Archives for March 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.
* * *
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)

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:

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 20 and reopens Apr. 29 at the Music Box Theatre for an open-ended run, 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)

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

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

• In the Heights (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

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

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

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 16, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)

• The Seagull (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 13, reviewed here)

IN CAMBRIDGE, MASS.:

• The Tempest (drama, G, possible for very intelligent tweens, reviewed here)

ON TOUR:

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

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND ON BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Saturday and reopens at the Cort Theatre on Apr. 29, reviewed here)
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

“Theatre invites its audience to use its imagination in a social setting. By doing this, it creates a space where we can dream together and via that dreaming activity reconnect with the world and each other. Doing this can be an uncomfortable experience, but by engaging imaginatively in a work of art as a group and as individuals simultaneously, we experience theatre’s power. The power to make us feel more alive. The power to create new possibilities within our brains. The power to tell stories in different ways.”
Isaac Butler, Parabasis (Mar. 19, 2008)

Over the weekend both our cars were broken into. Nothing too serious, just a change box and the handful of CDs in the carrier — all the CDs, that is, except for one, which pointedly got left behind on the driver’s seat: My copy of Nilsson Schmilsson.
I love the record, Lowell hates it, and we’ve bickered about it a kazillion times the way you do when you’re married and go everywhere together and are appalled by what the other one wants to play on the stereo on the way there. You can tell Lowell feels super-vindicated that the car burglar took his side.

What a relief, The Return of Jezebel James has been cancelled. Out of loyalty to Amy Sherman-Palladino I watched the first two weeks and would have continued to watch — but it was painful. About five minutes in to the first episode it was clear the show was a bust, and after that it was just like sitting vigil. It felt like, if you had a friend who rammed her ship into an iceberg and everyone knows the boat’s sinking but you kind of owe it to her to stay on board anyway and drink with her until the whole thing goes down. Or something like that. It was bad.
So that laugh track was an abomination before God, but what else went wrong (I ask ye, the other four people who watched the show)? For me, Parker Posey seemed overly vague and drifting in her role, like she never clued in that she was a lead and had to hold the center down. Instead she played her part like a satellite character: A two-note sidekick.
And then, I think, part of the fault must lie with how her character was written, with scavenged Frankenstein-ish pieces of Lorelai Gilmore (e.g., the compulsive list-making, the fascination with girlie monstrosities like Hello Kitty) stapled on here and there, which made for an incoherent whole — again, at least as Posey played it. I hate to say this because I adore her, but these tics felt less like a return of beloved tropes, than a failure of imagination on ASP’s part*. She writes so well about neurotic, complicated, high-strung women, but I want her to push on.
* I felt the same way when Anna and April, Luke’s ex-girlfriend and daughter, were introducted in GG Season 6 — Anna with her fast-talking and her quirks, April as a bookish brainiac — and it was all a little too mirror, mirror on the wall to the Lorelai-Rory houseold.