Archives for 2007

I cheated yesterday! Instead of listening to a new piece of music, I opted for a popular piece that I haven’t heard for well over a decade, Claude Debussy’s G Minor String Quartet, recorded for Deutsche Grammophon by the Melos String Quartet.

“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”
Philip Johnson, Writings

Because I work most weekends and travel so much, I often lose track of holidays, and I’d forgotten that this was Memorial Day until I returned to New York earlier today, turned on the TV, and saw that Turner Classic Movies was showing back-to-back war movies. Please forgive my unintentional silence, which I wouldn’t want anyone to construe as making mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep.
If you’ve never worn a uniform, I suggest that you consider going to see Stephen Lang’s Beyond Glory, a one-man show now in previews at the Laura Pels Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s off-Broadway house. I reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal when it played at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2005:

Adapted by Mr. Lang from the book by Larry Smith, it consists of eight first-person monologues by recipients of the Medal of Honor, given for “gallantry and intrepidity…above and beyond the call of duty.” You can’t get much more military than that. But Mr. Lang’s one-man play is no simple-minded piece of flag-waving. It is an unsparingly direct portrait of men at war, pushed into narrow corners and faced with hard choices. It is also one of the richest, most complex pieces of acting I’ve seen in my theatergoing life….

For more information, go here.

• Movies look real. This is the source of their power: they seem to show us life as it is and people as they are. To be sure, a movie does not have to be real to seem real. Good genre films, for instance, take unreal situations and fill them with convincing emotional content. You probably don’t know any detectives or cowboys, but you know people like Robert Mitchum and Randolph Scott, and so you accept the conventional premises of films like Out of the Past and Ride Lonesome in much the same way that you accept the self-evident absurdities of Swan Lake or Il Trovatore. But when a movie is situated in a precisely observed modern-day setting, you natually expect believable things to happen there, and when they don’t, you roll your eyes and get giggly.

Though the metaphor embodied in its nickname is long dead, everyone in the world understands that a “movie” consists of “moving pictures,” and it is in the nature of a picture—a photograph—that we take for granted its unfaked reality. A century ago, our great-grandparents were scared out of their wits when one of the villains in The Great Train Robbery pointed his gun at the audience and fired it. Nowadays we’re more sophisticated than that, but most of us still cling to the belief that a film is in some attenuated but still meaningful sense a record of something that actually happened, if only on a soundstage.

Will our children feel this way about film? I doubt it. For one thing, most of the big-ticket movies to which they flock make use of digitally generated special effects, many of which are more or less invisible to the naked eye but a growing number of which are intended to be seen as fake. Indeed, postmodern filmmakers are more inclined to brag about their use of such effects than to cover it up. At the same time, younger photo editors at mass-circulation magazines are increasingly open to using digital technology to “enhance” still photographs, and even though old-fashioned newsmen continue to treat such manipulation as inappropriate, even unethical, I can’t imagine that this informal prohibition will last much longer.

Remember the sign in T.H. White’s The Once and Future King? “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” Or, as one of Dostoyevsky’s characters put it, “Man grows used to everything—the scoundrel!”

• Speaking of movies, a reader writes:

Is there any classic Hollywood comedy from the golden age with a great or even near-great musical score? In fact, is there any Hollywood comedy from any age with such a score? In discussing this with some of my fellow film “connoisseurs,” none of us could think of one.

Neither can I. To be sure, I can think of any number of fine film comedies whose well-crafted scores contribute greatly to their total effect, but in none of them is the music truly distinguished in its own right.

I was so surprised to come up empty-handed that I decided to go at the problem from the other end by drawing up a list of my ten favorite Hollywood film scores: Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven, Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront, Aaron Copland’s The Heiress, Hugo Friedhofer’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Adventures of Robin Hood, Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire, David Raksin’s Laura, and Miklós Rózsa’s Brute Force. Not one of these films is a comedy.

What, if anything, does this interesting fact tell us about the nature and function of dramatic music? I’m not sure. No doubt it’s relevant that most great operas are tragedies—but it’s also true that the two greatest operas ever written, The Marriage of Figaro and Falstaff, are both comedies.

I wish I could shed light on this apparent paradox, but for the moment I’m clueless.

UPDATE: Alex Ross speculates on the aforementioned conundrum, and offers a list of his own film-score favorites.

Meanwhle, Lisa Hirsch points out a composer I should definitely have mentioned. I’ll see you and raise you one, Lisa: how about Scott Bradley?

Mr. My Stupid Dog has some additional relevant thoughts.

From Chicago, Mr. Deceptively Simple chimes in.

Once more with feeling: Mr. Soho the Dog. (I seem to have started a meme!)

Last Friday’s new piece of music was Constant Lambert’s Piano Sonata, completed in 1929 and recorded for Continuum by John McCabe in 1991.

“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.”
Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York

I’ll be in and out of New York for much of the summer, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my peregrinations. I went to New Haven to review Long Wharf Theatre’s Uncle Vanya after having seen the Irish Repertory Theatre revival of Gaslight in New York. I also paid my first visit to the Olney Theatre Center, a Maryland company that’s currently performing Georges Feydeau’s 13 Rue de l’Amour:

At the moment, the least frequently revived of Anton Chekhov’s four major plays seems to be “Uncle Vanya.” Long Wharf Theatre’s new version is the first important American production to have come to my attention since I started writing this column four years ago. Fortunately, it was worth the wait: Gordon Edelstein, the company’s artistic director, has given “Uncle Vanya” an exceptionally fine staging. Well cast, well designed, well lit and well translated, this lovely production conveys Chekhov’s special flavor with unostentatious grace….
“Uncle Vanya” has been translated and adapted many times, most recently by Brian Friel and David Mamet. Unfazed by precedent, Mr. Edelstein has done it over again in an attractively casual style that sits well on the tongue. Vanya’s searing last-act confession is a particularly choice example of Mr. Edelstein’s approach: “I dread each day. I want a different life. I want to wake up on a bright and beautiful morning and begin a new life, with my past gone like smoke.” His similarly plain-spoken staging keeps the play’s comic and tragic elements in perfect equipoise. The laughs come right on schedule–but so does the heartbreak….
Patrick Hamilton wrote plays and novels about very creepy people, most of which are better remembered as movies. “Gaslight,” the tale of a thoroughly nasty Victorian husband who tries to drive his terrified wife insane, opened on Broadway in 1941, ran for 1,295 performances and was then sold to Hollywood. Alas, George Cukor’s 1944 film version, which starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, was so successful that Hamilton’s original play is now rarely performed save by amateurs and small regional companies. I didn’t see the Pearl Theatre Company’s 1999 Off Broadway revival, so I made a point of catching the Irish Repertory Theatre’s new production, which is, as usual with that superlative troupe, a knockout….
Now that so many affluent city dwellers are decamping for the suburbs and exurbs, who will keep them amused? The Olney Theatre Center, located more or less midway between Baltimore and Washington, is an ancient summer-stock house (it started life in 1938 as a roller rink) that used to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Then a suburb grew up around it, and the company retrofitted itself as a sprawlingly attractive three-stage complex that presents an ambitious year-round schedule of straight plays and musicals….

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