Archives for 2008

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column features three musicals, one on Broadway and two out of town: [title of show], a Vermont production of The Light in the Piazza, and an Oklahoma! in upstate New York. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
The ultimate backstage musical–and I don’t mean that as a compliment–has come to Broadway. “[title of show]” is a show about itself, a 90-minute mini-musical whose authors, Jeff Bowen and Hunter Bell, play themselves and whose subject is how the show in which they are appearing came to be written and produced. If all this sounds claustrophobically self-indulgent, there’s a reason: I don’t know when I’ve seen a musical that seemed more pleased with itself.
Art about art usually is self-indulgent, but it doesn’t have to be–so long as its self-reflexiveness has wider implications. The first two-thirds of “[title of show]” fails to pass that test. It basically amounts to one long inside joke about theater, a daisy chain of glib references to moldy Broadway flops (anybody who can remember “Censored Scenes from King Kong” needs to run right out and get a life) and stale postmodern gimmickry (it is not clever to shout “Key change!” when the song you’re singing changes keys). A full hour crawls by before “[title of show]” cuts out the coyness and gets serious….
Everything missing from “[title of show]” is present in abundance in Adam Guettel’s “The Light in the Piazza,” which has just been revived by the Weston Playhouse Theatre Company in a brand-new chamber version for eight actors and five musicians. (The original version calls for 18 actors and 15 musicians.) Mr. Guettel has shrunk the show’s scale without diminishing its passionate romanticism–if anything, it plays better this way–and I won’t be at all surprised if the new “Piazza” becomes the standard performing version of the first great musical of the post-Sondheim era.
It helps, of course, that this intimate production, directed with intelligence and grace by Steve Stettler, is so very fine. In certain ways Mr. Stettler’s “Piazza” is actually superior to Lincoln Center Theater’s 2005 Broadway production…
Richard Rodgers, Mr. Guettel’s grandfather, was a pretty fair tunesmith himself, and many of his shows profit from the same intimate treatment that the Weston Playhouse is giving to “The Light in the Piazza.” I’m not altogether sure that “Oklahoma!” is one of them, but the Hangar Theatre’s small-scale revival of the most enduringly popular of the five hit musicals that Rodgers wrote with Oscar Hammerstein II is still an unpretentiously likable piece of work….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

Joe Queenan, who can be a very funny man, published a piece in the Guardian last week in which he declared himself to be unalterably opposed to modern music of all kinds:

In New York, Philadelphia and Boston, concert-goers have learned to stay awake and applaud politely at compositions by Christopher Rouse and Tan Dun. But they do this only because these works tend to be short and not terribly atonal; because they know this is the last time in their lives they’ll have to listen to them; and because the orchestra has signed a contract in blood guaranteeing that if everyone holds their nose and eats their vegetables, they’ll be rewarded with a great dollop of Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn.

My editor at The Wall Street Journal sent me a link to Queenan’s piece, accompanied by the suggestion that I might possibly want to write a “Sightings” column about “Admit It, You’re as Bored as I Am.” Boy, was he ever right. Pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what came of it.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.”
Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen (trans. Harry Zohn)

Jo Stafford, who died yesterday, is mostly forgotten now, save by those who were young a half-century ago, but back then she was one of the most popular singers in America, a wholesome beauty with a smooth, perfectly produced voice who sold millions and millions of records. Some of them were silly novelties, others bland period ballads, but when she had a good song to sing, nobody sang it better.

Stafford dealt in reassurance, a commodity much appreciated during World War II and in the Age of Anxiety that followed it, which may explain why she is not nearly so well remembered as Frank Sinatra (with whom she sang in Tommy Dorsey’s band) or the hotter, sexier canaries of the Fifties. Her tasteful singing was rhythmically fluid without ever sounding self-consciously “jazzy,” and her warm mezzo-soprano voice had a maternal quality that eased the troubled heart, though it didn’t do much for the critics of the day. “I never made it with the critics,” she once told Gene Lees. “I think what the critics didn’t like was that it was simply singing.”

