Archives for February 2008

“In San Francisco, vulgarity, ‘bad taste,’ ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that it is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can’t afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety.”
Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider the careers of Leonard Bernstein, Orson Welles, and Ralph Ellison. All were artists of extraordinary promise who failed to live up to it. What went wrong? Each of them contracted the same dread disease:

Stephen Sondheim, Bernstein’s collaborator on “West Side Story,” told Meryle Secrest, who wrote biographies of both men, that he developed “a bad case of importantitis.” That sums up Bernstein’s later years with devastating finality. Time and again he dove head first into grandiose-sounding projects, then emerged from the depths clutching such pretentious pieces of musical costume jewelry as the “Kaddish” Symphony and “A Quiet Place.” In the end he dried up almost completely, longing to make Great Big Musical Statements–he actually wanted to write a Holocaust opera–but incapable of producing so much as a single memorable song.
Alan Greenspan recently proposed a constitutional amendment: “Anyone willing to do what is required to become president of the United States is thereby barred from taking that office.” In a similar spirit–with tongue partway in cheek–I’d like to put forward Teachout’s First Law of Artistic Dynamics: “The best way to make a bad work of art is to try to make a great one.” That law was inspired at least as much by Orson Welles as by Bernstein….

Read the whole thing here.

It’s been a busy week with an unexpected flurry of deadlines. Lowell has a bad cold and looks and sounds like a mournful frog. The nice thing: We’re playing hooky this morning. A friend gave us passes to Biltmore Estate, the French chateau that George Vanderbilt chose to build in Asheville. How unlikely it was that Vanderbilt would build here — in some remote mountain town, only newly reachable by train, far from friends and family — never occurred to me until I was researching Henry James’ and Edith Wharton’s stays at the estate for an article I wrote several years back. Here is James in a letter to Wharton:

We are 2,500 feet in the air; the cold, the climate, is well nigh all the ‘company’ in the strange, colossal heart-breaking house; & the desolation & discomfort of the whole thing — whole scene — are, in spite of the mitigating millions everywhere expressed, indescribable. … It’s, in effect, like a gorgeous practical joke — but at one’s own expense, after all, if one has to live in solitude in these league-long marble halls.

When I first moved here and knew hardly anyone, I spent a lot of time mooning around the estate, although tellingly the part I feel most at home in is the servants quarters, which are very simple and airy and remind me of my grandparents’ farm. Today I’m looking forward to visiting the library (duh) and exploring the grounds, although I imagine they’re a little stark and wind-swept this time of year. The estate was Frederick Law Olmsted’s last great project, and this will be my first time visiting since reading a couple books by and about him.

In between plays Mrs. T and I have been tooling around Los Angeles and its environs, checking out art of various kinds. On Tuesday we fired up my Garmin StreetPilot c500 and set a course for Richard Neutra’s “Health House,” a legendary piece of mid-century modern domestic architecture that movie buffs will need no prompting to recognize as the residence of Pierce Patchett, the “powerful behind-the-scenes strange-o” of L.A. Confidential. It’s privately owned, so you can only view it from the street, but that’s a sufficiently cool thing to do if, like Mrs. T and me, you’re into modern houses. We then tooled over to Neutra Place, a quiet side street that is lined with nine separate Neutra houses, and spent a few minutes goggling.

On Wednesday we stopped by a less well known but equally interesting residence, the home of Annette Kaufman. Regular readers of this blog may recall my recent posting about Annette, the widow of Louis Kaufman, the great American violinist and art collector. Annette and I had lunch in New York two months ago, at which time she invited Mrs. T and me to visit her in Los Angeles. We accepted with alacrity.

From there the three of us went to the Getty Museum, where we had an excellent lunch and chatted happily about art and music. It was the first time in my life that I’ve taken part in a mealtime conversation in which one of the participants reminisced about Milton Avery and Bernard Herrmann. We then took a stroll through “Consuming Passion: Fragonard’s Allegories of Love,” a splendid little show that merely served to whet Annette’s apparently inexhaustible appetite for art, which we slaked by driving straight to the Armand Hammer Collection. After that we returned to her house and put our feet up for an hour while she returned a couple of dozen phone calls. Did I mention that Annette is ninety-three years old? I hope I’m a quarter as energetic as she is if I should be lucky enough to live so long. (I wish I were half as energetic as she is right now.)

Annette lives in a house that Lloyd Wright, Frank’s son, designed for her and Louis in 1935. Though it looks nothing like the work of his famous father, it has the same clean and inviting interior lines that are familiar from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian houses, and it is infinitely better suited to the display of art–a major consideration for the Kaufmans, who amassed a huge collection of paintings and sculpture in the course of their long life together. Annette has given much of their collection away since Louis’ death, but she still owns a goodly number of remarkable pieces, many of which were painted by Milton Avery.

The first thing you see when you open the door, for instance, is an Avery portrait of Louis wearing a pair of bright red suspenders. Stroll into the dining room and you’ll find “California Landscape/Seascape,” the 1942 painting that was one of the highlights of the Phillips Collection’s great 2004 Avery Retrospective. Beyond it in the breakfast nook is a brightly colored, strikingly Cézanne-like still life that the Kaufmans bought in 1926 for $25–the very first painting that Avery ever sold.

Now, two days and two shows later, Mrs. T and I are getting ready to drive to Union Station–itself a destination of considerable splendor–and board the Coast Starlight for San Francisco. Amtrak brags that the Coast Starlight travels along “one of the most beautiful of all train routes…The scenery along the Coast Starlight route is unparalleled: snow-covered mountains, dense forests, fertile valleys and long stretches of Pacific Ocean shoreline provide a gorgeous backdrop for your journey.” I am a middle-aged man mad about trains, and this is one I’ve always wanted to ride, even though I gather it’s not quite what it used to be back in the days when trains were trains and planes were for rich people.

