Archives for May 2008

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from my friend Mark Sarvas, proprietor of The Elegant Variation and author of the new novel Harry, Revised. New York magazine gave Harry a thumbs up, praising the author’s “sure hand for vivisecting 21st-century absurdities.” New York readers can catch Mark when he reads tomorrow night — that’s Wednesday! — at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca (more info).
Here Mark shares five beloved books he’s afraid to re-read for fear they won’t hold up.
1. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck’s legacy hasn’t held up particularly well. Robert Gottlieb just took several thousand words in the New York Review of Books to bury him, not to praise him. “The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck,” he began, “is how good he can be when so much of the time he’s so bad.” I have fond memories of Of Mice and Men, one of the first “serious” literary works I read at a young age. Besides being proud of myself for my leaps in reading comprehension, I was completely drawn in by Lenny, George and those damned rabbits. I cried for hours when I finished the book but felt I had glimpsed something about friendship that was rare and true. But I’ve had my own love/hate with Steinbeck since — I think he’s better than Gottlieb allows but he can frequently be astonishingly ham-fisted. So I think I’m going to leave this one untouched in the well of memory.
2. The Princess Bride by William Goldman. I’ve read this one well over a dozen times but not in the last ten years or so. Rob Reiner famously did a fine job, but, for me as for many others, he simply could not compete with the Inigo and Fezzik of my own memory. Of course, in my first youthful reading, I didn’t realize Goldman was funning with us with all that Florin/Guilder stuff — until I went to Holland and handled actual florins and guilders. My fear here is all the stuff I thought was cool before — the breaking of the fourth wall, the book within the book stuff — is likely to just read like bits of business now and, knowing Goldman, the emotion I found back then would probably come off as mawkishness today. It’s another one I daren’t touch, though the hard-cover reissue sits proudly on the shelf.
3. The Tanglewood Murder by Lucille Kallen. Although I seem to have a reputation as an anti-genre snob, I retain very fond memories of this whodunit written by a former “Your Show of Shows” writer, who died in 1999. I actually enjoyed the whole C.B. Greenfield series so much that I had her sign first editions of all her books years ago at Murder Ink, the now-defunct New York mystery bookstore. But this one was always my favorite, and I’d picked up a paperback copy on my way up to Tanglewood one summer with my family. The mystery includes a Stradivarius, Ravel and Shakespeare and is forever associated in my mind with those summer evenings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra — and I tend to be suspicious of reading experiences too steeped in nostalgia. But I do remember it as a witty and surprising mystery.
4. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Like most of the free world, I was completely blown away when I read White Teeth, and the initial first flurry of pages I wrote of my own novel came out in a sort of Zadie Smith-soaked haze. (Those pages, thankfully, no longer exist.) What I admired most was her sheer fearlessness — no turn of phrase seemed to outrageous, no outré scenario off limits, and yet she had the chops to pull them all off — or so it seemed at the time. Those are precisely the bits I fear might not read as well today. Smith herself has disavowed the book, characterizing it as “the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old,” and though I think she goes overboard there, her prose has matured and quieted down in a way that fulfills the promise of her debut without making me eager to revisit it.
5. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I mentioned this “5 x 5” idea last week to a novelist friend, who immediately piped up with The English Patient, a book which wasn’t in my original list but one she had recently re-read. But she was so convincing in her case, suggesting that what I fondly remember as the book’s lush lyricism read to her as overripe, and that the absence of the plot that I swear I remember being there adds up to a book that’s a lovely slog. I trust and respect her enough that I’m suddenly terrified to crack this one open.

“It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart.”
Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle made its annual awards today. The best-play award went to August: Osage County, the best-musical award to Passing Strange.
To find out how all the judges voted, myself included, go here.

This is the world we made edition:
• Virginia Heffernan reports that the Oxford English Dictionary may soon be out of print as it moves to a web-only format. Luddites cry, “O.E.D. no!” Relatedly, in this week’s Publishers Weekly, Gwenda Bond explores how Wikipedia’s dominance is affecting the publishing model for encyclopedias and other reference works.
• Janet Maslin gives James Frey’s new novel a rave. But the review is written in a bad James Frey imitation. Which made this reader squirm, cringe.

Now that Rhythm Man is finished and the Broadway season is over, I’m blowing town for a few days of much-needed rest. Tonight I’ll be dining with Mrs. T somewhere in deepest Connecticut, and anybody who wants to get in touch with me there for any reason not involving a four-figure advance cash payment is out of luck.
Blogging? Fugedaboudit. Except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings, I intend to leave you in the hands of OGIC and CAAF all week long. If I break my word, throw stones.
See you next Monday.
P.S. I’ve freshened the Top Five and “Out of the Past” picks, and my colleagues will be adding still more new stuff this week. Take a peek.

“When I know how long a piece must take, then it excites me,” Igor Stravinsky said to George Balanchine. That’s sort of how I felt when I finally got a look at the stage on which the Santa Fe Opera will give The Letter its first performance next July.

The Crosby Theater is a 2,166-seat open-air house built atop a 7,500-foot-high desert mesa. Here’s how the construction company that built the theater describes it:

The most unique feature of the project is the enormous, and very complex, steel roof structure. The roof rod tensioning system and huge mast assemblies support the roof structure and balcony steel, with the roof connected in tension, and resting on the four existing star columns.

