Archives for March 28, 2008

• Bookslut pushes the poetry of Philip Whalen. In addition to those links, you can read some of Whalen’s poetry as well as explore other writings and biographia.
• Joan Didion, short and long.
• “Read this and never come back”: Marginalia of a county jail library. The jail is located in Dade County, Wisconsin, so Madison-ish. Here is the library’s “Most Wanted” list (jail humor!), and you can help with a book or two. (Via The Dizzies.)
• Speaking of breaking the law, one of the best news stories to emerge from Asheville in recent weeks was the arrest of (alleged) moonshine king Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton. The ATF has shut down quite a few moonshiners in the area in the past year; I don’t know the reason for the stepped-up policing, but it certainly invites some investigative reportage beyond “boy, it sure is harder to procure moonshine lately”. As Mountain Xpress notes, Popcorn once authored a book called Me and My Likker, which may have, you know, helped tip off authorities. The book’s out of print now so it’s impossible to verify the rumor that it included a fold-out map with the sites of Popcorn’s stills marked with big black “x”s.

This week’s Wall Street Journal drama column is a triple-header in which I report on the new (sort of) Broadway revival of Gypsy, a Baltimore production of A Little Night Music, and the New York premiere of The Four of Us. Here’s an excerpt.
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The production of “Gypsy” that opened on Broadway last night is the same one that ran for three weeks last July at City Center, so I needn’t say much beyond this: No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting or effective revival of a golden-age musical. Everything you’ve heard about Patti LuPone’s performance as Mama Rose, the stage mother from hell, is true–she’s so ferociously compelling that you’ll have to remind yourself to breathe between songs–but part of what makes this production so special is that the rest of the cast is just as memorable. I doubt there’s been a better Louise than Laura Benanti, who starts out as Rose’s mousy little daughter, then turns herself before your astonished eyes into Gypsy Rose Lee, the world’s most glamorous stripper. Boyd Gaines is no less fine in the ungratefully self-effacing role of Herbie, Mama Rose’s lover, while Leigh Ann Larkin brings off the even more challenging task of making a strong impression as June, Louise’s sister.
The show itself is a miracle, one of the top contenders for the title of Best Musical Ever. The songs, by Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne, are classics one and all, as are Jerome Robbins’ impeccably theatrical dances. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of “Gypsy,” has staged this revival, and his knowing hand is everywhere in evidence….
Mark Lamos has done almost as well by CenterStage’s revival of “A Little Night Music” as Mr. Laurents has by “Gypsy,” in part for one of the same reasons: His cast is all but unimprovable. Led by Barbara Walsh, one of the stars of John Doyle’s much-admired Broadway revival of “Company,” Mr. Lamos’ ensemble of singing actors strips away the mirrored surfaces of Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics and shows us the hard kernels of honesty that lie within. “A Little Night Music” may sound like a frothy waltz-time operetta, but its real subject is romantic disillusion, and in song after song we are invited to contemplate unpalatable truths about the “dirty business” of love: Men are stupid, men are vain/Love’s disgusting, love’s insane. Only through the stoic acceptance that comes with maturity do the characters find their way to more or less happy endings, and even then you go home wondering what the future holds in store for them.
Mr. Lamos makes the most of the pointed ironies of Mr. Sondheim’s brilliant songs and Hugh Wheeler’s wry book. Everyone in the cast is on the director’s acerbic wavelength….
Is there a more promising playwright in America than Itamar Moses? “The Four of Us,” his latest play, delighted me when I saw it in San Diego last season, and now Off Broadway audiences can revel in this crisply witty study of a pair of up-and-coming young writers (Gideon Banner and Michael Esper) whose friendship is threatened when one of them hits the celebrity jackpot while the other is still struggling to find himself….
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Read the whole thing here.

Here’s an excerpt from a “Sightings” column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2006 about Peter Gelb, the then-new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera:

Mr. Gelb has set music lovers to buzzing yet again, this time about his latest innovation. Starting in December, the company will beam a half-dozen of its Saturday matinees into movie theaters in the U.S., Canada and Europe–live. “We want to make the Met as available electronically to its followers as the Yankees are to theirs,” Mr. Gelb told the Washington Post. The first broadcast will be Julie Taymor’s much-admired “Lion King”-style production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” cut to 90 minutes and performed in a new, family-friendly English-language version.
I can already hear the purists rumbling, and I hate to put a damper on their high dudgeon, but the truth is that most of Mr. Gelb’s “new” ideas are older than I am. Among the first things Rudolf Bing did when he took charge of the Met in 1949, for instance, were to start hiring big-name stage and screen directors like Garson Kanin and Alfred Lunt and to give selected performances of popular operas in English. As for the notion of piping closed-circuit broadcasts of the Met’s performances into movie theaters, it was tried a half-century ago. Alas, the Met’s 1952 movie-house “Carmen” flopped, as did a similar attempt to broadcast Richard Burton’s 1964 Broadway production of “Hamlet.”
Will the company’s new venture be more successful? I doubt it. Not only are large-screen versions of actual stage performances visually unsatisfying, but opera itself is simply not a mass medium, PBS’s increasingly infrequent telecasts from the Met notwithstanding. Even such ambitious undertakings as Franco Zeffirelli’s big-budget films of “La Traviata” (1982) and “Otello” (1986) failed to make it out of art-house purgatory. Significantly, last week’s announcement contained no information about how many theaters would be showing the Met’s broadcasts, and Mr. Gelb did his best to keep expectations low, explaining that “The Magic Flute” would be opening “right in the middle of the biggest box office weekend of the year.” Translation: Who’s going to bother with Mozart when he can see “Dreamgirls” instead?

Answer: lots and lots and lots of people. The Met’s movie-house high-definition simulcasts have turned out to be one of Gelb’s biggest successes to date. So since I’d put my foot in it up to my eyebrows, I resolved to do penance by trying to figure out why I’d been wrong–and what I was missing. To this end, I went to see the Met’s new production of Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera House on February 28, then took a train to Philadelphia two weeks later to watch the same production telecast on the silver screen.
What did I learn? The answer is in this week’s “Sightings” column. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and watch me dine on freshly roasted crow.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.”
Jack Lemmon (quoted in The Independent, Feb. 21, 1990)