Archives for November 2009

I saw five shows this week, all of them important, so The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to give me a bonus column in today’s paper so that I could write at greater length than usual. Today I report on the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s My Wonderful Day, a New Jersey revival of On the Town, and the first Broadway revival of Ragtime. All are good, the first two extraordinarily so. Here’s an excerpt.
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Is America finally catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, England’s most popular playwright? I sure hope so. The success of the Broadway revival of “The Norman Conquests” raised Mr. Ayckbourn’s profile by several notches in this country, and the Off-Broadway production of his latest play, “My Wonderful Day,” is bound to benefit from that development–as well it should. Not only is “My Wonderful Day” one of the wittiest and most pristinely crafted of Mr. Ayckbourn’s dark farces, but the Brits Off Broadway festival has wisely imported his own production, which was first seen in October at Mr. Ayckbourn’s home base, Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre. Like the play, it’s a gem, a textbook example of how to stage a comedy effectively, and anyone fortunate enough to see it will wonder why Mr. Ayckbourn’s parallel career as a director is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.
“My Wonderful Day” starts off quietly: Laverne (Petra Letang), a cleaning woman, brings Winnie (Ayesha Antoine), her nine-year-old daughter, to the house of one of her clients, a middle-aged TV pitchman named Kevin (Terence Booth) whose wife (Alexandra Mathie) has just discovered that he’s sleeping with his young secretary (Ruth Gibson). As Winnie looks on in silent amazement–and amusement–things go from bad to worse to absolutely appalling. Yet Mr. Ayckbourn, as is his wont, takes care to make Kevin not just a comic beanbag but an unfeeling brute, thereby turning what in less skilled hands might have been no more than an amusing romp into a poignant, sharp-eyed portrait of a marriage gone sour….
“On the Town,” the 1944 sailor-suit musical that made Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green somewhat rich and very famous, is a masterpiece that has never gotten the respect it deserves. The original Broadway production was a hit, but the 1971 and 1998 revivals both flopped, and the 1949 film version, whose benighted makers scrapped most of Bernstein’s songs and all of Robbins’ dances, was a travesty. Now, though, New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse has given us a production of “On the Town” staged by Bill Berry that gets everything right, all the way down to the last detail, and the results are lovely and amazing to behold….
Paper Mill’s “On the Town” is better than any musical now playing on Broadway, “South Pacific” included. It belongs there….
If you saw Stafford Arima’s excellent staging of “Ragtime” at Paper Mill four years ago, you won’t be greatly surprised by the new Broadway revival of the musical version of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel about life in turn-of-the-century America. Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s production, which originated last season at Washington’s Kennedy Center, is a slimmed-down, pageant-style rendering of “Ragtime” played on an open stage surrounded by cast-iron catwalks. I don’t know whether Ms. Dodge saw the Paper Mill revival, but she was clearly thinking along similar lines, and the results are just as effective, maybe even more so….
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Read the whole thing here.

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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)

• Finian’s Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

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

• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• 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)

• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Nov. 29, reviewed here)

“It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make due with what you get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want.”
W. Somerset Maugham, “The Treasure”

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I taped two excerpts from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the “Writers Reading” section of Vanity Fair‘s Web site. That reading is now available as a podcast, and you can listen to it by going here.
Yes, Mom, your beloved Satchmo was known to talk dirty from time to time, and I quote him verbatim in these excerpts. So if you don’t want to hear me talk dirty, don’t listen.

Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin’s Vers la flamme, Op. 72, at his New York apartment:

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

“Only a mediocre writer is always at his best.”
W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker

Mrs. T and I finally got around to watching Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise for the first time the other day. You may wonder why two devoted film lovers waited so long to see a film universally regarded as one of the supreme achievements of European cinema. Alas, I don’t have a good answer other than “Sir, you MAY wonder,” but at least I can echo the words of Evelyn Waugh, who made the following entry in his diary in 1946:

What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of Portrait of a Lady.

Waugh was only forty-two when he wrote those lines. At fifty-three, my reaction to seeing Children of Paradise is to say, What joy to have more masterpieces ahead of me!
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The English-language theatrical trailer for Children of Paradise:

“Dreams, life, they’re the same thing. Otherwise life’s not worth living.”
Jacques Prévert, screenplay for Children of Paradise