Archives for November 2008

I gave thumbs-up reviews to a pair of New York shows in today’s Wall Street Journal, one a Broadway musical (Irving Berlin’s White Christmas) and one an off-Broadway play (Itamar Moses’ Back Back Back). Here’s an excerpt.
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Now that playgoers and producers are feeling the financial pinch, the market for super-safe no-brainer shows is soaring. Escapism looks especially good between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and so Broadway is saying hello to “Irving Berlin’s White Christmas,” a sure-fire seasonal musical that’s been road-tested in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Toronto. This stage version of the Bing Crosby-Danny Kaye movie is pure, unadulterated commodity theater, right down to the inclusion of Berlin’s name in the title of the show–but the ingredients are costly and the craftsmanship immaculate, and only the Scroogiest of Scrooges will turn up their noses at its sleek charm.
Michael Curtiz’ original 1954 film was itself a commodity, a Technicolor variation on “Holiday Inn” in which Kaye replaced Fred Astaire and the whole film took place at Christmastime. It’s long been a seasonal staple, but I never liked it as much as “Holiday Inn,” and the stage version of “White Christmas” is a definite improvement on its cinematic source. The reason for this is twofold: David Ives, that wittiest of playwrights, has joined forces with Paul Blake to spruce up the script, while Walter Bobbie, the justly celebrated director of the Broadway revival of “Chicago,” has put the show on stage with his customary comedic skill. The result is a streamlined valentine to the Eisenhower era that’s packed with period references, some obvious (the heroes appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show”) and others subtle (there’s an Eames chair in their dressing room). The songs have even been orchestrated by Larry Blank in the smoothly jazzy style of Nelson Riddle, the “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” man….
Itamar Moses is having himself a time. Two of his plays, “Back Back Back” and “Yellowjackets,” had high-profile premieres in San Diego and Berkeley earlier this year, while “The Four of Us” transferred from San Diego to New York for a successful Off-Broadway run. Meanwhile, “Bach in Leipzig,” the play that put Mr. Moses on the map in 2005, was revived to brilliant effect by Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Not bad for a 31-year-old phenom.
Now “Back Back Back” has made its way to the Manhattan Theatre Club in a new production directed by Daniel Aukin, and I am delighted to report that it is a very superior piece of work, one of the best new American plays to come my way in 2008. This is all the more surprising given the unpromising fact that “Back Back Back” is issue-driven–and that the issue in question is the use of steroids by major-league baseball players…
I know nothing about baseball beyond what I learned from watching “Bull Durham” and “Eight Men Out,” but I had no difficulty grasping what was going on in “Back Back Back.” As a precaution, though, I brought along a baseball fan who assured me at evening’s end that Mr. Moses had gotten everything right–and that the play closely tracks the real-life events on which it is based. Yet “Back Back Back” never feels like a docudrama, much less a polemic. Instead Mr. Moses has given us a taut, touchingly elegiac study of friendship and betrayal…
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Read the whole thing here.
This is a fascinating article about Back Back Back by a writer with personal knowledge of the major-league-baseball steroid scandal. (Incidentally, he liked the play as much as I did.)

“THANKSGIVING DAY. A day devoted by persons with inflammatory rheumatism to thanking a loving Father that it is not hydrophobia.”
H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques

It’s not exactly a secret that I stay pretty busy, but even by my extreme standards, 2008 has been a bit on the hectic side. According to my records, I reviewed or will be reviewing a total of one hundred and fourteen shows for The Wall Street Journal in 2008, fifty-six of which took place outside New York City. (To put it another way, I reviewed shows in fourteen states and the District of Columbia.) During that time I knocked out roughly ninety columns and other pieces for the Journal and Commentary, plus a dozen or so articles that were published elsewhere, and finished writing A Cluster of Sunlight: The Life of Louis Armstrong and the libretto for The Letter.
I also made four new friends and mourned the deaths of two old ones, read a couple of hundred books and looked at a like number of paintings, saw eighteen performances of fourteen Shakespeare plays (not counting Falstaff and Kiss Me, Kate), bought three pieces of art, stayed in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, visited the grave of Willa Cather, had lunch at the Supreme Court Building, hugged Leontyne Price, posted to this blog with reasonable regularity, and spent as much time as possible in the company of Mrs. T.
I’ve been known to complain from time to time about being overworked, but for most of these things–especially the last–I am profoundly grateful. May you be as grateful for at least as many different and wondrous things on this Thanksgiving Day.

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)

• Dividing the Estate (black comedy, G, far too serious for children, reviewed here)

• Equus (drama, R, nudity and adult subject matter, closes Feb. 8, reviewed here)

• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 1, reviewed here)

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

• A Man for All Seasons * (drama, G, too intellectually demanding for children of any age, closes Dec. 14, 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:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• Picnic (drama, PG-13, adult themes, reviewed here)

“Sir, gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides)

Fred Astaire performs “One for My Baby” in the 1943 film The Sky’s the Limit:

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