Archives for September 2008

“Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in Hester Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson)

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I give the good word on the two shows I saw last week at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin, Widowers’ Houses and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s an excerpt.
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George Bernard Shaw called “Widowers’ Houses” one of his “unpleasant” plays, by which he meant that it dealt in what he believed to be unpalatable truths about the world. But Shaw, like Mary Poppins, knew that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and so his first play, written in 1892, is a bubbly boulevard comedy about the causes of poverty, a dramatized debate strewn with sly epigrams: “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. It is not precisely what one goes to the expense for.” Think Karl Marx rewritten by Oscar Wilde and you’ll get the idea. Shaw didn’t care much for “Widowers’ Houses” in later years, but he was, as usual, wrong: It’s one of the most startlingly effective debuts ever made by a modern playwright, and Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre has revived it with splashy élan. Economics 101 was never this much fun….
American Players Theatre is a classical repertory company that performs in an outdoor amphitheater built high atop a wooded hill in Spring Green, the tiny rural town (pop. 1,444) best known as the home of Frank Lloyd Wright. (Taliesin, the house Wright built for himself in 1911, is just up the road.) Many of the company’s actors, directors and production staffers come from Chicago, which is three hours away by car. This helps to explain the quality of its productions–Chicago is one of the two best theater towns in America–but the unpretentiously inviting atmosphere of its rustic hilltop theater is something you won’t find in any big city. From the smell of the pines to the sound of the crickets, APT has a festive, near-Edenic feel. When you go there, you know you’re not at home.
Like most summer festivals, APT does a lot of Shakespeare, sometimes straight and sometimes fancy. This season William Brown, who is best known for his work with Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre, has staged “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” more or less in the manner of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and to say that it comes off is to greatly understate the case. The members of Mr. Brown’s excellent cast dip their toes into a variety of other contemporary cinematic genres along the way–Oberon, the king of the fairies, is dressed up like Conan the Barbarian, while the young lovers could have come straight out of a high-school romcom…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
Max Beerbohm, quoted in S.N. Behrman, Portrait of Max (courtesy of John Pancake)

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)

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

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

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Half a Sixpence (musical, G, closes Sept. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN OGUNQUIT, ME.:

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)

“Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him–how the great, stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom.”
H.G. Wells, Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul

Flanders & Swann perform “Madeira M’Dear” in the 1967 Broadway production of At the Drop of Another Hat:

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

“Comedy deflates the sense precisely so that the underlying lubricity and malice may bubble to the surface.”
Paul Goodman, In Creator Spirit Come