As for Mrs. T, she longs to sit in the Sightseer Lounge Car, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, and watch the world go by. She also plans to pack a meal, not caring for the indigenous fare. That’s fine with me.

The really great thing about train travel, of course, is that it forces you into a different tempo of life, slower and less fraught. The fact that Amtrak’s trains don’t always get where they’re going on time actually contributes to this unwinding effect. Sometimes your cellphone works, sometime it doesn’t, and surfing the Web is out of the question. Instead you chat idly, read, listen to music, or–above all–look out the window.

I don’t spend nearly enough time looking out the window. Today I plan to fix that.

This morning I file the first of three Wall Street Journal drama columns from California. Today I review three shows, Reprise! Broadway’s Best’s Li’l Abner, Pasadena Playhouse’s Orson’s Shadow, and the Aurora Theatre Company’s Satellites. Here’s a sample.
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If you know who Al Capp was, you’re probably reading this review through bifocals. “Li’l Abner,” the comic strip about hillbilly life that Capp wrote and drew, ran in newspapers across the country from 1934 to 1977. For much of that time it was enormously popular–enough so that it was made into a musical in 1956, which in turn was made into a movie in 1959. But defunct comic strips have a short shelf life, and “Li’l Abner” had already lost most of its audience by the time Capp retired…
So why is Reprise! Broadway’s Best, the Los Angeles-based musical-comedy troupe led by “Seinfeld”‘s Jason Alexander, reviving a half-forgotten show based on half-remembered comic-strip characters? On paper, at least, I can think of two good reasons: Johnny Mercer, who needs no introduction, wrote the score of “Li’l Abner” in collaboration with Gene De Paul, whose list of hits includes “I’ll Remember April” and “Teach Me Tonight.” But neither man had much theatrical experience, and the songs they cranked out for the show are dramatically static and musically flat….
As City Center’s Encores! series of musical-comedy revivals has proved repeatedly, a stylish staging can make a B-minus musical look and sound better than it is. Alas, this production falls far short of the standards set by Encores! and Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals. Too often it reminded me of a competent but dull college show…
Pasadena Playhouse knows a thing or two about celebrity. The list of stars who first shone on its handsome 1925 proscenium stage includes Dana Andrews, Raymond Burr, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Preston and Gig Young. That makes it a suitable place to see “Orson’s Shadow,” in which Austin Pendleton takes a real-life encounter between Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier (who met when Olivier invited Welles to direct a production of Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” in 1960) and spins it into a bitterly witty theatrical meditation on the self-destructive impulse that frequently goes hand in hand with great gifts.
I’m sorry to say that Pasadena Playhouse’s revival, unlike the brilliant Off Broadway production of 2005, never catches fire. Part of the problem–for which Dámaso Rodriguez, the director, may be to blame–is that Bruce McGill plays Welles not as a genius whose character has been warped by frustration but as a blustering joker who somehow stays afloat in spite of everything….
I went to the Aurora this week for the West Coast premiere of Diana Son’s “Satellites,” whose 2006 Off Broadway run I missed. Ms. Son stirred up her share of buzz in 1998 with “Stop Kiss,” then dropped out of sight to have a baby and write for “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” “Satellites,” her first play since “Stop Kiss,” is a glib, preachy dramedy about a biracial yuppie couple (he’s black, she’s Korean-American) who move into a rundown brownstone in a soon-to-be-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood and discover that life in the real world is more complicated than they’d thought. Up to a point “Satellites” is bracingly honest about the deep-seated problems of can-we-all-get-along multiculturalism, but in the end it goes soft…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Trains are for meditation, for playing out long thought-processes, over and over; we trust them, perhaps because they have no choice but to go where they are going. Nowadays, however, they smack of a dying gentility. To travel by car makes journeys less mysterious, too much a matter of the will. One might as easily sit on a sofa and imagine a passing landscape. I doubt whether any truly absorbing conversation ever took place in a car; they are good only for word games and long, tedious narratives. We have come to regard cars too much as appendages of our bodies and will probably pay for it in the end by losing the use of our legs. We owe to them the cluttering of the landscape, the breakup of villages and towns.”
Alastair Reid, Whereabouts: Notes on Being a Foreigner

“Lady Waters was quick to detect situations that did not exist. Living comfortably in Rutland Gate with her second husband, Sir Robert, she enlarged her own life into ripples of apprehension on everybody’s behalf. Upon meeting, her very remarkable eyes sought one’s own for those first intimations of crisis she was all tuned up to receive; she entered one’s house on a current that set the furniture bobbing; at Rutland Gate destiny shadowed her tea-table. Her smallest clock struck portentously, her telephone trilled from the heart, her dinner-gong boomed a warning. When she performed introductions, drama’s whole precedent made the encounter momentous. … Only Sir Robert, who spent much of his time at his club, remained unaware of this atmosphere.”
Elizabeth Bowen, To the North

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Mar. 23, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

• 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)

• Come Back, Little Sheba (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 16, reviewed here)

• The Farnsworth Invention (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, closes Mar. 2, reviewed here)

• The Homecoming (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

• Is He Dead? (farce, G, reasonably family-friendly, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, here)

• Rock ‘n’ Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, closes Mar. 9, reviewed here)

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:


• Hunting and Gathering (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

ON TOUR:

• Moby-Dick–Rehearsed (drama, G, not suitable for children, touring the U.S. through May 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, closes Feb. 24, reviewed here)

• The New Jerusalem (drama, G, too complicated for children but accessible to mature adolescents, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN RED BANK, N.J.:

• Macbeth (drama, PG-13, very violent, reviewed here)