Archives for September 2010

In the second of two reports from Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, I review a major revival of Somerset Maugham’s rarely seen The Circle in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Long before he became one of the world’s most popular novelists, Somerset Maugham was one of England’s most successful playwrights. Four of his new plays actually ran simultaneously in London’s West End in 1908, an achievement that makes Neil Simon look like a piker. But Maugham’s brand of high social comedy had fallen from grace long before his death in 1965. It’s been 21 years since any of his plays was successfully mounted on Broadway, and that one, “The Circle,” presumably owed its success to the presence in the cast of Rex Harrison. While Maugham revivals are not unknown in this country, one almost always has to get out of New York to see them. So I hastened to Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, one of America’s top classical companies, to find out how well “The Circle,” which was first performed in London in 1921, has held up, and the answer–to my surprise–is that it is not merely viable but brilliant.
Most of Maugham’s other plays, to be sure, are period pieces that merit the dusty obscurity into which they long ago fell, but “The Circle” is different. Instead of the not-quite-Wilde-enough epigrams of “The Constant Wife,” we get a drawing room full of well-dressed but plain-spoken characters who might have stepped out of one of Maugham’s own short stories, plus a plot so soundly made that you’ll be engrossed as soon as the wheels start turning.
Lady Kitty (Tracy Michelle Arnold), the fallen woman at the center of “The Circle,” walked out on Clive (Brian Mani), her husband, 30 years ago and ran off to Italy with Lord Porteous (James Ridge), Clive’s best friend. Now Kitty and her aging consort have returned to England for the first time to pay a call on Arnold (Paul Hurley), her son, who was five years old when she bolted and is now a promising but priggish young politician who recoils at the thought of further scandal. Little does Arnold know that Elizabeth (Susan Shunk), his wife, has fallen for another man and is thinking of doing as Lady Kitty did…
James Bohnen, the departing artistic director of Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, a troupe whose work I greatly admire, has caught the tone of “The Circle” with perfect exactitude, and his cast, which consists for the most part of old APT hands, is with him all the way. Ms. Shunk, who is so fine as Birdie in this season’ revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Another Part of the Forest,” is, if anything, even more appealing as Elizabeth. At first her naïvete seems a bit much–you want to kick some sense into her–but before long you’ll find yourself hoping against hope that she’ll refuse to settle for the respectable life of a politician’s wife….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

You may possibly have read about the latest pronunciamento from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who informed his unhappy people the other day that the promoting and teaching of music is “not compatible with the highest values of the sacred regime of the Islamic Republic.” Would that this was a sick joke, but it’s not, nor is it the first time that an Islamic leader has declared war on music in recent years.
Such craziness should always, of course, be drawn to the attention of innocents who ought to know better but usually don’t, so I’ve made it the subject of my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Not wanting to settle for merely shooting fish in a barrel, though, I also discuss the equivocal relationship between Western Christianity and music. Read all about it in tomorrow’s Journal, but for now suffice it to say that the West has a fair amount of splainin’ of its own to do….
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

“He was fond of the theatre, but aware that there were people who would consider his tastes old-fashioned, even barbarous. He liked a play to have a beginning and a middle and an end; he liked to spot the crises, to recognize a craftsman at his business of constructing craftily; he liked a firm ending, to leave the theatre with that tiny scar on consciousness which meant he had been moved. He knew that there were people who talked crossly about commercial theatre and the well-made play; he knew their opinions but he did not care for them.”
William Haggard, Closed Circuit

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 SPRING GREEN, WIS.:

• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:

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

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:

• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SUNDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

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

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

CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:

• I Do! I Do! (musical, G, reviewed here)

“In his personal and private shorthand Peter Davis had tagged Patricia Leggatt, and the tag was upper arty. It had amused him to imagine her background, for the Minister’s modest flat where he had met her clearly wasn’t her natural stamping ground. That would be somewhere in the Cadogans, he had decided, somewhere rich and talkative. The people lived by taking each other’s photographs. Not really, of course: they all had private incomes which it was very bad form to mention; they all assumed that you had too. And they talked–how they talked! They talked novels and pictures and plays, and operas you’d never heard of. Not that they knew much about them, for solid knowledge meant work–hard reading and even thought. But they knew what was new.
“What was new was worth chattering about.”
William Haggard, The Unquiet Sleep

The Gary Burton Quartet plays Steve Swallow’s “General Mojo’s Well Laid Plan” in 1967. The guitarist is Larry Coryell:

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

“Listening to other opinions was invariably more profitable than antagonizing their owners by pointing out tiresome objections.”
William Haggard, The Hard Sell