James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor. This 1948 novel about life on a Florida air base nine months before D-Day won the Pulitzer Prize, then slipped through the cracks and has yet to resurface–yet it’s by far the best American novel written by a World War II veteran, the only one that can stand up to direct comparison with Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Tough-minded and stoic, richly detailed yet tautly controlled, Cozzens’ portrait of men and women preparing for war is an unrecognized classic of twentieth-century fiction. Still in print, amazingly enough (TT).
Archives for August 2009
DVD
Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 1 (Warner Home Video, five discs). Having just written the libretto for an opera noir, I’m struck by how many of the people I met along the way knew little or nothing of the Hollywood film genre on which The Letter was based. If you’re one of them, the best way to get up to speed is to acquire this immaculately chosen box set, which contains five classics of film noir, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, Edward Dymytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (a film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, and Robert Wise’s The Set-Up. It’s all here: the chumps, the dames, the hard-edged backchat, the shadow-stained cinematography, the fear and hopelessness, enacted by the likes of Jane Greer, Sterling Hayden, Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan, and Audrey Totter. Treat yourself to a long weekend of despair (TT).
BOOK
Richard Stark, The Seventh/The Handle/The Rare Coin Score (University of Chicago, $14 each). Three more titles in the University of Chicago’s uniform edition of the out-of-print Parker novels of Richard Stark (alias the late, lamented Donald E. Westlake) are out this week. All are lean, laconic, tough-minded installments in the endlessly rereadable saga of the ultra–professional burglar you hate to like. Nine down, six to go (TT).
CD
Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall–The Private Collection: Mussorgsky and Liszt (RCA Red Seal). Stupendously vivid performances of the Liszt B Minor Sonata and Pictures at an Exhibition (the latter in Horowitz’s own beefed-up transcription) recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1948 and 1949 and released here for the first time. Connoisseurs of transcendental virtuosity need not hesitate (TT).
PLAY
How the Other Half Loves (Westport Country Playhouse, Westport, Conn., closes Aug. 15). If The Norman Conquests whetted your appetite for the blacker-than-it-looks comedy of Alan Ayckbourn, this fizzy regional revival of his 1969 who’s-sleeping-with-whom farce about three unhappily married couples will fill the bill with ease. Catch it while you can (TT).
TT: Double exposure
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.
TT: Can jazz be saved?
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.
TT: Almanac
“Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.”
Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm