittersweet tone that is the novel’s essence. Gatsby is given a pair of clumsily confessional arias, a fatal mistake; the great mystery man of American fiction would never have revealed himself in that way, not even to himself. It doesn’t help that Jerry Hadley’s voice is frayed and throaty, or that he is stocky and unglamorous–hardly the gorgeous, gold-hatted charmer of Fitzgerald’s imagination….Harbison has turned Fitzgerald’s quicksilver masterpiece into a slow-moving opera that is stolidly competent and totally superfluous.

I wish my last memory of Hadley were a happier one.

The New York Philharmonic’s surprise decision to hire Alan Gilbert as its next music director is the talk of the classical-music world, in large part because Gilbert himself is not the talk of the classical-music world. He is chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and recently spent three years as Santa Fe Opera’s music director–both important posts, but not exactly high-profile slots. Though he’s led the Philharmonic in thirty-one concerts since making his debut with the orchestra six years ago, Gilbert is all but unknown to the public at large.
But, then, who isn’t?
The sad fact is that the days of the celebrity conductor are basically over, not because there aren’t interesting conductors out there but because our increasingly popular culture has essentially withdrawn its attention from classical music. According to news accounts, the other conductors who were considered by the Philharmonic to succeed Lorin Maazel were Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti. Both men are well known to regular classical concertgoers, but they have no name recognition whatsoever outside that small world. Moreover, they’re both senior citizens. (Pop quiz: name five indisputably major under-sixty conductors. Hello? Is anybody there?)
Spend a few minutes looking through the news stories about Gilbert’s appointment and you’ll come away knowing four things about him:
• He’s the first native-born New Yorker to be appointed music director of the Philharmonic.
• Both of his parents have played in the orchestra.
• He is (in the words of New York Times critic Tony Tommasini, who has been pushing hard for this appointment) “an unpretentious musician with no whiff of the formidable maestro about him.”
• He’s forty.
All interesting, though none save the last intrinsically encouraging. The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I’ve attended in recent years. If Gilbert can attract a new generation of listeners, more power to him–but I very much doubt that the mere fact of his age will persuade anyone under thirty to come hear his concerts. The classical-music generation gap goes far deeper than that.
Far more important, I suspect, will be whether Gilbert proves to be an effective communicator–and whether he can find new ways of getting his message out to a new generation of listeners that is largely indifferent to classical music. I can’t imagine, for instance, that he’ll have any luck getting on network TV, or persuading the national newsmagazines to cover his activities. Instead, he’ll have to go a different route. Does he understand how the new media work? Does the management of the Philharmonic understand?
A half-century ago, the New York Philharmonic hired another fortysomething music director, who promptly proceeded to put the orchestra at the center of postwar American culture. But Leonard Bernstein was already famous. By 1958 he had written West Side Story, scored On the Waterfront, made the most highly publicized conducting debut in the history of American classical music, made dozens of well-reviewed major-label recordings, and spent countless hours talking about music on network TV. Alan Gilbert has done none of those things, nor will he have the opportunity to do anything like them.
To be sure, part of the key to Gilbert’s success will lie in the quality of his music-making. About that I can say nothing: I’ve never seen him conduct or heard any of the handful of recordings he’s made to date. Nothing that I’ve read about his Philharmonic appearances has made me feel that I had to go hear him. Yes, his programs look interesting, but I don’t need to go to Avery Fisher Hall to hear interesting orchestral music: all I have to do is go to my CD shelf and pick at random.
Needless to say, I wish Alan Gilbert the best of luck, but for the moment I can’t honestly say that I’ll be more likely to start attending the New York Philharmonic’s concerts when he takes over in 2009. That could change–quickly. Alex Ross, whose taste I trust, calls him “a man with an inquisitive, contemporary mind” who is capable of turning the Philharmonic into “a markedly different, more vibrant organization.” That sounds good to me. If Gilbert and the Philharmonic want to get people like me to go to their concerts, though, they’ll have to transform the experience of classical concertgoing in such a way as to make it more attractive than staying home–or doing something else.
UPDATE: Says Marcus Maroney:

If you think “The New York Philharmonic has the oldest-looking audience of any major performing-arts organization whose performances I’ve attended in recent years,” come on down and go to a Houston Symphony concert….

I’ve also seen a lot of walkers at Paper Mill Playhouse‘s weekend matinees, which presumably is a big part of the reason why they got themselves into such dire financial straits this past season.

Dana Gioia, my boss at the National Endowment for the Arts, gave a widely reported commencement address at Stanford University last month. Now The Wall Street Journal has published a condensed version of it. Highlights:

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show, I saw–along with comedians, popular singers and movie stars–classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.
The same was true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman and James Baldwin on general-interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American–because the culture considered them important. Today no working-class kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.
The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture’s celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child’s imagination, and we’ve relinquished that imagination to the marketplace….
At 56, I am just old enough to remember a time when every public high school in this country had a music program with choir and band, usually a jazz band, too, sometimes even an orchestra. And every high school offered a drama program, sometimes with dance instruction. And there were writing opportunities in the school paper and literary magazine, as well as studio art training.
I am sorry to say that these programs are no longer widely available. This once visionary and democratic system has been almost entirely dismantled by well-meaning but myopic school boards, county commissioners and state officials, with the federal government largely indifferent to the issue. Art became an expendable luxury, and 50 million students have paid the price. Today a child’s access to arts education is largely a function of his or her parents’ income.
In a time of social progress and economic prosperity, why have we experienced this colossal cultural decline? There are several reasons, but I must risk offending many friends and colleagues by saying that surely artists and intellectuals are partly to blame. Most American artists, intellectuals and academics have lost their ability to converse with the rest of society. We have become wonderfully expert in talking to one another, but we have become almost invisible and inaudible in the general culture.
This mutual estrangement has had enormous cultural, social and political consequences. America needs its artists and intellectuals, and they need to re-establish their rightful place in the general culture. If we could reopen the conversation between our best minds and the broader public, the results would not only transform society but also artistic and intellectual life….

Ever since I launched this blog–and for many years before that–I’ve been writing about the significance of what I call the middlebrow moment in American culture. (It’s one of the unifying themes of A Terry Teachout Reader.) Dana didn’t use that phrase in his speech, but it’s exactly what he has in mind, both in this speech and in the various programs, including The Big Read, Shakespeare in American Communities, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, with which the NEA is seeking to stem the tide of cultural ignorance in America. I’m proud to be associated with that effort.
To read the rest of Dana’s speech, go here.

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 SOON:
• 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEKEND:

• 110 in the Shade * (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here, closes July 29)