Archives for May 2008

“I think it’s good to admit what a wolfish thing art is; I trust writers who know they aren’t nice.”
Kay Ryan

His New York Times obituary is here. Alas, it neglects to mention this Carol Burnett Show sketch, the funniest ever telecast on a variety show. I saw it as a boy and never forgot it.

My summer travels for The Wall Street Journal have now begun in earnest. In today’s drama column I review two regional-theater revivals, the Huntington Theatre Company’s She Loves Me in Boston and Hartford Stage’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in Hartford, Connecticut. Both are of excellent quality, but The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore is strictly for Tennessee Williams fans. Here’s an excerpt.
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What’s the best musical ever written? That depends on whether I saw “The Fantasticks,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Gypsy,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “On the Town” or “Sweeney Todd” last. But I’m never in doubt about my number-two choice: “She Loves Me” is the most sweetly romantic musical imaginable, the theatrical equivalent of a hot-fudge sundae with two spoons, and the Huntington Theatre Company’s new revival serves it up in a fancy dish. Smartly staged, attractively designed and well cast, this production is a great way to get to know a show beloved of musical-comedy buffs but inexplicably little known to the playgoing public at large….
Kate Baldwin, who was so memorable in the outstanding revival of “A Little Night Music” presented by Baltimore’s CenterStage earlier this season, is even better this time around as Amalia, the lovelorn clerk who doesn’t know that she’s fallen for one of her colleagues. Not only is she a fine actress, at once spirited and affecting, but she also has the vocal chops necessary to nail the high C in “Ice Cream” and make it stick….
I’ve never been able to get on Tennessee Williams’ wavelength, and if you share my disability, be warned that “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” probably won’t help you tune in. This 1963 play, which flopped twice in a row on Broadway, is one of Williams’ ripest exercises in southern-fried Gothicism, a parable about a rich, imperious and scared old lady with the improbable name of Flora Goforth (Olympia Dukakis) who is dictating her memoirs to an uptight Ivy League prig (Maggie Lacey) in a frantic attempt to set the record straight before she dies of cancer. Enter Chris (Kevin Anderson), a ne’er-do-well sculptor-poet who lives off rich, imperious and scared old ladies, then moves on as soon as they kick off. Is he a gigolo, a parasite, the Angel of Death or some combination of the above? Will he sleep with Flora’s secretary, thus awakening her stunted sexuality? Will Flora finish her book, coax her sculptor-poet into the sack and die happy? Yada yada yada yada yada, and then some….
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Read the whole thing here.

“I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.”
Tennessee Williams (quoted in the New York Times, Mar. 18, 1965)

• What you’ll find in Alberto Manguel’s 30,000 volume library in rural France: A section devoted to versions of the Faust legend, Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, lots of John Hawkes and Cynthia Ozick, Plato, thousands of detective novels, and “dozens of very bad books that I don’t throw away in case I ever need an example of a book I think is bad.” What’s not in the library: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, because “I felt [it] infected the shelves with its prurient descriptions of deliberately inflicted pain.” (This is an older link but a goodie. Via Bookdwarf.)
• Zadie Smith’s appreciation of the best of all books, Middlemarch, begins with a look at Henry James’s review of the novel, written when he was 30: “To James, Dorothea is a serious element, Fred a trivial one. It’s strange to see wise Henry reading like a dogmatic young man, with a young man’s certainty of what elements, in our lives, will prove the most significant.”

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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Cry-Baby (musical, PG-13, mildly naughty and very cynical, 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)

• 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, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)

• Port Authority (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes June 22, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, performed in alternating repertory through July 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• From Up Here (drama, PG-13, closes June 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NEW HAVEN, CONN.:

• Carousel (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
Louis Pasteur, lecture, University of Lille (Dec. 7, 1854)

My neighborhood is at its best this time of year. A hundred kinds of flowers are in bloom, but the lilac bushes that edge the front of my U-shaped courtyard building establish precedence, sending their perfume back into the further reaches of the long courtyard and through an only slightly cracked window (it’s been cool out) to scent my living room. It’s lovely, though of course it’s a decisively urban form of natural beauty: cultivated, tended, counting on the contrast with brick and pavement for much of its effect.
At times like these, when I’m most attuned to natural world with its circumscribed but still affecting role in my citified life, I wonder: WWGWD? What was Gilbert White doing, 275 years ago in the English village of Selborne and environs, at this time of the year? What was he observing and recording, what variations was he finding in the seasonal rhythm from year to year? If you’ve been reading “About Last Night” for a while, you know that I turn to White every once in a while for the wonders he recorded, for his dogged observation and sharp discernment, for the way he puts the humble human scale in perspective by telling us tinier stories about tinier worlds, and for the poetic economy with which he expresses all of this. Here are sccenes from May.

May 23 to June 3, 1772. [Ringmer] Wryneck pipes. The Ringmer-tortoise came forth from it’s hybernaculum on the 6th of April, but did not appear to eat ’til May the 5th: it does not eat but on hot days. As far as I could find it has no perceptible pulse. The mole-cricket seems to chur all night.
May 20, 1774. Flycatcher appears: the latest summer-bird of passage. The stoparola is most punctual to the 20th of May!!! This bird, which comes so late, begins building immediately.
May 19, 1775. No chafers appear as yet: in those seasons that they abound they deface the foliage of the whole country, especially on the downs, where woods & hedges are scarce. Regulus non cristatus stridet voce locustulae [wood wren]: this bird, the latest and largest willow-wren, haunts the tops of the tallest woods, making a stammering noise at intervals, & shivering with it’s wings. Bank-martins abound over the ponds in the forest: swifts seldom appear in cold, black days round the church.
May 21. Mr. Yalden’s tank is dry.
May 23. Dutch -honeysuckles in fine bloom.
May 24. Thrushes now, during this long drought, for want of worms hunt-out shell-snails, & pick them to pieces for their young. My horses begin to lie abroad.
May 24, 1776. [Winton] Cold dew, hot sun, soft even.
May 22, 1779. Nightingales have eggs. They build a very inartificial nest with dead leaves. & dry stalks. Their eggs are of a dull olive colour. A boy took my nest with five eggs: but the cock continues to sing: so probably they will build again.
May 24. Fiery lily bows: orange lily blows.
May 26. The nightingale continues to sing; & therefore is probably building again.
May 28. Young pheasants!
May 14, 1782. Tortoise eats the leaves of poppies.
May 15, 1784. The tortoise is very earnest for the leaves of poppies, which he hunts about after, & seems to prefer to any other green thing. Such is the vicissitude of matters where weather is concerned, that the spring, which last year was unusually backward, is now forward.
May 16. Sultry. Left off fires in the parlor. So much sun hurries the flowers out of bloom. Flesh-flies begin to appear.
May 19. Flowers fade, & go-off very fast thro’ heat. There has been only one moderate shower all this month. Bees thrive. Asparagus abounds.

I previously excerpted White’s journals here and here.