Archives for June 4, 2008

By the time most of you get around to reading this, Mrs. T and I will be in Chicago, where we’re taking OGIC to see shows at Writers’ Theatre, Shattered Globe Theatre, and Chicago Shakespeare Theater, the last of which is about to collect a well-deserved Regional Theater Tony Award.
Tonight the three of us are dining with Carrie Frye and her husband. This is a major event–Our Girl and CAAF have never met in the flesh–and you can count on hearing all about it, though probably not until a few days after the fact, since we’ll all be exceedingly busy.
Come Sunday, Hilary (that’s Mrs. T) and I will fly down to St. Louis, pick up a rental car, and drive to Smalltown, U.S.A., for a visit with my mother, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and anybody else who happens to be in the vicinity. We’ll be back in New York…er, I forget when.
See you along the way!

• FRIDAY, MAY 30 To Montgomery, Alabama, by way of Hartford and Atlanta, where I picked up a rental car and drove southwest for two and a half hours, listening along the way to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Bach E Minor Partita and an advance copy of Roger Kellaway’s forthcoming live album. I’m writing the liner notes for the Kellaway album, having been present when it was recorded.
I also listened to Better, a CD by a very promising young singer-songwriter named Brooke Campbell with whose shivery, breathless voice and deep-toned acoustic guitar playing I fell in love after hearing her perform live a couple of months ago. I don’t know why she isn’t better known–I haven’t been more impressed with a singer-songwriter since I first heard Jonatha Brooke.
Montgomery is the navel of the Deep South, where the waitresses say “Mornin’, hon” and serve you sweet tea without asking. I never sweeten my iced tea in New York, but in Alabama I take it as it comes, and it came that way when I ordered dinner at Martin’s Restaurant, which also serves the fluffiest biscuits imaginable. After lapping up a piece of chocolate meringue pie like Mom used to make, I drove to a motel on the edge of town, checked in, and finished reading a biography of Hugh MacLennan before retiring for the night.
• SATURDAY, MAY 31 Breakfast at the Waffle House across the highway from my motel. The hash browns there are good and greasy. Afterward I returned to my room, knocked out a set of liner notes for Paul Moravec’s next Naxos CD, and e-mailed them to him in Princeton, then spent the rest of the day watching back-to-back performances of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival‘s productions of The Count of Monte Cristo and Romeo and Juliet. In between shows I drove downtown and dined at Chris’ Hot Dogs, a fabulous old dump where Hank Williams used to eat once upon a time. (The above photo is of the dining room, which looks a whole lot dingier in real life.)
I last visited Alabama Shakespeare three summers ago, writing about it the following week in my Wall Street Journal drama column:

Rarely has anything so delightful as the Alabama Shakespeare Festival been situated in a more depressing location. To get there, you drive past downtown Montgomery, pull off the interstate and plunge into a tangle of six-lane suburban sprawl so congested as to make the hardiest of urban planners reach for a triple dose of Xanax. Strip malls, fast-food joints, megachurches the size of Wal-Marts…but then you take a sharp turn and find yourself in the middle of a 250-acre park that looks as though it had been landscaped by Grant Wood and mowed daily by a thousand well-paid gardeners. Down one lane is the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; down the other, the Carolyn Blount Theatre, home of one of America’s most ambitious and impressive theatrical enterprises. It is, if a weekend visitor to the Bible Belt dare say so, the damnedest thing imaginable.

A previous stage version of The Count of Monte Cristo served as a vehicle for the histrionic talents of James O’Neill, Eugene’s father, who is said to have acted in it some four thousand times. In 1913 he made a silent film of his production. Here’s a clip:

• SUNDAY, JUNE 1 I woke up early, wrote my Roger Kellaway liner notes, and e-mailed them to IPO Recordings, then headed back to Connecticut by way of Atlanta. Mrs. T picked me up at the Hartford airport, where it was twenty degrees cooler than in Alabama.
“Did you miss me?” I asked.
“Maybe just the least little bit,” she replied.
(Last of three parts)

The Dave Brubeck Quartet performs Brubeck’s “Koto Song” live in 1966, with Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass, and Joe Morello on drums:

(This is the second in a weekly series of arts-related videos that will appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”
Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons