Archives for November 2008

“Music is a parasitical luxury, supported by the few. It is something that must be inflicted on the public.”
Sir Thomas Beecham (quoted in Time, Apr. 5, 1943)

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)

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

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

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• Picnic (drama, PG-13, adult themes, closes Nov. 30, reviewed here)

“I believe that one tradition spawns another. I believe in tradition in life in general, not fashion. I don’t think that a new message falls from the sky and the light bulb goes on and suddenly there’s another whole new aesthetic. I think the best art comes from the best art.”
Helen Frankenthaler (quoted in The Art Newspaper, June 2000)

For the past few years I’ve been writing at odd intervals about Arnold Friedman, a little-known American painter whom I once described in the Washington Post as “the greatest artist you’ve never heard of.” (You can read more about him here and here.) Along the way I tracked down and bought four of his lithographs, all of which I cherish, but I took it for granted that I’d never be able to afford an oil painting by Friedman.

Very much to my surprise, a small Friedman oil turned up on eBay a few weeks ago, and after a modest amount of preliminary dickering, I was able to persuade the owner to part with it at a price that was well within my modest means. It’s called “Landscape,” and my educated guess is that it was painted around 1940. Mrs. T hasn’t seen it yet–she’s up in Connecticut–but I think she’s going to like the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. I hope you do, too.

The “Public Melody Number One” musical sequence from Raoul Walsh’s 1937 film Artists and Models, staged by Vincente Minnelli and featuring Louis Armstrong and Martha Raye. Raye darkened her skin with makeup in order to appear on screen with Armstrong:

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

“One is safe if one is still able to risk.”
Helen Frankenthaler (quoted in the New York Times, Apr. 27, 2003)

On October 9, 1918, an HMV sound engineer named Will Gaisberg set up a primitive piece of recording equipment immediately behind a unit of the Royal Garrison Artillery stationed outside Lille and recorded a British gas-shell bombardment. His purpose in doing so was to preserve the sounds of war before the coming armistice caused them to vanish forever from the face of the earth.

According to HMV’s catalogue, the recording, which was commercially released, consisted of

the actual reproduction of the screaming and whistling of the shells previous to the entry of the British troops into Lille. It is not an imitation but was recorded on the battlefront. The report of the guns and the whistling of the shells is the actual sound of the Royal Garrison Artillery in action on October 9th, 1918. No book or picture can ever visualise the reality of modern warfare just the way this record has done…it would require only the slightest imagination for one, by means of this record, to be projected into the past, and feel that he is really present on the battlefield witnessing this historic chapter of the war.

Here is Gaisberg’s own account of the making of the recording:

Gradually we came within the sound of the guns, and eventually, when only a short distance from Lille, we pulled up at a row of ruined cottages, in one of which the heavy siege battery had made its quarters. In the wrecked kitchen we unpacked our recording machines and made our preparations before getting directly behind a battery of great 4.5′ guns and 6′ howitzers, camouflaged until they looked at close quarters like giant insects. Here the machine could well catch the finer sounds of the “singing,” the “whine,” and the “scream” of the shells, as well as the terrific reports when they left the guns.

Dusk fell, and we were obliged, very reluctantly, to pack up our recording instrument and return to Boulogne–and to England; but we brought with us a true representation of the bombardment, which will have a unique place in the history of the Great War.

You can download the two-minute-long recording from iTunes by searching for “Gas Shells Bombardment.” It is one of the most haunting and disturbing documents of the past that I know–one made all the more haunting by the knowledge that Gaisberg accidentally inhaled some of the gas from the attack, which damaged his lungs irreparably. In London he fell victim to the international flu epidemic that was then ravaging the city, and died on November 5, six days before World War I came to an end.

Ninety years later, only ten veterans of what Woodrow Wilson called “the War to End War,” one of whom is an American, are still alive. If you think of them today–and you should–take a moment to think about Will Gaisberg as well.

* * *

HMV D378, “Actual Recording of the Gas Shell Bombardment, by the Royal Garrison Artillery (9th October, 1918), preparatory to the British Troops entering Lille”:

A new friend of mine who dances for a living wrote the other day to tell me that she’s just been cast as the Woman With the Purse in Jerome Robbins’ Fancy Free, the wonderful 1943 sailor-suit ballet that made stars out of Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the delicious and irresistible score. Her e-mail reminded me of how rarely I get to dance performances these days. The publication in 2004 of All in the Dances, my brief life of George Balanchine, turned out in the short run to be an end rather than a beginning: more than a year has gone by since I last saw New York City Ballet, and even longer since my most recent visit to the Paul Taylor Dance Company, both of which used to be central to my hectic life as a peripatetic aesthete. Alas, I’m good for only so many nights out each week, and now that I’m a full-time drama critic and part-time opera librettist, I’ve been forced to put dance on the shelf, at least for the time being.
Hence it is with a mixture of nostalgia and wistfulness that I announce the publication of Robert Gottlieb’s Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, a thirteen-hundred-page anthology whose subtitle is impeccably accurate. Reading Dance contains pieces about Balanchine, Robbins, Frederick Ashton, Fred Astaire, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Serge Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, Suzanne Farrell, Martha Graham, Gelsey Kirkland, Mark Morris, Vaslav Nijinsky, Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp and dozens of other key figures in dance. The list of contributors includes Joan Acocella, Mindy Aloff, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Beaumont, Max Beerbohm, Toni Bentley, Holly Brubach, Richard Buckle, Clement Crisp, Arlene Croce, Edwin Denby, Janet Flanner, Lynn Garafola, Robert Greskovic, B.H. Haggin, Deborah Jowitt, Allegra Kent, Lincoln Kirstein, Alistair Macaulay, George Jean Nathan, Jean Renoir, Marcia Siegel, Paul Taylor, Tobi Tobias, Kenneth Tynan, David Vaughan, and my old friend Anita Finkel, whose premature and untimely death robbed the world of dance of one of its most passionate commentators.
I am represented in Reading Dance by “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” an essay about Merce Cunningham that was originally published in Anita’s New Dance Review in 1994 and reprinted a decade later in A Terry Teachout Reader. Revisiting that half-remembered piece filled me with memories of the heady years when it was common for me to attend three or four ballet and modern dance performances a week. Back then my first encounters with Balanchine, Cunningham, and Taylor were still hitting me with the force of revelation, and I felt the urgent need to write as often as I could about the life-changing things that I was seeing–and feeling.
Needless to say, my life has changed greatly since then, but I still love dance with all my heart, and I’m glad that Bob Gottlieb has gone to so much trouble to tell me what I’ve been missing. I’ll be back, Bob, I promise!