Archives for March 2009

This afternoon I reached another milestone on the long and winding road to the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Barbara Wood, my copyeditor, sent me an e-mail containing eight “final questions” arising from my responses to her detailed editing queries. All were reassuringly trivial, a simple matter of changing a word here and there. I replied five minutes later, and that was that. I’ll read the page proofs in a month or so and will doubtless make a few last-minute changes at that point, but otherwise I’m through with Pops. As of today, what I’ve written is what will be published on December 2.
If you should find a hitherto-unknown Armstrong letter in your attic next week in which he confesses to having held up a bank in 1921…burn it. I don’t want to know.

I’m on and off Broadway in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review Des McAnuff’s revival of Guys and Dolls and the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Distracted, a new play by Lisa Loomer. Here’s an excerpt.
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Never underestimate the power of a director to louse up a good show. That’s what Des McAnuff has done to “Guys and Dolls,” a pop-culture masterwork so bulletproof that it’s never failed to make its effect, even when performed by amateurs–until now. Mr. McAnuff, the director of “Jersey Boys,” has taken Frank Loesser’s timeless tale of New York in the ’30s and turned it into a shrink-wrapped, over-designed piece of high-dollar plastic that belongs in a warm-weather theme park, not on Broadway….
Mr. McAnuff and his collaborators seem not to have realized that there’s nothing stale about Loesser’s raffish songs or Abe Burrows’ wisecrack-studded book. All you have to do is perform them with the same hard-nosed punch that you can hear on the original-cast album of George S. Kaufman’s 1950 production and you’ve got yourself a hit. That punch is what’s missing from this revival, and in particular from most of the men in the cast. It’s as though none of them had ever seen a Jimmy Cagney movie….
The women come off much better, especially Lauren Graham, who is making her Broadway debut as Adelaide, the hapless chorus girl who’s been engaged to Nathan for 14 years. Ms. Graham, lately of “Gilmore Girls,” is a musical-comedy newcomer, but you couldn’t tell it by her work in “Guys and Dolls.” Not only is she a terrific singer, but but she plays Adelaide with a rueful, leggy charm that is wholly endearing…
Lisa Loomer made a well-deserved splash six years ago with “Living Out,” an impressively intelligent dramedy about an impeccably liberal entertainment lawyer who hires an illegal immigrant from El Salvador to tend her newborn child. Then Ms. Loomer dropped off the scope, much to my dismay. Now she’s back in town with the New York premiere of “Distracted,” another sharp-toothed satire set in upper-middle-class suburbia. In “Distracted” Cynthia Nixon and Josh Stamberg play the parents of Jesse (Matthew Gumley), a bright, energetic child of nine whose inappropriate behavior in the classroom and at home causes him to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. Appalled by the possibility that Jesse might need to be put on Ritalin, the amphetamine-like stimulant that is widely prescribed for children suffering from ADD, they embark on a desperate search for a more palatable alternative to drug therapy, one so frenzied that they find themselves spending more time with doctors than with their increasingly unhappy boy….
“Distracted” isn’t nearly as taut or disciplined a piece of work as “Living Out.” It’s journalistic to a fault–the characters are forever telling us interesting things about ADD instead of interacting with one another–and it also succumbs at annoyingly frequent intervals to the kind of self-conscious humor that makes you wonder whether Ms. Loomer lacks confidence in her ability to hold an audience’s attention by being serious. And while it’s easy to see what she’s trying to do by cramming “Distracted” full of fast-paced dialogue, the play’s hectic pace makes it seem longer than it really is. Especially during the first act, I kept wanting to nudge the author in the ribs and say, “O.K., O.K., we get it already! Let’s move on!”
On the other hand, “Distracted” is also smart, funny and genuinely felt, and Mark Brokaw, the director, keeps the action flying by so fast that the weaker parts of the script are gone almost before you know it….
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Read the whole thing here.
This is my Wall Street Journal video review of Guys and Dolls:

In place of the “Sightings” column about Harold Clurman that I filed earlier in the week, I’ve written a tribute to Horton Foote for Saturday’s Journal in which, among other things, I talk about why it took so long for so widely admired a playwright to score a decisive success on Broadway. (The Clurman column will run at a later date.)
Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Deep thinkers of the theatre who refuse to relate to its vulgar pleasures are off balance: they lack that essential ingredient of wisdom–the ordinary.”
Harold Clurman, “Never Too Late” (The Nation, Dec. 15, 1962, reprinted in The Collected Works of Harold Clurman)

