Archives for September 2009

“Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

I wind up my summer travels this week with reviews of two out-of-town musicals, Trinity Rep’s Cabaret in Providence, Rhode Island, and Paper Mill Playhouse’s Little House on the Prairie in Millburn, New Jersey. The first is a gem, the second a dud. Here’s an excerpt.
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More people, I suspect, know “Cabaret” as a movie rather than a stage show nowadays. Bob Fosse’s hard-edged, bisexually frank 1972 screen version, in which Joe Masteroff’s book was completely rewritten and all but one of the songs were performed in a more or less naturalistic nightclub setting, was the most influential movie musical of the post-“Hair” era. Not only did Rob Marshall’s 2002 film of “Chicago” owe everything to Fosse’s example, but most of the major stage revivals of “Cabaret,” including Sam Mendes’ long-running 1999 Broadway production, have incorporated various elements inspired by or purloined from the Fosse film.
Curt Columbus, the artistic director of Rhode Island’s Trinity Repertory Company, has taken a different tack in his new revival of “Cabaret.” Instead of trying to put Fosse’s “Cabaret” on stage, he has given us a show that is substantially faithful to what Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb had in mind in the first place. This “Cabaret,” unlike the film version, is an old-fashioned two-couple Broadway love story with a bracingly Brechtian dash of bitters: The songs sung by the bizarrely androgynous master of ceremonies of the Kit Kat Club (Joe Wilson, Jr.) supply ironic commentary on the futility of looking for love in a world driven mad by politics. The doomed romance of Fräulein Schneider (Phyllis Kay) and Herr Schultz (Stephen Berenson), her hapless Jewish boarder, is returned to center stage, while Sally Bowles (Rachael Warren) is not a top-dollar glamour puss but a middling hoofer who gets by on charm. Best of all, Mr. Columbus and Michael McGarty, his set designer, have hosed the polish off “Cabaret,” setting their production in a run-down Weimar-era music hall that could easily have housed a real-life Kit Kat Club….
The strength of this strongly atmospheric production lies not in its individual performances but in its total effect. It is, above all, a believable “Cabaret,” one that has the sharp and satisfying bite of authenticity….
The “Little House” novels of Laura Ingalls Wilder rank high among the permanent masterpieces of childhood, in large part because of the plain-spoken authenticity with which Wilder told her richly detailed autobiographical stories of pioneer life. It would take an Adam Guettel–or an Aaron Copland–to conceive and create a worthy musical-theater counterpart to what Wilder did in prose. The creators of “Little House on the Prairie: The Musical,” which opened at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre last year and is now touring the regional circuit, haven’t even tried. Instead, they’ve cuted up Wilder’s books into something more like “One-Room High School Musical.” The songs, by Rachel Portman and Donna di Novelli, are slick, innocuous movie-score pop, while Rachel Sheinkin’s book, which stitches together familiar pieces of “By the Shores of Silver Lake,” “The Long Winter” and “Little Town on the Prairie,” is clumsily episodic and devoid of dramatic impetus….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.”
Willa Cather, “Four Letters: Escapism”

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)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, extended through Oct. 18, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS:

• Long Day’s Journey into Night (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, too long and demanding for some adolescents, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)

IN STRATFORD, ONTARIO:

• The Importance of Being Earnest (comedy, G, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ARLINGTON, VA.:

• Dirty Blonde (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:

• Henry V (Shakespeare, G, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ST. LOUIS, MO.:

• Amadeus (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN STRATFORD, ONTARIO:

• Three Sisters (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:

• The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN TOPANGA, CALIF.:

• The Cherry Orchard (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.”
Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

John Barrymore performs a scene from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, filmed in 1929 for Show of Shows:

Go here to see Barrymore talking on screen about the scene he’s about to play.
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.”
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

My last author photo is so old that it’s (A) in black-and-white and (B) was shot on film. Not surprisingly, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt informed me in no uncertain terms that I needed a new digital photo for the dust jacket of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Alas, I don’t know any professional photographers, but I was lucky enough to run across a terrific one when I went to Santa Fe two months ago for the premiere of The Letter. The Santa Fe Opera employs Ken Howard to shoot its productions, and Ken was kind enough to make himself available between shows to shoot me as well.
The portrait on the left was taken one sunny afternoon in the Crosby Theater, the outdoor auditorium where The Letter was performed. The Givenchy tie that I’m wearing was the one originally belonging to Virgil Thomson that was given to me by Mrs. T as an opening-night present. I’m not especially photogenic, but I like this picture very much. I hope you do, too.