Archives for March 2010

I’m one for three in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, but the one, Roundabout’s new off-Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie, is a knockout and a wow. Also present and accounted for–though not very enthusiastically–are Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away and Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Book of Grace. Here’s an excerpt.
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Gordon Edelstein, whose past productions at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre include the best “Uncle Vanya” I’ve ever seen, has brought his version of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece from Connecticut to the Laura Pels Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Off-Broadway house. It should have gone to Broadway instead, and perhaps it will someday. In the meantime, though, you must see this show at once. No matter how well you know “The Glass Menagerie,” you’ll feel as though you’re watching it for the first time. Every line, every pause, every gesture is as fresh as a shaft of sunlight.
Mr. Edelstein has added a surprise of his own to the oft-told tale of the Wingfield family, who come north to St. Louis in search of a new life and find themselves trapped in the quicksand of shabby gentility and fading hope. Since “The Glass Menagerie” is an autobiographical memory play narrated by Tom Wingfield, Williams’ alter ego, Mr. Edelstein sets the action in a single playing space designed with penny-plain restraint by Michael Yeargan that doubles as the tenement apartment of the Wingfields and–here’s the surprise–a grubby New Orleans hotel room to which Tom has fled in order to write the very play that we are seeing. Needless to say, that’s not what Williams had in mind, and on paper it may sound like an over-ingenious directorial conceit, but in performance it heightens to a breathtaking degree the immediacy of Tom’s recollections.
In addition to rethinking the play in so innovative a way, Mr. Edelstein has assembled a masterly cast whose members perform without the faintest hint of sentimentality….
Twyla Tharp racked up a major disaster three seasons ago with “The Times They Are A-Changin,'” one of the lamest jukebox musicals ever to stagger onto Broadway. Not surprisingly, she’s playing it very, very safe this time around: “Come Fly Away” is a love-in-a-nightclub fantasy set to the ever-popular music of Frank Sinatra, whose recordings have previously accompanied three of Ms. Tharp’s ballets. The songs are familiar, the dancers are pretty, the set is fancy and the band is hot. All that’s missing from this recipe for success are a star and a few memorable onstage events….
If you feel the need for a stiff dose of fatuity, head straight down to the Public Theater to see Suzan-Lori Parks’ “The Book of Grace.” The setting is Texas, which is–naturally–a desert full of bigots. The villain of the piece is an ultra-conservative border-patrol officer (John Doman) whose long-estranged biracial son (Amari Cheatom) has come home for a visit, in the course of which he beds his Pollyannish stepmother (Elizabeth Marvel, who is, as always, astonishingly good). We are, I think, invited to suppose that the father molested the son once upon a time, or maybe vice versa….
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Read the whole thing here.

“It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree, but smiles.”
Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

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:

• A Behanding in Spokane (black comedy, PG-13, violence and adult subject matter, closes June 6, reviewed here)

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

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

• The Miracle Worker (drama, G, too intense for small children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, closes Aug. 22, 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, 2, and 3 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, now being performed in rotating repertory, closes May 8, reviewed here, here, and here)

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

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

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• A View from the Bridge * (drama, PG-13, violence and some sexual content, closes Apr. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Boys in the Band (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, sexual content, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PRINCETON, N.J.:

• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13/R, violence and very strong language, transferred from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, reviewed here)

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”
Georges Simenon, interview (Paris Review, Summer 1955)

A reader writes:

“Dad, can I read this book about Louis Armstrong?”
(Dad thinks for a second, thinks it will inspire eleven-year-old to practice his trumpet more, thinks it’s not a bad choice for a first grownup book, tries to remember what his first truly grownup book was, suspects it was Airport.)
“Sure.”
(A half-hour later) “Dad, what’s a pimp?”

I guess we need to slap a warning sticker on the paperback!

Noël Coward sings “Uncle Harry” on Together With Music in 1955, introduced by Mary Martin:

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

“Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.”
Wilfrid Sheed, “V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil”

“The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.”
Wilfrid Sheed, “The Wit of George S. Kaufman and Dorothy Parker”