Our household is in a sad, squalorous state. Last Saturday I met a significant, if arbitrary, deadline for my book and it was a very productive week — tired and raw at times, but also immersive and good. After I got everything mailed off I said to Lowell, “I feel married to the book now.” But Sunday I rested, and Monday I didn’t write well, and Tuesday either, and now it’s Thursday and I have nothing but a couple notebook pages and I’ve reached that hard, jangling mood that — in flashes of self-awareness — I realize is making me act like the cokehead at the party who no one wants to talk to because he/she is an ***hole. It is one of the most bewildering things about writing (I find), how one can be in the book one week, and then expelled from it the next.
Lowell is under a programming deadline and keeps talking about nervous breakdown. He needs a haircut. There’s a heating bill on the counter that’s been there for a month like a significant presence in the house, and everyone everywhere seems to be ahead of us in getting their taxes started. We’re out of groceries but Lowell can’t go because he’s legitimately working and I can’t go because I need to stay near my computer not writing. This morning a small but pivotal piece of the coffee-maker broke off and our mutual consternation was astounding. Lowell got out a flashlight and was shining it up into the interior of the machine to see if he could re-attach the small, pivotal piece. He couldn’t but found, shining the light up in there, that the interior of the machine is laced with dog hair. Neither of us knows how this happened — the dog generally isn’t allowed up on the kitchen counters. Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the cat has had an upset stomach all week and keeps walking to the back door, catching my eye, and throwing up.
(It has taken me two paragraphs to describe this. Yesterday, on Twitter, Hit Song linked to this clip that summarizes the entire domestic mood in just :18 seconds.)
Terry and OGIC have their own terrible deadlines, and so this morning I was thinking I would have to put up a post today that said in effect, “Sorry, I am too busy NOT WRITING to write anything here.” And that reminded me of all of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great writing about not writing, which is incredibly artful and beautiful and often funny, even when the source was painful.
One painful source, of course, was the rupture with Wordsworth, and the letter I’m going to quote was written shortly after it occurred. (If you’re not up on your early Romantics, Wordsworth and Coleridge originally were to produce Lyrical Ballads together. But then Wordsworth limited Coleridge’s influence on the first edition, refusing to allow “Christabel” to appear in it, and then further boxed him out of the second. All of this sounds comic and arcane as one types it up for the Internet in 2009 but when you read about this period of Coleridge’s life in the Richard Holmes biography, it is like seeing someone get lopped off at the knees or taking some other terrible blow.) Coleridge entirely lost his confidence, and (as Holmes observes — this isn’t my insight) stopped for a time being able to write about anything but not writing. But even these submerged bits of creativity are masterpieces, and here is one:

In my long Illness I had compelled into hours of Delight many a sleepless, painful hour of Darkness by chasing down metaphysical Game — and since then I have continued the Hunt, till I found myself unaware at the Root of Pure Mathematics — and up that tall smooth Tree, whose few poor branches are all at its very summit, am I climbing by pure adhesive strength of arms and thighs — still slipping down, still renewing my ascent. — You would not know me — ! all sounds of similitude keep at such a distance from each other in my mind, that I have forgotten how to make a rhyme — I look at the Mountains (that visible God Almighty that looks in at all my windows) I look at the Mountains only for the Curves of their outlines; the Stars, as I behold them, form themselves into Triangles — and my hands are scarred with scratches from a Cat, whose back I was rubbing in the Dark in order to see whether the sparks were refrangible by a Prism. The Poet is dead in me — my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been imaginative) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with Flame. That is past by! — I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy — but I have beaten myself back into weight and density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat & square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

One of America’s greatest playwrights has died at the age of ninety-two, mere months after scoring his first full-fledged Broadway success. Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate transferred to Broadway last November, having previously received rave reviews when it first opened off Broadway in 2007. I wrote about it with the utmost enthusiasm on both occasions, and am greatly pleased to report that Connecticut’s Hartford Stage will be remounting that same production in May.
Three years ago I reviewed the Signature Theatre Company’s exquisite revival of Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful. This is part of what I wrote about it for The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Foote’s great gift is his ability to drain the sentimentality out of potentially mawkish situations (the way he did in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Tender Mercies). The Trip to Bountiful could easily have degenerated into heart-tugging manipulation, but it never does. The tears it evokes–and I heard quite a lot of crying from the audience at the end of last Sunday night’s performance–are earned, not jerked….

I was sitting directly in front of Foote at that performance, and when it was over I wanted to tell him what it had meant to me. Alas, I was one of the many members of the audience who’d been moved to tears, and I was too choked up to say anything. Now I very much wish I had.
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The New York Times obituary is here.
This is the trailer for the 1985 film version of The Trip to Bountiful:

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, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 20, reviewed here)

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

• Love/Stories (or But You Will Get Used to It) (one-act plays, PG-13, vastly too complicated for children, closes Mar. 30, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

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

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN LENOX, MASS:

• Bad Dates (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)