Stafford went into semi-retirement in 1966. By then most of her records were out of print, and when I wrote a piece for Mirabella in 1994 occasioned by the release of a three-CD box set of her old Columbia recordings, she was very much a figure of the past. That hasn’t changed. Most of the collections of her singles that are currently available are junky hit-oriented anthologies that give no sense of what she was like at her best. Fortunately Corinthian, her own label, put out two excellent CDs, Big Band Sound and Jo + Jazz, in which she sings blue-chip standards accompanied by some of the greatest jazz and pop instrumentalists of the Swing Era. Jazz musicians loved Stafford’s voice and knew her worth–Lester Young was one of her biggest fans–and were always glad to play for her.

Stafford was only a vague memory of my childhood when a septuagenarian friend of mine played me a Columbia 78 of her version of “Early Autumn” a decade and a half ago. (It’s on Big Band Sound, and you can also download it from iTunes.) The record, arranged by her beloved husband Paul Weston, couldn’t be simpler. Stafford is accompanied by a clarinet choir and a soft-spoken rhythm section, and she sings Johnny Mercer’s haunting lyric in the most direct and unmannered way imaginable:

There’s a dance pavilion in the rain
All shuttered down
A winding country lane
All russet brown
A frosty window pane
Shows me a town grown lonely.

That deceptively uncomplicated-sounding performance hit me with the force of revelation. All at once I knew that good old Jo Stafford was a great artist, and I resolved to spread the word about her artistry in any way I possibly could. A couple of years later I wrote about her in Mirabella, and after that I made a point of mentioning Stafford whenever I had occasion to write about golden-age popular song and its interpreters, but never again did I have occasion to write a full-length piece about her. I wish I had, and I wish I’d sent it to her while she was still alive. Perhaps she would have enjoyed knowing that her quiet, unpretentious art was still giving pleasure long after her fame had faded.

* * *

UPDATE: The Daily Telegraph, Los Angeles Times, New York Sun, New York Times and Washington Post now all have long, well-informed obituaries.

Chris Albertson passes along this snippet from an interview he did with Lester Young in 1958.

YOUNG You know, I can tell you this, really, my favorite singer is Kay Starr. No, that’s the wrong name. What’s that other lady’s name? Her husband has a band.

ALBERTSON It’s not Jo Stafford?

YOUNG There you are! Yeah, I’ll go there.

ALBERTSON Jo Stafford is your favorite singer?

YOUNG Yeah, and Lady Day [Billie Holiday]. And I’m through.

ALBERTSON But Jo Stafford does not sing jazz, does she?

YOUNG No, but I hear her voice and the sound and the way she puts things on.

Enough said.

* * *

Jo Stafford sings “The Gentleman Is a Dope,” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, in an undated TV performance:

• Jessa Crispin considers the glut of biographies out there about the various members of the James family and considers the omissions to be found in the latest bio of the family, House of Wits. That biography, written by Paul Fisher, also received an unfavorable review from Hermione Lee.
• La belle et la bête: Eloisa James writes interestingly about the spate of recent romances featuring beastly metamorphoses. (Via Galleycat.)
• And the Translators Association of the Society of Authors (good old TAOTSOA) gives us its list of the 50 outstanding translations of the last 50 years and validates my preference for the Michael Glenny translation of Master and the Margarita. (Via The Lit Saloon.)

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 GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Cymbeline/Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in alternating 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, reviewed here)

“City people try to buy time as a rule, when they can, whereas country people are prepared to kill time, although both try to cherish in their mind’s eye the notion of a better life ahead.”
Edward Hoagland, “The Ridge-Slope Fox and The Knife-Thrower”

Jackson Pollock, filmed by Hans Namuth in 1951 and accompanied by the music of Morton Feldman:

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