Archives for 2008

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on some (but not all!) of the shows I saw on my recent travels from hither to yon. This week I review the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Noël Coward in Two Keys, the Peterborough Players’ Our Town, and the Williamstown Theater Festival’s Home. Here’s an excerpt.
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Noël Coward wrote a handful of serious plays, but hardly anybody does them anymore, and his reputation now rests exclusively on the divine frivolity of his ever-popular lighter-than-air comedies of bad manners. So naturally I couldn’t resist when the Berkshire Theatre Festival announced that it would be reviving “Noël Coward in Two Keys,” a double bill of one-act plays that includes “A Song of Twilight,” in which The Master (as his friends called him) shook off the caution of a lifetime and wrote with utter sincerity about the still-hot topic of homosexuality, a subject that he had previously handled with the longest of tongs. Coward, of course, was a gay man who grew up at a time when the British authorities threw gay men in jail for pursuing their sexual interests, which suffices to explain his protracted discretion. What is more surprising is that at the very end of his life he summoned up the nerve to write such a play–as well as the artfulness to make it one of his very best….
Thornton Wilder wrote most of “Our Town” at the MacDowell Colony, and it’s widely thought that he was inspired by the New Hampshire village in which America’s oldest artists’ colony is located. The townspeople have no doubt of it: “Welcome to Our Town” is emblazoned on Peterborough’s city-limits signs. As for the Peterborough Players, their relationship with the play goes all the way back to 1940, when Wilder supervised their first staging of “Our Town.” Now the company is celebrating its 75th anniversary by remounting Gus Kaikkonen’s 2000 production of Wilder’s beloved study of small-town life, and has invited James Whitmore back to reprise his performance as the Stage Manager. The Peterborough Players couldn’t have given themselves a better birthday present. This “Our Town” is perfectly, unassumingly right, a model of how to freshen a classic not by adding gimmicky touches of directorial frou-frou but simply by performing it the way it was written, adding only the enlivening force that makes an old chestnut seem brand new….
David Storey made a modest name for himself in this country four decades ago with “Home,” doubtless in large part because John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson came over from London to star in it. Since then, though, only one of Mr. Storey’s other plays has been seen on Broadway, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s revival of “Home” suggests the reason why: Mr. Storey is the kind of British playwright whose work doesn’t travel….
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Read the whole thing here.

“I should have thought that even your cheap magazine mentality would have learnt by now that it is seldom with people’s characters that one falls in love.”
Noël Coward, A Song at Twilight

Mrs. T and I finally made it home to Connecticut on Monday, and I wish I could say that we’d been taking it easy ever since. No such luck: I’ve written a Wall Street Journal drama column, spent a grueling ten-hour day editing the manuscript of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and am now gearing up to knock out a Commentary essay on David Thomson’s new book, which will be published next month. Our recent travels to California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Vermont barely seem real by now, though it’s not as though they never happened–I just can’t remember them very well, except for the steamed hot dogs we ate at Flo’s on Sunday and some of the shows we saw along the way.
No doubt a few more nights’ sleep will help us both unwind a bit, though by then we’ll be packing our bags for yet another trip, this one to Wisconsin to see American Players Theatre and visit Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s country estate. We leave next Monday and get back next Thursday, and after that we’ll be off the road for three straight weeks.
Looking back on the near-nonstop events of the past month, I realize that even for me, this has been coming it a bit high. As for my poor spouse, I suspect she’s feeling a bit like Lucille Armstrong, Louis’ fourth wife, who got the shock of her life when she married a working musician and discovered what it meant to go on the road.
As I wrote in Rhythm Man:

Popular renown had brought few changes in Louis Armstrong’s daily life. He had always been a workhorse, and Joe Glaser, his manager, worked him harder than ever now that he was starting to make serious money. “Once we jumped from Bangor, Maine, to New Orleans for a one-nighter, then on to Houston, Texas, for the next night,” Pops Foster, the Armstrong band’s bassist, recalled in his autobiography.
Armstrong lived in the continuous present, playing pretty for the people, grabbing a bite to eat between shows, signing autographs after the last set, typing a stack of fan letters before bedtime, then starting from scratch the next day. After each dance he peeled off his sweat-soaked clothes and cleaned himself as best he could. “I mean, you see, places did not have them fine dressing rooms and showers and things then,” said Charlie Holmes, who spent five years in his saxophone section. “You just waited until everybody got out of the place, and then he could change his clothes after everybody had gone, and dry himself with his own towels and things.” The going wasn’t always that tough–sometimes the band traveled by private railroad car–but most of the time Armstrong’s men rode the bus, and he rode it with them. “He was a hard worker and a hard-workin’ man,” Holmes added, “and he didn’t ask you to do nothin’ that he wouldn’t do.”
Lucille had no inkling of what it would be like to live out of a suitcase. “My honeymoon was eight months of one-nighters and I thought I was going to give up the whole marriage,” she said later. “I’d never been away from home and I just couldn’t take it.” But she did what she could to make the anonymous hotel rooms in which they lived more inviting, and that Christmas Eve she bought a small tree, set it up in their room, and trimmed it, not knowing that her new husband, who had spent his childhood rummaging through garbage cans for food to sell, had never had a Christmas tree of his own.
He came back to the room that night and was stunned by the brightly colored lights. “We finally went to bed,” Lucille remembered. “And Louis was still laying up in the bed watching the tree, his eyes just like a baby’s eyes would watch something….So finally I asked him–I said, ‘Well, I’ll turn the lights out now on the tree.’ He said, ‘No, don’t turn them out. I have to just keep looking at it.'” They carted the tree from hotel to hotel until it dried up and had to be thrown out.

Needless to say, it wasn’t quite like that for us. Last week, for instance, we spent two perfectly happy nights in the attic suite of the Benjamin Prescott Inn, a 150-year-old farmhouse that is one of our favorite New England homes-away-from-home. The neighborhood is peaceful, the breakfasts delicious, the innkeepers unobtrusively friendly, the nearby restaurants excellent. Not all of our lodgings were that agreeable, but none was less than satisfactory, and all the things we saw and did along the way were worth the time spent getting from point A to point Z.
Even so, enough is enough, and that’s what Mrs. T and I have had. Throughout the last few days of our trip, we longed to come back home to our farmhouse, watch old movies on TV, eat leftovers, look at the deer on the lawn, do the laundry, and sleep late. I haven’t had much luck with the latter, but all the other items on that homely agenda have been checked off at least once since Monday afternoon.
You will note, by the way, that blogging is nowhere to be found on the above list. I really do need a few days off, so I’m going to take them, unless I don’t. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I chatted with Our Girl on the phone last night, so I know she’s alive, and CAAF is actually reported to have blown through New York while Mrs. T and I were on the road. Perhaps one or both of them will take up the slack, but if they don’t, there’ll always be a daily almanac quote!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, the next item on my schedule is a nap….

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 LENOX, MASS:

• Othello/All’s Well That Ends Well/The Ladies Man (Shakespeare/Feydeau, PG-13, not suitable for children, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• All’s Well That Ends Well/Bach in Leipzig/Burn This (Shakespeare/Moses/Wilson, PG-13, playing in festival repertory through Aug. 31, reviewed here)

“One of the ministers of Truro, when I asked what the fishermen did in the winter, answered that they did nothing but go a-visiting, sit about, and tell stories, though they worked hard in summer. Yet it is not a long vacation they get. I am sorry that I have not been there in winter to hear their yarns.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Cape Cod”

George Bernard Shaw, filmed in 1928:

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