The opera seating is a concrete riser on grade and the balcony seating is a pre-cast riser set on structural steel. The architectural finish is the traditional New Mexican stucco. Special systems that were added include a state-of-the-art theatrical lighting system running throughout 750 lineal feet of catwalk erected above the stage, and computerized dimming capabilities both within the theater and throughout the plaza grounds.

All this is true enough, I suppose, but only in the limited sense that it would also be true to describe the Empire State Building as rather tall. It’s more to the point, if less exact, to say that the Crosby Theater is the most gorgeous-looking open-air theater I’ve seen in my life–and I’ve seen some beauties. The setting is part of it, of course, but the theater itself is a humdinger, at once spacious and arrestingly intimate. Now that I’m a drama critic, I spend much of my time watching performances in small theaters, and in the process I’ve become impatient with giant-sized auditoriums like the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, where even the best seats are far removed from the singers on stage. Not so the Crosby Theater. When you stand on the stage, you feel as though you’re in the lap of the audience, and when you sit in the orchestra seats, you feel as though you’re being thrust toward the performers. To build such a theater in so naturally beautiful a place all but ensures a festive atmosphere, and by most accounts the opera buffs who come to Santa Fe do so in the expectation of having a rip-roaringly good time.

I learned these things when I flew out to Santa Fe two weeks ago to attend the press conference at which the cast and production team of The Letter were announced. I’d never been to Santa Fe before, and didn’t know how complicated it is to get there from New York: you fly into Dallas or Denver, change planes for Albuquerque, then spend an hour driving to Santa Fe. The connections can be dicey, and if you try to cut it close, you’re likely to end up spending the night somewhere else. I flew out of Newark, and my flight left two hours late, the same amount of time I’d allowed myself to change planes in Dallas. Since I was booked onto the last flight to Albuquerque, I assumed that I wasn’t going to get to Santa Fe until the next day, but American Airlines, God bless them, held my plane, and I made it to New Mexico in one piece, more or less on time.

Paul Moravec, my collaborator on The Letter, picked me up at my hotel the following morning and drove me to the opera house, where the company’s production chief gave us a tour of the grounds. The more I saw, the bigger my eyes grew. Of course I knew perfectly well that Santa Fe Opera is a large-scale operation, but you can’t fully appreciate the implications of that statement until you see the company’s headquarters spread out before you. As I explained to Mrs. T when I got back to New York, Santa Fe Opera is not so much a summer opera company as a major opera company that performs in the summer. Paul told me this after he went there last year–he compared it to Bayreuth–but it wasn’t until I stood on the stage that I understood what he meant.

Paul and I did our best to act like grownups, but as soon as the tour was over and the production chief left us to ourselves, we looked at one other and broke out in mile-wide grins.

“Is this cool or what?” Paul said.

“Dude,” I replied, “we have soooo hit the big time!”

Then we started laughing uncontrollably.

Once we got ourselves pulled together, we strolled over to the rehearsal hall. We had an hour to kill before the press conference, so Paul found a piano and played through his preliminary sketches for the last scene of The Letter. At length the reporters started drifting in, and we closed the piano and made ready to be introduced to the world. What followed was later described on the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican under the wonderful headline “Opera’s 2009 Season Takes Film Noir Turn”:

The Santa Fe Opera announced Wednesday that its 2009 season will include the world premiere of The Letter, an opera based on a 1927 stage adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham short story.

The SFO commissioned the opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec and critic, biographer and blogger Terry Teachout.

Tom Ford, fashion designer and legendary former creative director of Gucci, whose new house atop Talaya Hill is still under construction, is making his debut as a costume designer for The Letter.

The 90-minute opera in eight scenes has “blood and sex, everything you want in opera,” Teachout said.

Patricia Racette and Anthony Michaels-Moore star as an unhappy couple whose life in the jungle of Malaya is torn apart by adultery that leads to murder, blackmail and revenge.

Moravec said he and Teachout intend the opera to be as “fast, concise and hard-hitting as a film noir.”

The characters in the opera are more likely to be wearing khaki or white duck suits (including one soaked in blood) than Ford’s signature cowboy boots, blazers, unbuttoned shirts (and 5-o’clock shadows). But, Moravec said, “anything Tom Ford wants to do is fine with us as long as the labels aren’t showing.”

Read the whole thing here–there’s lots more, all of it accurate, including the quotes.

When the show was over, I wolfed down lunch, then headed back to New York by way of Albuquerque, Denver, and Newark. Paul stayed behind to work on the last scene and confer with Richard Gaddes, the company’s outgoing general manager, and Charles MacKay, who will be replacing him this fall. I would have liked to stay on for a few more days, too, but I had four shows to see on Broadway and no time to spare, so I left with the utmost reluctance.

The good news is that I’ll be returning to Santa Fe in July to spend a week seeing four of this season’s productions (one of them staged by Jonathan Kent, who is directing The Letter) and meeting with more of the people with whom we’ll be working next year. I can’t wait. Paul and I have been thinking about The Letter for the better part of two years, but now, at long last, it seems absolutely real to us–and we’re excited. Very, very excited.

UPDATE: A friend writes:

You said “Dude”? For realsies?

Way.

It took long enough and then some, but Elaine Dundy finally made it onto the obituary page of the New York Times last Friday. Kindly note the last paragraph:

The Dud Avocado, reissued last year by The New York Review of Books, remains Ms. Dundy’s most popular book, flawed but vital, like its heroine. “The plot is helter-skelter, and the end trails off into vapor,” the critic Terry Teachout wrote, “but the narrator’s utterly feminine voice redeems all.”

Sure enough.