Archives for July 2009

This isn’t really Louis Armstrong’s birthday, but he thought he was born on July 4, 1900, so I invite you to spend a few minutes of this beautiful and blessed day watching one of America’s greatest artists talk and play:

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two West Coast plays, the Los Angeles revival of David Mamet’s Oleanna and the La Jolla premiere of Claudia Shear’s Restoration. Both are first rate. Here’s an excerpt.
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David Mamet shocked a great many people when he declared that he was no longer a “brain-dead liberal.” What made him change his stripes? “I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay published last year in the Village Voice. That belated conclusion won’t come as a surprise to anyone who sees “Oleanna,” Mamet’s 1992 two-character play about a sexual-harassment case, in the incisive Broadway-bound revival now playing at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. Whatever else “Oleanna” is or isn’t, it’s definitely not the work of a playwright who takes a rosy view of human nature.
Bill Pullman plays John, the self-important but well-meaning professor who tries to help Carol (Julia Stiles), a student who is floundering in one of his classes and comes to his office in despair. We see their meeting, at which nothing egregiously offensive happens. Then, in the second act, we learn that Carol has filed an official complaint of harassment by John in which she exaggerates and misrepresents everything that took place in the first act. At first it appears that the complaint arises from a genuine misunderstanding, but Carol turns out to be part of a “group” of female students “who suffer what I suffer.” She’s been collecting evidence against John on their behalf, and in third act she hints that their real purpose is to control what he teaches in his classes….
What is most impressive about this revival, which Doug Hughes (“Doubt”) has directed with an enthralling combination of force and subtlety, is that the actors give both characters their due: Mr. Pullman is so tightly wound that he all but quivers, while Ms. Stiles appears to have strolled directly into the theater from the nearest classroom….
I last saw Claudia Shear on Broadway 10 years ago in “Dirty Blonde,” her delightful three-person play about a woman obsessed with the spirit of Mae West. Alas, I haven’t heard much of her since then, so I made a point of going to the La Jolla Playhouse to catch the premiere of “Restoration,” her fictionalized retelling of the story of the 2003 cleaning of Michelangelo’s David. Ms. Shear plays Giulia, a middle-aged scholar-restorer with a redwood-sized chip on her shoulder who becomes obsessed with the statue in part because she believes herself to be physically unattractive: “Beautiful eyes–the catch-all compliment for the plain woman.” No doubt this too-neat summary sounds as though Ms. Shear is using a great work of art as the pretext for a three-hankie weeper. Not so: “Restoration” is a beautifully wrought portrait of an unhappy woman who uses her sharp tongue to hold the world at bay…
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Read the whole thing here.

“If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Strictly Personal

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)

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, 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 and extended through July 26, 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)

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

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, extended through Sept. 27, reviewed here)

• A Minister’s Wife (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, then reopens Sept. 8 and runs through Nov. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Rivalry (historical drama, G, too complicated for children, closes July 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN HARTFORD, CONN.:

• Dividing the Estate (black comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Coraline (musical, G, possibly too scary for small children and very problematic for twee-hating adults, reviewed here)

“For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.”
Henri Matisse, interview (L’Art Vivant, Sept. 15, 1925)

Benno Moiseiwitsch plays the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in 1944, accompanied by Constant Lambert and the London Philharmonic:

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

“What makes a poet is, surely, the love of these things, a desperate search for the tiny ray of sunshine which used to flicker on the floor of a child’s bedroom.”
François Mauriac, Questions of Precedence