Archives for August 7, 2009

No sooner did I come back from the road than I returned to it: I saw two shows on Wednesday, Westport Country Playhouse’s How the Other Half Loves and Goodspeed Musicals’ Camelot, and in today’s Wall Street Journal I give them both thumbs-up reviews. Here’s an excerpt.
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Thanks to the success of Matthew Warchus’ recent Old Vic staging of “The Norman Conquests,” Alan Ayckbourn is hot on Broadway–at last. But he’s been hot in America’s regional theaters for a whole lot longer, and nowhere more so than at Westport Country Playhouse, which is currently presenting its third Ayckbourn revival in three consecutive seasons. Like its predecessors, “How the Other Half Loves,” the 1969 play that was Ayckbourn’s second commercial hit, is directed by John Tillinger and stars Geneva Carr, Cecilia Hart and Paxton Whitehead. “How the Other Half Loves” hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 1971, and judging by this explosively fizzy production, I’d say it’s well past time for a return engagement.
“How the Other Half Loves” was the first of Mr. Ayckbourn’s “conceptual” comedies, in which a near-surrealistic piece of stagecraft puts a new spin on a more or less traditional farce plot. Here we have two different couples whose separate living rooms are portrayed in the same stage space (you can tell who lives where by the furnishings). Like most of the playwright’s sleight-of-hand narrative tricks, this one is harder to explain than it is to grasp when you see it played out before your eyes, but try to imagine a who’s-sleeping-with-whom farce whose first and second acts are performed simultaneously and you’ll get the idea….
It’s been sixteen years since “Camelot” was last seen in New York, and none of the show’s three Broadway revivals managed to stay open for more than a few weeks. Why has the 1960 Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical about the legend of King Arthur, whose original production ran for 873 performances, failed to establish itself as a Broadway perennial? Don’t ask me: “Camelot” is a charmer, not as fine as “My Fair Lady” but more than satisfying in its own right, and Goodspeed Musicals’ elegant new small-scale production, ably directed by Rob Ruggiero, makes a strong case for its continuing viability.
Most of the same production team that was responsible for Goodspeed’s superlative 2007 revival of “1776” has come back for “Camelot.” Michael Schweikardt, the set designer, has brought off yet another feat of creative compression, squeezing “Camelot” onto the shallow stage of the company’s 130-year-old riverside theater so efficiently as to create the illusion that the 398-seat house is twice as large as it is…
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Read the whole thing here.

Next to nothing has been written in the print media about “Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National Survey,” a recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts which shows, among other alarming things, that the median age of the audience for live jazz performances in America skyrocketed from twenty-nine in 1982 to forty-six in 2008. This is, to put it mildly, very bad news for jazz musicians, and I’ve taken a closer look at what it might mean in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Is jazz dying of old age? If so, is its demise inevitable–or can it be reversed? Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.”
Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm