Archives for April 2010

Gene Lees, who published the Jazzletter and wrote the lyrics for such standards as Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “This Happy Madness” and Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby,” was so much a part of my life that I can’t take in the fact of his death. I knew him for years and wrote a preface for Waiting for Dizzy, one of the many books in which he collected his Jazzletter essays and profiles. He was a vain, difficult, endlessly crotchety man, and like many such men, he was surprisingly easy to love.
Most people know Gene’s lyrics, but comparatively few non-musicians are familiar with the Jazzletter, though it was one of the first and most influential privately published newsletters of its kind. Here’s how I described it in my preface to Waiting for Dizzy:

In order to preserve some of the rich oral tradition of jazz and, in his words, “satisfy my own curiosity” about the lives and personalities of the great jazz musicians, Gene Lees started the Jazzletter, a monthly journal about jazz and American popular music, in 1981. Most of the Jazzletter is written by Lees himself, though he also publishes essays and memoirs by working musicians. Waiting for Dizzy, the third book quarried out of his Jazzletter essays, portrays in unprecedented and knowing detail the world of jazz as it really is. The musicians profiled in Waiting for Dizzy are not inarticulate sociopaths wandering from fix to fix. They are intelligent, well-spoken craftsmen who take a commercial commodity and turn it into an art form, the only wholly original one this country has produced. They live the shadowy lives of night people, working their mysterious musical alchemy in bars and country clubs and recording studios. Theirs is a world of friendship and mutual admiration, of unexpected kindness and extraordinary generosity, of hard times and empty pockets and four-in-the-morning courage….
Composer Johnny Mandel–one of the many major jazz musicians who subscribe to the Jazzletter and eagerly await its arrival each month–has said of Lees’ work: “Most writing about jazz seems like somebody looking through glass into a fish tank. Gene’s sounds like he’s in the tank, swimming with the rest of us.”

I wrote a couple of pieces that appeared in the Jazzletter, and was immensely proud to have been asked to do so by a writer whom I admired so greatly.
I’d say more, or at least try, but Doug Ramsey has already said it all here.
UPDATE: I ran across this quote from Gene on Facebook this morning: “I have always been more interested in music itself than in my own opinion about it.” Well said.
The Washington Post obituary is here.
The Los Angeles Times obituary is here.

This week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review three new Broadway musicals, is a mixed bag. I very much liked the revival of La Cage aux Folles, a musical of which I’m not greatly fond, but I had no use whatsoever for American Idiot and was unable to shake off strong doubts about Sondheim on Sondheim. Here’s an excerpt.
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Now that money is tight in the world of theater, small-scale productions of large-scale Broadway musicals are popping up everywhere. Some are illuminating, others constrictingly ill-conceived. The Menier Chocolate Factory’s revival of “La Cage aux Folles,” which has transferred to Broadway after a hugely successful London run, belongs in the first category–and then some. I’ve never cared for “La Cage,” but I loved this modest staging, which is so good that it makes the show seem better than it really is.
The trouble with the musical version of “La Cage” is that it’s loud, crass and overblown. Not so the 1978 film on which it is based, in which the story of two middle-aged gay men who run a transvestite nightclub (one is the manager, the other the drag-queen star) is told with such sweet simplicity that you can’t help but be touched. In the process of turning this charming little tale into a big-budget Broadway show, Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein smothered it in brassy one-liners and knock-’em-dead production numbers, and somewhere along the way the sweetness turned sour.
By stuffing their staging into a shabby-looking set roughly comparable in size to a second-rate nightclub, Terry Johnson and Tim Shortall, the director and set designer, have clipped away the tinsel and made it possible for the audience to focus on the relationship of Georges (Kelsey Grammer, lately of “Frasier”) and Albin (Douglas Hodge). To be sure, the score is still banal and the jokes still grate, but at least you can believe in what you’re seeing, and Messrs. Grammer and Hodge are so engaging that the show’s shortcomings recede into the distance….
Whatever else it is, Green Day’s “American Idiot” isn’t an opera, just as the stage show that has now been made out of it isn’t a musical. The original album, released in 2004, consists of 13 sketchily related punk-rock songs that purport to tell the story of a trio of disaffected teenage slackers, and the show consists of the same songs, with a few others thrown in to bring the running time up to 90 minutes. The onstage version of “American Idiot” contains no dialogue, only intermittent snippets of first-person narration, and Michael Mayer’s image-driven video-style staging is discontinuous to the point of plotlessness.
All this being the case, “American Idiot” rises or falls almost entirely on the strength of the songs themselves, and I regret to say that I found them to be brain-numbingly dull. Perhaps I might feel differently if I were 14, but I was all but incapable of attending to the puerile maunderings of Billie Joe Armstrong, Green Day’s lyricist…
In addition to being a great songwriter, Stephen Sondheim is the object of a cult, the members of which are gathering nightly at Studio 54 to take part in a religious ceremony disguised as a revue. “Sondheim on Sondheim,” devised and directed by James Lapine, Mr. Sondheim’s longtime theatrical collaborator, consists of lively performances by eight singers of three dozen Sondheim songs, all of them introduced by the man himself, who appears not in person but via the wonders of digital projection. The handsomely mounted results suggest a cross between a PBS documentary and a lecture-recital and at times are almost as interesting…
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Read the whole thing here.

“The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand.”
George Moore, Impressions and Opinions

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)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• 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 Glass Menagerie (drama, G, too dark for children, closes June 13, reviewed here)

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

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

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• I Never Sang for My Father (drama, G/PG-13, too dark for children, closes May 1, 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)

“The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

The opening of Terence Rattigan’s 1955 screen adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea, starring Vivien Leigh and directed by Anatole Litvak, with a score by Malcolm Arnold:

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

“Biographer: an unjust god.”
H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major