Archives for August 2010

“When you got older, did you actually need your parents less or did you just learn how to replace them?”
Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil

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:

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

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

• The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WESTPORT, CONN.:

• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, extended through Sept. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:

• Absurd Person Singular (farce, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I get very impatient with people who say ‘I go to the theatre to be taken out of myself.’ I think, ‘There’s probably nothing in yourself.’ I’m only interested in making sure people are reintroduced to themselves. Great theatre draws your attention to things in real life, to the negligible, the boring and nondescript. A playwright like Chekhov makes that considerable and reintroduces us to the things that we have overlooked.”
Jonathan Miller (interviewed in The Independent, Aug. 3, 2010)

An excerpt from the 1942 film of The Man Who Came to Dinner, directed by William Keighley and adapted (mostly faithfully) by Philip G. Epstein and Julius J. Epstein from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart. Monty Woolley, who plays Sheridan Whiteside, created the role on Broadway in 1939:

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

“To be able to write a play, for performance in a theatre, a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naïve, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool. He must be a chaser of wild geese, as well as of wild ducks. He must be prepared to make a public spectacle of himself. He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work; because if he isn’t, he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts.”
Robert E. Sherwood, preface to The Queen’s Husband

Stephen Hough plays Paderewski’s B Flat Nocturne, Op. 14, No. 6:

“A lost cause may still deserve support, and that support is never wasted.”
Kingsley Amis, The King’s English (courtesy of Levi Stahl)