Archives for January 2010

I flew back to New York from Florida last weekend to review two shows for today’s The Wall Street Journal, one off Broadway (Ernest in Love) and one on (Present Laughter). One was perfect, the other good but greatly flawed. Here’s an excerpt.
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Most musicals are born to be big, but some take wing when staged on a small scale. A happy case in point is “Ernest in Love,” which is currently being presented with bewitching finesse Off Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theatre. The 1960 stage production of the musical-comedy version of “The Importance of Being Ernest” got great notices but ran for a paltry 103 performances, then vanished largely without trace, leaving behind only a cast album. The Irish Rep’s revival, the first of any significance ever to be mounted in New York, is so endearing that I can’t help but wonder why so delightful a show disappeared from sight for so long.
Does Oscar Wilde’s best play really need music? Of course not. But Anne Croswell (who wrote the book and lyrics) and Lee Pockriss (who wrote the music) managed between them to put a fresh and personal spin on “Earnest”: They shifted the emphasis from Wilde’s epigrams to his pretty-young-things-in-love plot, thereby turning a masterpiece of diamond-hard verbal ingenuity into a romantic soufflé lightly sauced with wit. No, it’s not Wilde, but if you can keep from breaking out in a cheek-to-cheek grin when Jack Worthing (who is played with sweetly boyish charm by Noah Racey) launches into a neat little soft shoe in the first scene, you’re just a sour old crock….
Charlotte Moore’s staging, which makes perfectly judged use of the Irish Rep’s L-shaped 140-seat theater, points up the show’s innate charm without once going over the top. The cast is adorable, especially Annika Boras, who plays Gwendolen as a sexy prig…
The revival of Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter” that opened on Broadway this week under the auspices of the Roundabout Theatre Company is the same one that I saw performed in Boston three years ago by the Huntington Theatre Company, give or take a couple of new cast members. I liked it with significant reservations in 2007, and I feel the same way now: It’s effective, but not the “Present Laughter” of my dreams.
The play, written in 1939 and last seen on Broadway 13 years ago, is one of Coward’s finest, a coruscating piece of autobiographical spoofery in which he sent himself up with unexpected honesty (Garry Essendine, Coward’s onstage alter ego, is a charismatic but by no means likable piece of fancy goods). In this production, directed with a too-broad brush by Nicholas Martin, Victor Garber is “doing” Coward himself rather than creating a character from scratch, and though his imitation of Coward’s speaking voice is eerily exact, he lacks the sleek physical glamour of his well-remembered model. Mr. Garber gets his laughs, but it’s hard to see why so many of the women in the play feel moved to fling themselves at his feet….
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Read the whole thing here.

Last May, I found myself seated for the first time behind a philistine who sent a text message in the middle of a show that I was reviewing. She got off lucky–I wasn’t armed. Like most civilized folk, I take a hard line on texting during performances. But given the fast-increasing ubiquity of texting, I suspect that we’re on a slippery slope here, and so do a number of performing-arts organizations that are starting to experiment with organized texting during performances.
Texting has already been used to poll audiences and let them pick an encore, or choose between alternative endings for a play. Might this be a desirable step toward heightening an audience’s involvement in a performance? Or the thin end of a social wedge whose unintended consequences could be highly undesirable? I’ll attempt to sort out some possible answers to this tricky question in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

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:

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

• 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, Parts 1 and 2 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory with third part of cycle, closes Mar. 28, reviewed here and here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO, ILL.:

• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13/R, violence and very strong language, extended through Feb. 14, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Life of Galileo (drama, G, accessible to well-read older teenagers, closes Feb. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• Copenhagen (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Jan. 31, reviewed here)

“In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.”
Konstantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares

Apropos of the front cover of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, James Breig, a reader of this blog, writes with a query:

Impertinent question: Is the cover photo reversed (Armstrong’s pocket handkerchief is on the right side of his jacket)? If so, was it done deliberately by the photographer or book designer, or inadvertently?

My jaw dropped when I read this e-mail, and I immediately set to investigating. It turns out that the photograph in question, taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965, was in fact reproduced in reverse–both on the cover of Pops and on the Web site of Magnum Photos, which is where the book’s designer found it.

When I checked on Monday afternoon, I discovered that another Halsman photograph of Armstrong is reversed on the Magnum site. That one, however, was an easy catch: Armstrong is fingering his trumpet with his left hand, not his right. In the photo on the cover of Pops, by contrast, he has the horn tucked under his arm, and the only immediately obvious clue that the picture is reversed is, as the preternaturally sharp-eyed Mr. Breig noticed, the fact that his handkerchief is on the wrong side.

How could I possibly have let this goof get past me? Because I’m left-handed, I guess (but so is Mr. Breig–that one won’t work!). What amuses me most, however, is that until Monday, nobody had noticed it, including a number of Armstrong’s friends who read Pops in manuscript. That also includes Joe Muranyi, Armstrong’s last clarinet player, who knew him very, very well. I wrote Joe to tell him about it, and his reply made me smile: “It still looks very much like him. The pocket on the wrong side isn’t important–doesn’t bother me. The only thing that is wrong, when one looks and observes carefully, is that dent in his forehead. It was on the left side of his head!”

If Joe, who spent more time with Armstrong than anyone else I know, didn’t catch the mistake on his own, I think I can be forgiven for failing to notice it.

We will, needless to say, be correcting the inadvertent reversal of Philippe Halsman’s photograph on the cover of the paperback edition of Pops, which will be coming out in November. (This edition will also contain a number of very tiny corrections to the text, about which more in a future posting.) If you’re curious, the image on the right, which was sent to me yesterday afternoon by Mark Robinson, the designer of Pops, shows the front cover of the book with the photo reproduced correctly. Meanwhile, here’s the good news: if you bought the hardcover edition of Pops, you now own a collector’s item!

As for Mr. Breig, I hereby invite him to proofread my next book.

Thomas Edison talks about Einstein’s theory of relativity and the “talkies”:

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

Reason, which fifty times for one does err.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satire Against Mankind”