Archives for May 2009

I recently visited a retrospective at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that was devoted to the life, work, and thought of Buckminster Fuller, the man who invented the geodesic dome and was–once upon a time–famous enough to have made the cover of Time and been profiled in The New Yorker. Fuller isn’t nearly so well known today, but he has his fair share of passionate devotees, and in my “Sightings” column in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal I take a skeptical look at the sources of their undiminished passion.
Exactly what was it about this self-styled “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” that made so many people so sure that he knew the secret of peace, love, and understanding? For the answer, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
George Steiner, Language and Silence

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)

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (drama, PG-13, some adult subject matter, accessible to adolescents with mature attention spans, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Waiting for Godot * (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, closes July 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, 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 June 28, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN BROOKLYN:

• The Merchant of Venice (Shakespearian drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“You can hone a speech to a point where it’s actually better, but in the end you don’t believe it–it’s too clever, sort of joke-planted all the time; it’s always possible to make things funnier. But you can see the truth running out of the door.”
Alan Ayckbourn (quoted in Paul Allen, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge)

I depart New York this morning for the first leg of a long theater-related trip that will take me to Washington, D.C., followed by points south and west. I’ll be describing my adventures in this space, though not necessarily as they happen, since I’ll also be filing Wall Street Journal columns from the road in between shows. Work comes first!
I’m going to be on the move for much of the next couple of months, after which I settle down in Santa Fe for rehearsals of The Letter. I arrive in New Mexico on July 12, and the opera opens thirteen days later. Needless to say, you’ll be hearing all about it in this space.
Now, though, I’ve got to catch a train….

Sir Thomas Beecham rehearses the London Philharmonic in a 1932 newsreel:

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

“I don’t believe anything that happens in films. But on stage there are no tricks except the tricks you see. The tricks are the actors and actresses persuading you of what they are.”
Alan Ayckbourn (quoted in Paul Allen, Alan Ayckbourn: Grinning at the Edge)

On Sunday I read the page proofs of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the last time and made my final corrections. (For the record, I added some commas and cut a half-dozen repeated words and phrases.) Today I’ll be sending the proofs back to the Boston office of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. I’ll double-check the index as soon as it’s ready, but otherwise the tinkering is over. I’m through with Pops.
How do I feel? Very good–though not, I trust, unreasonably so. I made a point of setting the proofs aside for a couple of weeks in order to let them cool down. Then I read them in a single day-long sitting, hoping to recapture my sense of the book as a whole. I liked what I saw this time around. The narrative is fast-moving, the facts as straight as I could make them, the prose style formal (I don’t like chummy biographers) but not stiff. The design of the book is gorgeous–I love how the photos are integrated into the text. I think that Armstrong’s personality comes through clearly. So, of course, does my own view of the man and his work, but while I took great pains to correct the record whenever necessary, I also went out of my way not to be argumentative. No scores are settled in Pops. This book is about him, not me.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m already planning my next book–perhaps even my next three books–and I also have The Letter on my mind. Tomorrow I’ll hit the road again, and I won’t be back in New York (save for a couple of quick touchdowns) until well after the curtain goes up in Santa Fe. All this means that I won’t have much time to brood about Pops, which is just as it should be. What’s done is done. I hope the reading public is pleased with the results, but even if they’re not, I can’t do anything about it now. The cord is cut. It’s time to move on to the next part of my life.