Archives for April 2008

“You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough, you get to be a real professor of pain.”
Paddy Chayefsky, Marty

I’m up to my ears in the next-to-last chapter of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and I’ll probably stay that way until Sunday afternoon, when I head out to New Jersey to see a performance of Kiss Me, Kate. I don’t intend to surface again until this chapter is wrapped up and put to bed. Wish me luck!

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 (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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)

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

• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

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

• Macbeth * (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 24, reviewed here)

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

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

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Sunday in the Park with George * (musical, PG-13, too complicated for children, closes June 29, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• The Four of Us (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through May 18, 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 IN PROVIDENCE, R.I.:

• Blithe Spirit (comedy, G/PG-13, some adult subject matter, closes Apr. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WESTPORT, CONN.:

• Time of My Life (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 26, reviewed here)

REOPENING THIS MONTH ON BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reopens at the Cort Theatre on Apr. 29 for an open-ended run, reviewed here)

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

“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by neglect of many other things.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “An Apology for Idlers”

A couple cool watch-able things:
• PBS’s American Experience is making its one-hour special on Walt Whitman available online. (Via SoT.)
• Yale’s roster of open courses includes a modern poetry class with lectures on such poets as Yeats, Bishop, Eliot and Moore. (Via Crooked House.)

“‘Do you know any happy music?’ asked Stephen. ‘I do not.'”
Patrick O’Brian, The Hundred Days

People in my line of work have to sift through a lot of press releases and other forms of flackery, all of which we take with a stalactite or two of salt. It’s part of the job. Nevertheless, I confess to having boggled at the blurbissimo I encountered on the back of my advance readers’ copy of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days, which will be published by W.W. Norton in June.
Here it is, in its entirety:

One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April’s usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it’s best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children’s videos in the office, while she works.
Except that April works at the Puma Club for Men. And tonight she has an unusual client, a foreigner both remote and too personal, and free with his money. Lots of it, all cash. His name is Bassam. Meanwhile, another man, AJ, has been thrown out of the club for holding hands with his favorite stripper, and he’s drunk and angry and lonely.
From these explosive elements come [sic] a relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love. It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus’s #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog–and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.

Right.
I didn’t read House of Sand and Fog, so I suppose it’s within the realm of possibility that Andre Dubus III is a serious writer. Still, it isn’t very likely that I’ll be reading The Garden of Last Days, much less reviewing it. I don’t mind having my intelligence insulted by publicists–some forms of suffering are hard to avoid–but a critic can only be expected to swallow so much guff, and the Norton publicity department just blew my quota for 2008.

One of the most important theatrical events I’ve had the good luck to cover in my five years at The Wall Street Journal is coming to PBS later this month. Primo, Sir Anthony Sher’s one-man stage version of If This Is a Man, Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir, airs on Great Performances April 24.
Here’s what I wrote three years ago about the Broadway transfer of this extraordinary show:

“Primo” is a very great piece of theater, but the tale, not the teller, is what matters most, and it is to their credit that Sir Anthony and Richard Wilson, his director, have opted for stark simplicity in presenting “If This Is a Man” (originally published in the U.S. as “Survival in Auschwitz”). The set, designed by Hildegard Bechtler, consists of a few concrete walls, a shovelful of gravel and a single wooden chair. Into this cold, bare space walks the bespectacled Sir Anthony, wearing an old cardigan. “It was my good fortune,” he says matter-of-factly, “to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944…I was 24, with little wisdom, no experience, and a tendency–encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me by the racial laws–to live in an unrealistic world of my own.” Then, without further ado, he flings you into the bowels of hell.
As I sat in my aisle seat waiting for “Primo” to start, I wondered what so eloquent a book had to gain from dramatic presentation, however minimal. Might it not be even more effective for Sir Anthony merely to stand at a lectern and read it out loud? Within five minutes I knew better. The genius of his acting lies in its extreme understatement. When the Nazis order him to strip naked, he takes off his glasses and pushes up his sleeves, hinting at his humiliation by furtively sliding a hand over his crotch. His voice grows steadily higher in pitch–first quizzical, then astonished. That’s all he does, and all it takes: Levi does the rest, recounting the unimaginable horrors of Auschwitz with the laconic poise of a man who knows his tale needs no embellishing.
The ultimate proof of the purity and immediacy of this performance is that you come away from it thinking not about Sir Anthony, or even Primo Levi, but the story they have told together. Resounding in my ears as I left the theater were the climactic words in which Levi described the Russian soldiers who liberated Auschwitz: “They seem overwhelmed, not just by compassion but something else, something that seals their lips and keeps their eyes fixed to the scene around them. It’s shame. We know this shame. It’s the same that swamped us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage. It’s the shame that the just man feels at another man’s crime…a feeling of guilt, that such a thing even exists…”

Mark your calendar–now.
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For more information, go here.