Archives for June 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

• MONDAY, MAY 26 I had a nightmare about The Letter, the first time I’ve ever dreamed about it. In my dream, Paul Moravec and I were about to lead a workshop performance of our opera at a summer festival that took place in a clearing in some unspecified forest. A hundred or so singers and instrumentalists were seated on two sets of bleachers, waiting for us to get started. Then Truman Capote, dressed in a red leisure suit, stood up and addressed the assembled performers. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t approve of any of this. It simply isn’t true.” He walked out–and the whole cast followed him….
I woke up, looked at the alarm clock, saw that it was five-thirty in the morning, and muttered a four-letter word of the highest possible voltage. I had to be at Adrienne Farb‘s Upper West Side apartment at eight, meaning that there wasn’t much point in trying to go back to sleep. Instead I got out of bed, climbed down from the loft, took a shower, and wrote for an hour and a half.
Adrienne is an abstract artist whose style has fascinated me ever since I first read about it three years ago. Her work bears a superficial resemblance to the color-field paintings of Morris Louis, especially when seen in reproduction, but it looks completely different in person, crisper and more dynamic, and the more I saw of it, the more interested I became. Last winter I nearly bought one of her works on paper, but I got married instead, which soaked up all my spare change. Then a mutual acquaintance put us in touch via e-mail. It turned out that we were neighbors, so she invited me to visit her studio in the Bronx. Several months went by before we could find a morning when I was in town and we were both free, but we finally pinned down a date, and after coffee and conversation with Adrienne and her very nice husband Clément, we took a bus and a subway up to her studio, where I spent two and a half increasingly excited hours looking at her paintings.
I liked everything I saw, but this large 2007 canvas, “Fruitti di Bosco, No. 2,” spoke to me most powerfully and immediately:

Afterward I rushed down to Penn Station, stopping at a mailbox along the way to send in my Tony Awards ballot, and headed north to Hartford to rejoin Mrs. T in the woods of Connecticut.
• TUESDAY, MAY 27 Today I wrote a drama column, reread two Parker novels, took a much-needed nap, ate home cooking, and watched an old George Sanders movie.
• WEDNESDAY, MAY 28 Today I wrote a Commentary essay, took a ride with Mrs. T and listened to two episodes of Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour on the car radio, reread another Parker novel, took yet another much-needed nap, ate more home cooking, and watched The Asphalt Jungle with Mrs. T, who likes caper movies as much as I do.
• THURSDAY, MAY 29 Mrs. T and I had John Huston on our minds after watching The Asphalt Jungle, so courtesy of the Documentary Channel, we watched two of his World War II documentaries, The Battle of San Pietro and Let There Be Light, the second of which is unavailable on DVD but can be viewed online by going here. I’d never seen either film, and they both turned out to be as good as their reputations.
(Second of three parts)

The New York Drama Critics’ Circle, of which I am a member, was founded in 1935. Six years later Al Hirschfeld drew the then-current membership, portraying them in camera at the Algonquin Hotel:

Hirschfeld’s caricature was published in the New York Times in April of 1941. The original, I learned the other day, is being auctioned off later this month by Swann Galleries. I was fascinated to read the names of the members pictured therein: Rosamund Gilder, Joseph Wood Krutch, Richard Watts, Jr., John Mason Brown, Walter Winchell, George Jean Nathan, Sidney Whipple, Brooks Atkinson, Arthur Pollock, Grenville Vernon, Stark Young, Wolcott Gibbs, Burns Mantle, Richard Lockridge, Louis Kronenberger, Kelcey Allen, Oliver Claxton, John Anderson, and John Gassner. In their day, several of these critics wielded considerable power. Two or three of them are still remembered, and one or two others ought to be. The rest, however, are long forgotten–and rightly so.

“Never pay any attention to what critics say,” Jean Sibelius once told a colleague. “Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!” While this is not quite true, it is, as they say, close enough for jazz. So I found it oddly touching to see that Hirschfeld, who for much of the twentieth century was one of America’s arbiters of celebrity, had once upon a time taken the trouble to draw nineteen of my erstwhile colleagues. It isn’t a statue, but it’s not bad.

“New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.”
Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River

• TUESDAY, MAY 20 To New Haven with Mrs. T to see Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Carousel, which I liked enormously in spite of the fact that I’ve never cared much for the show. I’m a Rodgers-and-Hart man, not a Rodgers-and-Hammerstein man. (Mrs. T is the opposite.)
• WEDNESDAY, MAY 21 Up early to write my Carousel review in our hotel room in New Haven, then file it via e-mail. I try to avoid writing on the road whenever I can, but sometimes it’s inescapable, so I grit my teeth and make the best of it. After a late breakfast, Mrs. T and I drive to Boston to dine at Brasserie Jo with Tracey Jenkins (who designed our engagement ring) and see the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of She Loves Me, one of my favorite musicals. It’s new to Mrs. T, and she loves it, too. We get stuck in a traffic jam on the way back to our hotel in Cambridge and spend forty-five minutes making what would normally be a seven-minute drive. The Art of Segovia soothes our nerves en route.
• THURSDAY, MAY 22 Back to Connecticut–no show tonight! Today’s New York Times contains an interesting story about Tom Ford, who is designing the costumes for The Letter. I read it with close attention, then send a link to Paul Moravec, my collaborator, in Princeton.
• FRIDAY, MAY 23 Mrs. T and I pack a picnic lunch and go to Diana’s Pool to eat it. In the evening we drive to Hartford to see The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. Tennessee Williams has always gotten on my nerves, and this play is no exception, even though Hartford Stage is one of the best companies in New England and the production is top-notch. According to the program, Rupert Everett once starred in a London production in which he played the role of Flora Goforth in drag. That I would have paid to see.
• SATURDAY, MAY 24 Mrs. T waves goodbye as I return to New York, where I spend the afternoon dredging through a pile of snail mail. One inexplicably large package turns out to contain my new Arnold Friedman lithograph. It’s even more beautiful than I’d expected.
To Joe’s Pub in the evening to hear the Lascivious Biddies, whom I haven’t seen on stage since they played at my wedding last October. After the show I meet the Biddies’ new guitarist, Ila Cantor, about whom I’ve been hearing good things ever since she joined the band a few months ago, all of which turn out to be true. Back at home, I Google Ila and am sent to her MySpace page, where I listen to an original composition for solo acoustic guitar called “Dance of the Chromozomes” that knocks me sideways.
• SUNDAY, MAY 25 In the morning I spend three hours conferring with Paul Moravec at his apartment, conveniently located just two blocks from my place. Paul has come into town to discuss possible cuts in The Letter, which is running a bit longer than we planned. We pare five minutes from the score, then go through the last scene measure by measure looking for possible weak spots. After lunch I pay a visit to a sick friend who has moved to an East Side nursing home, then have dinner with another friend who lives nearby.
To bed at eleven–tomorrow is another travel day.
(First of three parts)