Archives for 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

A. J. Liebling is making me laugh out loud, a lot. His not-so-funny subject is wartime in Europe, specifically his brief life on a tanker that brought him from England to America in December 1941. His shipmates are a gaggle of Norwegians. He figures the chances of a German torpedo attack on them to be about 90 to one. What nobody’s expecting is the news they hear on December 7:

There is a difference of thirteen and a half hours between the time in Hawaii and Great Britain, and I was asleep before Grung, the radioman, picked up the first bulletin about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I heard the news when I went up on the bridge next morning. Bull, the third officer, pumped my hand and said, “We both allies now!” It felt more natural to be a belligerent on a belligerent ship than that anomalous creature, a neutral among belligerent friends.

Liebling’s observations of day-to-day human behavior during wartime are touching, even heartening. He’s drawn to the most life-goes-on strains of men’s responses to existential threat. A pilot on his ship who lost seven motorboats at Dunkirk remembers the port best for the motorbike races the soldiers there ran and bet on. The exigencies and uncertainties of war make people only more vividly themselves.
And what selves the Norwegian shipmen are. There’s the steward who’s keeping clear of schoolteachers:

The fellow, who was wearing a white jacket, was obviously a steward. He was of medium size but had long arms, so the jacket sleeves ended midway between elbow and wrist, baring the tattooing on his wide forearms. On the right arm he had a sailor and his lass above the legend, in English, “True Love.” The design on the left arm was a full-rigged ship with the inscription “Hilse fra Yokohama,” which means “Greetings from Yokohama.” His head was large and bald except for two tufts of red hair at the temples, looking like a circus clown’s wig. He had a bulging forehead and a flat face with small eyes, a turned-up nose, and a wide mouth. As soon as I got my breath, I said, “Passenger,” and he took me in charge with a professional steward’s manner, which, I afterward learned, he had acquired while working for a fleet of bauxite freighters that often carried tourists. The bauxite freighters had operated out of a port the steward called Noolians, and most of the tourists had been vacationing schoolteachers from the Middle West. Fearing emotional involvement with a schoolteacher, he had switched to tankers. “Tankers is safe,” he said. “No schoolteachers.” His name was Harry Larsen.

And the captain of few words:

At meals with Captain Petersen I had plenty of time for eating, because there was not much conversation. Once he said, as he began on his first plate of cabbage soup, “I have an uncle in New York who has been fifty-two years with the Methodist Book Concern.” Twenty minutes later, having finished his second helping of farina pudding, he said, “He came over in a windyammer.” On another occasion he said, “We had a Chinaman on the ship once. When we came to Shanghai he couldn’t talk to the other Chinamen.” After an interlude during which he ate three plates of lobscouse, a stew made of leftover meats and vegetables, he explained, “He came from another part of China.” And once, taking a long look at the shipowner’s portrait, he said, “I went to see an art gallery near Bordeaux.” After eating a large quantity of dried codfish cooked with raisins, cabbage, and onions, he added, “Some of the frames were that wide,” indicating with his hands how impressively wide they were. Once, in an effort to make him talk, I asked him, “How would you say, ‘Please pass me the butter, Mr. Petersen,’ in Norwegian?” He said, “We don’t use ‘please’ or ‘mister.’ It sounds too polite. And you never have to say ‘pass me’ something in a Norwegian house, because the people force food on you, so if you said ‘pass’ they would think they forgot something and their feelings would be hurt. The word for butter is smor.”

“Westbound Tanker” is collected in Just Enough Liebling. I’m happy to be only halfway through it. I got onto Liebling after reading James Marcus’s interview with Pete Hamill, who edited the new Library of America edition of Liebling. (If you’re reading The House of Mirth, as you should, you’ll be way ahead of me on this.)

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)

• 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 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, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

“There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words: love and achievement.”
Theodor Reik, A Psychologist Looks at Love

My 20th high-school reunion is this weekend, and I’m rushing around this morning packing my bags for the trip back to Wisconsin. I think you’re supposed to dread class reunions but other than wishing my bangs were a half-inch longer, that I wasn’t mid-breakout, and that I had, um, exercised more diligently for the past 20 or so years, I’m looking forward to it in a pretty uncomplicated way: Friends! Home! Bars! Cheese! I hardly get back to my hometown, Appleton, these days — my parents moved from there when I was 19 — but it’s still a main place with me: Not home exactly (that’s the bungalow with Lowell), but an epicenter.
The novel I’m writing is set in a sort-of Appleton; a city both like and unlike the place where I grew up. It’s strange because I inhabit that town imaginatively almost every day, but in other fundamental ways I no longer know the other city, the living city, as well as I wish I did — both because of what I’ve forgotten and because the city itself has grown, changed, moved on. And the faux Appleton that’s built up in my head is pervasive (persuasive?). This morning I was thinking about where I’d get coffee on this trip; I’ll be staying at a hotel downtown, and I thought, “Oh, you’ll just walk down to that little bakery down the street.” Then I remembered that the bakery doesn’t exist; I made it up.
In honor of the trip, and of homelands that both are and aren’t, here are two parts from James Tate’s “I Am a Finn,” taken from his book Distance from Loved Ones, which you should have along with his selected poems (which is to say, this is a longish excerpt; please don’t be angry with me, Mr. Tate!):

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).
Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger
no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
On the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid
to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910–why
is everyone leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
…
But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
Assuming I pass. Finnish literature
really came alive in the 1860s
Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.
They’ve never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
Winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

Photo from Wiener Fest 2009 in Whitelaw, WI. Taken by Sarah Filzen.