Archives for February 2009

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)

• 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:

• Aristocrats (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, reviewed here)

• The Cripple of Inishmaan (black comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 15, reviewed here)

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

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cherry Orchard (elegiac comedy, G, not suitable for children or immature adults, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• The Little Foxes (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

• Macbeth (tragedy, PG-13/R, nudity and graphic violence, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS:

• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Speed-the-Plow (serious comedy, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Talent is not a rare thing. But the will to use it and the technique which gives it form are not so easy to acquire. It takes a good deal of humiliation to make a success, just as it takes a good deal of living to understand why this must be so.”
Hal Holbrook, Mark Twain Tonight!: An Actor’s Portrait

“Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.”
E.B. White, “Television” (The New Yorker, Dec. 4, 1948)

A 1961 Ernie Kovacs commercial for Dutch Masters cigars:

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

I spent most of the weekend going through the copyedited manuscript of Pops, my Louis Armstrong biography, a three-inch stack of paper that was bristling with queries. Most were easy enough to fix–I’d inadvertently left a half-dozen books out of my bibliography, for instance–but Barbara Wood, my copyeditor, also spotted a not-inconsiderable number of bigger blunders, including a couple of knotty chronological snarls that proved somewhat more difficult to untangle. Such close reading can make all the difference in the world for a too-busy author, and by the time I’d finished working my way through the manuscript, I was immeasurably relieved to know that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, my publishers, had put me in such good editorial hands.
In addition to responding to Barbara’s queries, I made sixty-six inserts of various kinds, many short and to the point but a few quite substantial. Most were based on new source material discovered by myself and other Armstrong scholars after I sent in the manuscript last November. Among other interesting things, Ricky Riccardi, the best of all possible Armstrong bloggers, sent me a CD containing a 1956 Voice of America broadcast in which Armstrong played and talked about forty-nine records by himself, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Bunk Johnson, Joe Oliver, and Jack Teagarden. Some of his remarks were so revealing that I felt I had to make room for them, so I did.
The most significant cache of source material to come to my attention in recent weeks was a thick envelope sent to me by Steven Lasker, a California-based reissue producer and jazz scholar. Much to my amazement and delight, Steven presented me with photocopies of the surviving court papers relating to Armstrong’s 1930 arrest in Los Angeles for possession of marijuana, plus a wad of hitherto-unknown newspaper clippings documenting numerous other aspects of Armstrong’s nine-month stay in California. As a result of his just-in-timely generosity, I completely rewrote the opening section of the sixth chapter of Pops, and the revised version, thanks entirely to Steven, will be the first fully accurate account of Satchmo’s brush with the law to see print.
As for Barbara, I’ve recognized her contribution to my book by inserting in the acknowledgments a heartfelt reference to “Barbara Wood, the copyeditor of my dreams.” Copyeditors, alas, are not fact checkers, a duty that rests on the sagging shoulders of the author, and I was horrified to discover that two potentially embarrassing errors, both of them entirely my fault, had made it all the way to the copyedited manuscript. It turned out that I’d misspelled the last name of Humphrey Lyttelton, the British jazz trumpeter and radio broadcaster, and in the appendix, a list of thirty key recordings by Louis Armstrong, I mistakenly said that “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” my all-time favorite Armstrong record, was cut in 1932 instead of 1933. Yes, I knew better. No, I don’t know what I was thinking.
Now that everything is fixed, I’m reading through the book one last time with an eye to continuity and emphasis, and I’ve also decided to make one last change in the title. After a month-long flirtation with the definite article, I’ve opted for modesty and made it Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Come Monday I’ll box up the manuscript and ship it off to Boston.
I’ll be reading the page proofs of Pops a few weeks from now, at which point I can make any further corrections–so long as they’re small–that occur to me between now and then. But the contents of the book are now more or less locked in: the version of Pops that I send to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on Monday is for all intents and purposes the one that will see print this fall. The text is written and edited, the photographs chosen, the title set in stone. All that remains is to design the cover and typography and make the index (a painstaking chore that will be done, thank God, by someone else, though I’ll check and correct it).
This hat, in other words, is almost finished, though I don’t feel quite done with it yet. No wonder! I’ve been juggling Pops, The Letter, and my day-to-day duties as a drama critic for so long that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be doing just one thing at a time, much less to take a week off and do nothing at all.
On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I were to take more than a day or two off from my regular routine. As Louis Armstrong said on the Voice of America in 1956:

I figure why should I go out on a vacation, some woods, some place there with a whole lot of people don’t even speak my language? I mean, if I go out there they gonna call on me to play now, so I just play every night and stay in shape and make a little loot to boot, and I’m happier.

Needless to say, I went out of my way to shoehorn that quote into Pops, smiling wryly as I did so. I don’t have all that much in common with Satchmo, but I find it both amusing and comforting to reflect on that point of contact between our otherwise dissimilar lives.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I recently went to a nightclub to hear a musician whom I know and like. The next morning I got an e-mail from my musician friend, who asked whether I’d recognized the woman who waited on me. The waitress, it seemed, was an actress whom I’d praised in my Wall Street Journal drama column on more than one occasion. “I am totally embarrassed,” I replied. “It was the context–and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her offstage.” To which my friend responded as follows:

She didn’t mind–she said she preferred that you not see her in her Clark Kent guise. That would be like someone in the business catching me in secretary mode. We all have to do our time in the trenches, don’t you know.

I do know, very much so. Many years ago I worked as a teller in a downtown Kansas City bank, a job that allowed me to pay the rent while simultaneously playing jazz and writing concert reviews for the Kansas City Star on the side. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that for some inexplicable reason, the people whom I knew in my “real” life as a writer and musician almost never came into the bank to do business. Had they done so, it would have broken my heart.

I wrote about this experience eight years after it finally came to an end, when my feelings about it were still fresh and raw:

At night I was a writer, on weekends a jazz musician. During the day, though, I was a servant. My nameplate was displayed for the world to see, and strangers, seeing it, called me by my first name. I despised them for their casual familiarity, but I despired myself even more. Once I had been a young man of unlimited promise. My teachers had predicted great things for me. Now I spent my days making change. My promise was running dry, my great expectations turning sour. I was sure I had gone as far as I could go. I expected to spend the rest of my life punching a clock.

So yes, I know how it is–which is one of the reasons why I now spend so much of my middle-aged energy seeking out memorable performances in tiny theaters far from Times Square. I know what Orson Welles meant when he told Peter Bogdanovich that artists “need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.” As long as I live, I’ll never forget how much I needed it once upon a time.

Alexander Woollcott, the kingpin of the Algonquin Round Table, was the real-life model for Sheridan Whiteside, the appallingly ill-mannered central character of The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Waldo Lydecker, the venomously campy critic-boulevardier played by Clifton Webb in Laura. The caricatures, as sometimes happens, outlived the man: Woollcott’s writings are no longer read, not even his drama criticism, though in his day he was one of Manhattan’s most powerful and influential men on the aisle and a regular contributor to The New Yorker. (The “Shouts and Murmurs” column in the present-day New Yorker was originally created for and written by Woollcott.)

Least of all is Woollcott remembered in his capacity as a radio personality. Yet The Town Crier, the series on which he held forth each week, trumpeting his opinions of everything from new books to celebrated murders, was immensely popular throughout the Thirties, so much so that it figures prominently in both Laura and The Man Who Came to Dinner. Sic transit!
Only one recording of a Town Crier broadcast is known to survive. It originally aired in 1933. You can listen to it here. Woollcott’s rambling, nostalgic musings offer a fascinating glimpse into the long-lost middlebrow culture of America in the Thirties.

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Read more about Woollcott’s radio career here.