Archives for May 2010

Today I wrap up the current theater season in New York by covering two revivals, Beth Henley’s Family Week and Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories. Neither did much for me, though the first is more interesting than the second. Here’s an excerpt.
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Many playwrights have only one memorable script in them, though they almost always keep on trying to hit the high C a second, third or fourth time. Such, it seems, is the case with Beth Henley, who in 1978 gave us “Crimes of the Heart,” which not only won a Pulitzer Prize but deserved it, and has since sought repeatedly and unsuccessfully to write something as good. Now she’s gone back to the drawing board. “Family Week,” first seen in New York in 2000, has been given an Off-Broadway revival directed by Jonathan Demme and performed this time around in a new version whose revisions, alas, fail to fix an interesting but unsuccessful piece of work….
“Family Week” appears at first glance to be satirizing the foibles of the therapeutic society: “Are you feeling anger towards me?” “I’m feeling distrust, disdain and revulsion.” “That would fall into the anger category.” But Ms. Henley–or Mr. Demme, who reportedly urged her to revise the play in order to make it more hopeful–proves in the end to be a true believer in the virtues of psychotherapy, which is a perfectly admissible position but doesn’t make for compelling theater….
I don’t care for the plays of Donald Margulies, but I respect the neatness of his craft. He would never have dreamed of allowing a play as untidy as “Family Week” to make it to the stage–and that’s part of the problem with “Collected Stories,” which is so tidy as to be enervatingly devoid of surprise.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: An aging short-story writer who teaches on the side (Linda Lavin) takes a naïve young student (Sarah Paulson) under her wing. (Stop! Stop!) The teacher shows the protégé the ropes, and the protégé returns the compliment by becoming successful and betraying her mentor, who turns out to be dying of an unspecified disease that leaves her with just enough strength to deliver a furious curtain speech.
You are, perhaps, rolling your eyes? Join the club. Watching “Collected Stories,” which was first performed in 1996 and has now made it to Broadway courtesy of the Manhattan Theatre Club, made me feel like a damsel in distress who’d been tied to the tracks by Snidely Whiplash. I could see the train thundering towards me from miles off, but couldn’t get out of the way….
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Read the whole thing here.

“It is the immemorial dream of the talentless that a sufficient devotion to doctrine will produce art.”
David Mamet, Theatre

In case you haven’t heard, I’m on my way to downtown Kansas City today, where I’ll be speaking about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Kansas City Public Library. The show starts at six-thirty sharp. Stop by and get your copy of Pops signed–and if you don’t own a copy yet, you can buy one there.
For more information, go here.

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)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Fences * (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes July 11, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 27, 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, closes May 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

Having recently watched Strictly Ballroom for the first time in a decade or so–and having enjoyed it every bit as much as I did in 1993–allow me to share with you one of my favorite pieces of music on the soundtrack, Stanley Black’s ultra-obscure recording of “Os Quindins de Ya Ya,” which some obliging soul has kindly posted on YouTube:

If you remember the scene in which this recording is heard, you are a true Strictly Ballroom fanatic!

“In the great drama we follow a supposedly understood first principle to its astounding and unexpected conclusion. We are pleased to find ourselves able to revise our understanding.”
David Mamet, Theatre

A scene from Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer:

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