Archives for August 2010

“I’ve noticed that most plays dealing with the tragic suffering of the human condition are written by people who haven’t experienced that much of it themselves. People who have genuinely suffered, more often than not, want to laugh.”
Brooke Berman, No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 Apartments

Long before he metamorphosed into the smiling maestro of Sing Along With Mitch and the producer of such preposterous pop novelties as Frank Sinatra’s “Mama Will Bark” and Rosemary Clooney’s “Come on-a My House,” Mitch Miller, who died over the weekend at the august age of ninety-nine, was a classical oboist who cut a fair number of solo records for which he will always be remembered by connoisseurs of great wind playing. Here’s one of the very best ones:

Amazingly enough, I’m not even close to finished with Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Among other things, I’ll be talking about the book at New York’s Bryant Park at 12:30 on Wednesday, August 11, accompanied by the fabulous jazz trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, who’ll play before I speak and supply some relevant musical examples during the speech itself.
Alas, the New Yorker, which used to check its facts, got the date of my appearance wrong in its Goings On About Town section. If you show up on August 4, I won’t be there–I’ll be up in New Hampshire, seeing the Peterborough Players’ production of Tartuffe. So kindly ignore the New Yorker and come hear Jon-Erik and me and me do our thing next Wednesday!

In the Greater New York section of this morning’s Wall Street Journal, I re-review the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, in which Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters have replaced Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Sad to say, the production is as disappointing now as it was when it opened last year. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway feeds off Hollywood like a thirsty vampire. It was the presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury in the first Broadway revival of “A Little Night Music,” not the production’s dubious artistic merits, that kept it running for six months. Now that they’ve moved on, the producers have decided to take a very big chance and replace them not with a second pair of certified screen stars but with Elaine Stritch and Bernadette Peters, two deservedly beloved Broadway performers whose names are not generally known to the public at large (though Ms. Peters teetered on the edge of full-scale celebrity in the ’70s and ’80s and Ms. Stritch’s guest appearances on “30 Rock” have made her a somewhat more familiar face). Will they be able to keep the show open for another six months? I doubt it–and not just because they lack the name recognition necessary to galvanize the tourist trade. Much as I esteem both women, neither one of them is well cast….
Ms. Stritch’s cackling spunky-grandma demeanor is infinitely removed from the haughty disillusion of the worldly-wise Madame Armfeldt…
Ms. Peters, who was last seen on Broadway six years ago in Sam Mendes’ revival of “Gypsy,” is even more closely identified with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim than Ms. Stritch, having previously created starring roles in “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Into the Woods.” I don’t blame her in the least for wanting to try her hand at playing Desirée Armfeldt, the aging actress who longs to put the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue behind her and settle down with a more-or-less suitable man. It’s one of the richest and most emotionally complex female roles in a Sondheim musical, and Ms. Peters, who looks half her age, brings it to persuasive life in the heart-wrenching scene in which she sings “Send in the Clowns” to Alexander Hanson. Elsewhere, though, her mile-wide performance is too coarse for comfort…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Who is to say what is normal in a king? Deferred to, agreed with, acquiesced in. Who could flourish on such a daily diet of compliance? To be curbed, stood up to, in a word thwarted, exercises the character, elasticates the spirit, makes it pliant. It is the want of such exercise that makes rulers rigid.”
Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III