Archives for 2009

Yes, I’m still carrying on my usual drama-related duties in between pitching my new book hither and yon, and in today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new shows, the Liv Ullmann-Cate Blanchett revival of A Streetcar Named Desire and an off-Broadway revival of S.N. Behrman’s Biography. Here’s an excerpt.
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Blanche DuBois, it seems, will always be with us. Like it or not–and I find myself liking it more and more as time goes by–Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” is so true to life as to approach the archetypical in its hurtfully frank portrayal of the sufferings of a lonely woman of a certain age who has never been able to come to terms with the fleshly implications of her own sensuality. Such a role was surely made for Cate Blanchett to play, and now she’s brought her own Sydney Theatre Company all the way to Brooklyn to show us her stuff. This is good news by definition, since Ms. Blanchett is not only one of the best actors in the world but is equally at home on screen and stage. I do wish, however, that she and Liv Ullmann, the director, had dug a little bit deeper. Except for the set, about which more later, they have given us a surprise-free staging of “Streetcar” that tells us nothing new about Williams’ most frequently performed play.
As it happens, this is the first “Streetcar” I’ve seen whose cast and production team are entirely foreign–Ms. Ullmann is Norwegian, everyone else Australian–and it occurred to me more than once that they were all bending over backwards to give us an idiomatically American “Streetcar,” right down to the (mostly excellent) accents. The problem is that seasoned American theatergoers have seen the play and/or the movie many, many times, and don’t really need to see it done again in yet another high-strung school-of-Elia-Kazan version. Ms. Blanchett is the chief offender: Her ultraflighty Blanche is so twitchy from the first scene onward that she has nowhere to go but straight into the stratosphere of overacting…
S.N. Behrman, one of the most successful playwrights of the ’30s and ’40s, never had another hit after “A Streetcar Named Desire” wrapped up its original New York run. His old-fashioned brand of high comedy was washed off the stage by Williams’ poetic naturalism. Yet Behrman’s early plays have lost none of their effectiveness, and “Biography,” perhaps the finest boulevard comedy ever written by an American, has long been in need of a revival on Broadway, where it hasn’t been seen since 1934. Some smart producer would thus do well to pay a visit to the Mint Theatre, the Off-Broadway house where Tracy Shayne is giving the performance of a lifetime as Marion Froude, a portrait painter with a past who decides to tell all–on paper….
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Read the whole thing here.

• The Economist chose Pops as one of the best books of 2009. To see the complete list, go here.
• Courtesy of NPR, you can listen to five of my favorite Louis Armstrong records–and read commentary by me on each one–by going here. Also included is an excerpt from the first chapter of Pops.
• To read the fourth installment of Marc Myers’ five-part interview with me, go here.

To celebrate the publication this week of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I’ll be posting Armstrong videos every day.
In today’s video, Armstrong and the All Stars perform “Basin Street Blues” on The Bell Telephone Hour in 1964:

“When I blow I think of times and things from outa the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man with no name you seen once in a place you don’t remember.”
Louis Armstrong (quoted in Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong)

A tip of the hat to my friend Luciana Souza, whose latest CD, Tide, has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category. Ditto to Dan Morgenstern, whose notes for Mosaic’s The Complete Louis Armstrong Decca Sessions (1935-1946) were nominated in the Best Album Notes category.
I also commend to your attention two other CDs previously praised in this space that received nominations:
• Quartet Live, by Gary Burton, Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow, and Antonio Sanchez, nominated in the Best Jazz Instrumental Album category.
• Intimate Letters, the Emerson String Quartet’s recording of Janacek’s two string quartets, nominated in the Best Chamber Music Performance category.
For friends with empty stockings who already have a copy of Pops, these albums are all eminently giftworthy.

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)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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)

• 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, closes Jan. 3, 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)

• The Orphans’ Home Cycle, Part 1 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with second and third parts of cycle starting on Dec. 3 and Jan. 7 respectively, closes Mar. 27, 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 OFF BROADWAY:

• The Starry Messenger (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, extended through Dec. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• My Wonderful Day (farce, PG-13/R, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, reopens Dec. 15 at the Soho Playhouse, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MILLBURN, N.J..:

• On the Town (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

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

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