Archives for 2007

It’s all Broadway, all the time in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I wrap up the 2006-07 season with reviews of 110 in the Shade, Deuce, and Radio Golf:

This has been a big season for Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. First they revived “The Fantasticks,” their best-known musical, in a splendid Off Broadway production directed by Mr. Jones that opened last August and is still going strong. Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has brought “110 in the Shade” back to Broadway for the first time since it closed in 1964–and it turns out to be every bit as good as “The Fantasticks.” Not only is Lonny Price’s staging letter-perfect, but Audra McDonald, who hasn’t appeared in a Broadway musical since 1999, is giving the performance of a lifetime as Lizzie Curry, a plain-Jane gal from Texas who is haunted by the prospect of permanent spinsterhood until a fast-talking con man named Starbuck (Steve Kazee) blows into town and awakens her inner babe….
Ms. McDonald gives the most fully realized performance I’ve seen in a musical this season, not excluding Donna Murphy in “LoveMusik” and Raúl Esparza in “Company.” It goes without saying that she has the best voice on Broadway, but like Kristin Chenoweth, she doesn’t have to sing a note to grab your attention. Ms. McDonald is an actor who sings, not a singer who acts…
Rejoice greatly, stargazers: Angela Lansbury and Marian Seldes have returned to Broadway to share a stage in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce.” Would that this tale of two retired tennis pros were something other than an ordinary celebrity vehicle, but great acting can ennoble the tritest of scripts, and Mr. McNally’s leading ladies deliver the goods with postage to spare….
August Wilson is back in town–posthumously. “Radio Golf,” the tenth and last installment in Wilson’s “Pittsburgh cycle” of plays about black life in 20th-century America, opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005, seven months before the playwright’s death. It has since been performed by a half-dozen other regional companies. Now it’s arrived on Broadway in a road-honed production directed by Kenny Leon, designed by David Gallo and performed by five first-class actors, three of whom have been with the show since its premiere….
Good drama doesn’t always tell the truth–it doesn’t have to. Great drama, on the other hand, turns a spotlight on the world and forces the viewer to acknowledge the most painful and fundamental facts about human nature. Many of August Wilson’s plays do that, but in “Radio Golf” he settled for the lazy half-answers of the ideologue. While that doesn’t diminish in the least the genuine greatness of a play like “Fences,” I wish he’d gone out on a higher, truer note.

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Next week, Chicago!

You may have heard about Orion Books’ Compact Editions, a new series of condensed classics that went on sale in England this week and will be coming to the United States in August. Not surprisingly, British eggheads are sneering at the thought that anyone would dare to publish abridged versions of David Copperfield or Moby-Dick–but should they? That’s the subject of my next “Sightings” column, which appears in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section to see what I have to say. (I promise to be concise!)

“We went to Mannheim and attended a shivaree–otherwise an opera–the one called ‘Lohengrin.’ The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.”
Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad

I depart this morning for Chicago, where I’ll be hanging out with Our Girl, eating at Hot Doug’s, the world’s greatest hot dog emporium, visiting Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the very first time, spending a night in yet another Frank Lloyd Wright house, and seeing three plays (see next Friday’s Wall Street Journal for details).
It’s a busier-than-usual schedule, and I don’t know whether it’ll leave any room for blogging, but if it does, you’ll hear from me–or her. Either way, I’ll be back in New York early next week and back at my desk shortly thereafter.

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)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, some strong language, reviewed here, closes Aug. 19)
• LoveMusik (musical, PG-13, adult themes, reviewed here)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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)
• Biography (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 20)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes Saturday)

“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
W.H. Auden (quoted in Time, Dec. 29, 1961)

I’m writing an opera.
To be exact, Santa Fe Opera, one of America’s most admired opera companies, has commissioned me to write the libretto for a musical version of Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter,” a 1924 short story that Maugham turned into a play three years later. The score will be by my friend and neighbor Paul Moravec, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2004 and was recently appointed artist-in-residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The commission was announced at a press conference held in Santa Fe earlier this hour.
“The Letter” has been filmed twice, the second time by William Wyler in 1940. If you don’t know the plot in any of its various manifestations, take it from me, it’s the stuff operas are made of. Lust, betrayal, murder, blackmail…what’s not to like? I feel like singing already. Paul and I are shaping it into a very tight structure (ninety minutes, no intermission) that we hope will have the feel of a film noir and the punch of a verismo opera. Think Tosca or Carmen directed by Jacques Tourneur and you’ll get the idea.
As for Paul’s music, allow me to quote from my liner notes for the Trio Solisti’s recording of two of his best pieces, Mood Swings and the Pulitzer-winning Tempest Fantasy:

Despite the considerable, at times formidable complexity of these tough-minded works, which are anything but “easy” in the way they translate experience and emotion into the realm of sound, their complexities are never gratuitous. To put it another way, they make sense. Their harmonies are lucid and logical, their melodies indelibly noble. They are, literally, eloquent, the painstakingly wrought, powerfully moving utterances of an artist who believes with all his heart in the possibility of beauty. I know no other music written today that moves me more.

The premiere of The Letter is set for the summer of 2009, but the production is already starting to take shape. Am I excited? You’d better believe it. Nervous, too, since this is the first time I’ve ever written anything for the stage (I tried to write a play a few years ago, but it wasn’t any good). Fortunately, Paul is such a splendid composer and Maugham so solid a theatrical craftsman that I think The Letter has an excellent chance of hitting the bull’s-eye. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see what it feels like to take a curtain call!
Much, much more to come….
UPDATE: From the Santa Fe Opera press release:

Paul Moravec, the Pulitzer-Prize winning composer, has been commissioned to write an opera for The Santa Fe Opera to be premiered in the 2009 season. Announcement of the commission was made today in Santa Fe by General Director Richard Gaddes. The commission is the first of two planned by the company.
Mr. Moravec has chosen the play entitled The Letter written in 1927 by W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Considered a Maugham masterpiece, The Letter is set in the Far East, and tells the story of an adulterous affair that leads to murder, blackmail, and revenge. It was made into a film in 1940 starring Bette Davis which has become a classic. Terry Teachout, the eminent critic and writer, is the librettist.
In making the announcement Gaddes commented: “When I first heard music by Paul Moravec I was immediately captivated. The great thing about him is that he’s found a musical language all on his own that is both pleasing to the ear and at the same time very contemporary. It is ground breaking and we are excited that this important American composer has agreed to write for The Santa Fe Opera. While Paul has written for voice, this is his first opera.”

Henceforth I shall be known as His Eminence! (You need not kiss the ring, though.)