Archives for 2008

Last week I pointed to a New Republic review of a new collection of the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. The book, Words In Air, won’t be out till the end of the month, but until then you can find a nice sampling of the letters in the October issue of Poetry (unfortunately not available online).
I’ve read much of Bishop’s side of the correspondence in One Art but it’s even more enjoyable to read her letters alongside Lowell’s own volleys and sallies. The letters are little gems, and I’m tempted to type them all in here, but in lieu of copyright larceny I’ll give you this sauntering paragraph from one of Lowell’s:

Since my last letter it has become autumnal (nice but muggy) and I’ve read Black Arrow, Weir of Hermiston, The Master of Ballantrae, and Graves’ abridgement of David Copperfield. Saw Black Arrow as a movie too — it’s a cumbersome pot-boiler at best, but redone with the plot of a western thriller it is, is — words fail me. Had a drunken discussion with two Englishmen in which I tried to use the Socratic method, but only discovered that none of us could define “right” or “good.” And finished off 23 more poets; God, how I dislike them!

• Should Margaret Drabble’s next novel feature a boy wizard with magical friends I guess we’ll all understand why. (Via Literary Saloon.)
• Not literary but five days later this skit still makes me laugh.

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)

• 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 NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO

• R.U.R. (serious comedy, PG-13, adult themes, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:

• To the Ladies (comedy, G, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

“I sometimes suspect that New Yorkers do not have a desire to be in theatres, I think they want to go to whatever the certified hit is, of the season. What the Delphic oracle tells them to go and see, sometimes in depressed moments I think, ‘Well, they really don’t want to be there at all. They’re looking for every excuse not to go. The New York Times tells them it’s not up to much, “Oh good, we’ve got a reason for not going.”‘ The English are not like that. They’re much more independent about their theatre. They’re much more naturally theatrical in their instincts. Theatre is part of their life in a way that it is not part of the average American’s life.”
Peter Shaffer, interviewed by Mike Wood for the William Inge Theatre Festival, Feb. 27, 1992

My paid workload is at something like an all-time height this week and into next, so consider this just poking my head in. I’ve been in this boat for a while, leading a narrowed life. But I did carve out some time last weekend for something special: a first-ever viewing of The Godfather on the big screen, and a gorgeous new print at that. In a recent story in Slate, Fred Kaplan walked readers through the heroically painstaking process through which Coppola’s masterpiece, and its even greater sequel, were restored to their original glory.
The quality of the picture and sound, and of course the liberation from living-room scale, made the film a new experience. We noticed details that were easy to lose in the background in previous viewings–a tear in Tom Hagen’s eye in one scene and numerous details of setting throughout. But Al Pacino’s performance is the element that most benefits from the restoration as far as I’m concerned. It’s a more subtle and powerful performance than I knew before. And it’s all in the eyes.
The transformation of Michael Corleone is tracked as much in his countenance and expression as in his speech, actions, and gestures. Pacino conveys all of this with terrific restraint, building his performance from the eyes out. After the incident outside the hospital, Michael becomes a strikingly more self-contained figure–composed, calculating, and almost shrunken–so that the eyes become his main conduit of expression. They’re darting and furtive in the earliest scenes following the blow to Michael’s face, the scenes in which the hits on Sollozzo and McCluskey are planned and carried out and Michael is still making rookie mistakes like betraying his surprise when the car gets on a bridge to Jersey. But the eyes themselves eventually come under discipline, too, growing steady and dead well before the final settling of accounts.
The new print is an electrifying experience, and one that really makes you lament what’s happened to Pacino. If you knew him only from such latter-day growling and bellowing as his performances in, say, Heat and Any Given Sunday, would you even recognize him here?
I can hardly wait to see Part II.

Truman Capote talks to a CBC interviewer in 1966 about how he came to write In Cold Blood:

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

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.”
A.J. Liebling, “A Talkative Something or Other” (The New Yorker, Apr. 7, 1956)