Archives for 2008

In this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report from San Diego on the Old Globe‘s productions of The Pleasure of His Company and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here’s an excerpt.
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Theatrical manners have changed greatly in the half century since “The Pleasure of His Company” opened on Broadway. Nowadays it’s an insult to call a play “well-made,” but back then you could still get away with setting a neatly crafted boulevard comedy in the drawing room of a home whose owners employed a butler. Not only did “The Pleasure of His Company” run for 474 performances, but it was later turned into a Hollywood movie that did just as well at the box office. Today, though, well-made comedies are as dead as drawing rooms, and the Old Globe’s revival of “The Pleasure of His Company” is the first time that the play has been on stage anywhere since the original production closed in 1959.
To what do we attribute this act of dramatic archaeology? The credit goes to Darko Tresnjak, the Old Globe’s resident artistic director, who has a taste for American stage comedies of the ’50s that you wouldn’t expect from a director born in Yugoslavia. “I find that underneath the glossy surfaces, the subtext [of these plays] is actually quite subversive,” he told James Hebert of the San Diego Union-Tribune earlier this month. Last year Mr. Tresnjak revived John van Druten’s “Bell, Book and Candle,” a quintessential example of the genre. Alas, I didn’t see that production, but if was half as stylish as this one, it must have been terrific….
Biddeford “Pogo” Poole (Patrick Page), the star of “The Pleasure of His Company,” is an ascot-wearing socialite-sportsman who walked out on Katharine (Ellen Karas), his ex-wife, and Jessica (Erin Chambers), his only daughter, to become (in Katharine’s exasperated phrase) a “globetrotting heel.” Years later he shows up on Katharine’s doorstep just in time for Jessica’s wedding, determined to charm his way into Jessica’s heart–and, if possible, Katharine’s bed. That Katharine has married again, this time to a rich, dull San Francisco businessman (Jim Abele), means nothing to Pogo, who uses his charm as an offensive weapon and is in the habit of having his own way, no matter what it costs or whom it hurts.
The part of Pogo was created on Broadway by Cyril Ritchard and played on screen by Fred Astaire, which will give you a pretty good idea of what it takes to make “The Pleasure of His Company” fly. (This is the sort of play in which lines like “I dug out some of the ancestral bourbon” and “Morality is merely low blood pressure” are tossed off between drinks.) The good news is that Mr. Tresnjak and the Old Globe have got every bit of what it takes. Not only does Mr. Page waltz through his part with the utmost suppleness and urbanity, but his supporting cast keeps him all the way up on his toes…
Across the courtyard in its attractive outdoor pavilion, the Old Globe is performing “The Merry Wives of Windsor” as part of a three-play Shakespeare festival that also includes “All’s Well That Ends Well” and “Romeo and Juliet.” Paul Mullins has staged “Merry Wives” in the manner of a Hollywood Western, turning Falstaff (Eric Hoffmann) into a Yosemite Sam-type blowhard equipped with a pair of six-shooters and a 20-gallon hat. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a Shakespeare comedy transplanted to the Wild West–the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival did “As You Like It” in much the same way last season–and some of the actors, Mr. Hoffmann in particular, skate casually atop Mr. Mullins’ directorial conceit instead of breaking through the ice and plunging into deeper comic waters. Still, there’s plenty of uncomplicated pleasure to be found in this thoroughly agreeable production…
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Read the whole thing here.

Only one recording of Raymond Chandler’s speaking voice survives, a BBC interview conducted with Chandler in 1958 by none other than Ian Fleming. You can listen to it by going here. If you do so, you’ll be staggered to learn that the creator of Philip Marlowe sounds…well, wimpy.
I mention this fact because I’ve long been fascinated by recordings of the voices of famous writers and other artists, many of which I find to be personally revealing in ways that no other documentary evidence can equal. The BBC has a vast archive of recordings as rare and illuminating as the Chandler interview, but until recently it sat firmly on them. Now the British Library Sound Archive has started releasing a series of spoken-word CDs drawn from the BBC archives, the first five volumes of which are devoted to W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, George Bernard Shaw, Evelyn Waugh, and H.G. Wells.
Yep, you guessed it: I’ve written a “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the great spoken-word recordings of the twentieth century, only a handful of which have made it to CD. I suspect you’ll find the column frustrating, since I devote most of it to telling you about amazing things that you can’t hear unless you go to a very well-stocked record library, but I think it’ll interest you anyway.
If you’re curious, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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:

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

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)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

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

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

“I don’t think God punishes people for specific things. I think he punishes people in general, for no reason.”
Christopher Durang, The Marriage of Bette and Boo

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from Jenny Davidson, author of the marvelous new young-adult novel The Explosionist and proprietrix of Light Reading.
In 2007 I fell head over heels in love — with swimming. This led me to spend as much time as I could in the water, but unfortunately one cannot always be swimming. the insatiable desire for ‘swim lit.’ It was difficult to narrow my choices down to five — what about Diana Nyad’s Other Shores, Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero and Sherman Chavoor’s The Fifty-Meter Jungle: How Olympic Swimmers are Made? What about the complete novels of Chris Crutcher?!? But here’s my list, and I hope you will take a dip or two yourself this summer under their watery influence.
1. Waterlog by Roger Deakin. An altogether magical book, rather in the spirit of W. G. Sebald, about ‘wild swimming’: the author breaststrokes his way around Britain’s less tame spaces and recounts his adventures in angelic prose. (See also.)
2. Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. At age fifteen, Cox set a world record swimming the English Channel. Later she swam across the Bering Strait at a time when political strain made it very doubtful whether she would obtain permission to set foot on Russian soil. An inspiring book by an exceptional athlete whose ability to tolerate very low water temperatures made possible the feat alluded to in the book’s title.
3. The Science of Swimming by ‘Doc’ Counsilman. For the hard-core swim-obsessed only! Almost mystically redolent of mid-20th-century American sports science, Counsilman’s tome includes gems like the following: “The Utopian view of an existence without any form of stress, either physical or mental, is not conducive to the development of a person well prepared for existence in a competitive society.”
4. In Lane Three, Alex Archer by Tessa Duder. A wonderful young-adult novel with a strong autobiographical basis; like her protagonist Alex Archer, Tessa Duder was a talented New Zealand swimmer in the late 1950s with her eyes set on the highest goals in competitive swimming. Appealingly introduces the term ‘togs’ (for bathing suit) and made me grateful for the use of polyester and lycra rather than itchy sagging wool for the suits one wears in the pool nowadays.
5. Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman. Finally, this last selection is incidentally a great novel of swimming, cycling and running, and should be adopted by triathletes everywhere as their literary inspiration.

Mary Martin sings “I’m Flying,” from the 1960 NBC telecast of Jerome Robbins’ musical version of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan:

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

“Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.”
J.M. Barrie, rectorial address, St Andrew’s University, Scotland (May 3, 1922)