Archives for 2010

I have much to tell—about our move to Hudson Heights, our trip to Smalltown, U.S.A., and various other adventures along the way—and no time or energy with which to tell it, at least for the moment. Instead I’m busy judging a literary award, which means that I’m winnowing down some thirty-odd books to a short list of half a dozen or so worthy titles. This is fun and no fun at the same time (too many good books, not enough prizes). I also have to finish writing an essay on Cab Calloway and continue the seemingly endless process of unpacking a couple of dozen boxes that all bear labels indicating that they require more or less immediate attention.
The good part—there is a good part—is that Mrs. T and I have gotten our new living room into something remotely approaching civilized order. Yes, the bookshelves required a couple of hours’ worth of aggressive sorting, but I supplied it this afternoon, and the room as a whole is now neat enough that it’s already possible to sit and relax without feeling the irresistible compulsion to Do Stuff.
To be sure, Mrs. T and I have started making preliminary decisions about which works of art should hang where, which should keep us busy for weeks to come. On the other hand, my Nakamichi SoundSpace 5 stereo, which looks not unlike a piece of minimalist sculpture, is already set up in the northwest corner of the room and is emitting beautiful sounds. Tranquility, in other words, is peering through the window from time to time, though it has yet to make itself at home.
I’ll keep you posted as I continue to pull myself together. For now, suffice it to say that Mrs. T and I are very happy to be here and are feeling exceedingly hopeful!

“I’ve found that one must try and teach people that there’s no top limit to disaster—that, so long as breath remains in your body, you’ve got to accept the miseries of life. They will often seem infinite, insupportable. They are part of the human condition.”
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two shows, one in Washington, D.C. (Arena Stage’s Oklahoma!) and one off Broadway (the world premiere of Neil LaBute’s The Break of Noon). Here’s an excerpt.
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Corny, charming, and as handsomely made as a hand-sewn quilt, “Oklahoma!” is one of the permanent landmarks of American musical theater. Though scholars continue to quarrel over whether the first of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II collaborations was also the first “integrated” musical–a show, that is, in which music, lyrics, book and choreography all work together to advance an emotionally serious plot–contemporary audiences don’t care whether it deserves priority over, say, “Pal Joey” or “Porgy and Bess.” Either way, they like it fine, and show no signs of longing for some fancy director to treat it to a high-concept staging. Nor has Molly Smith, the artistic director of Arena Stage, done anything of the kind. Ms. Smith’s “Oklahoma!” is a perfectly, almost baldly straightforward production that deviates from the norm in only two ways: It is performed in the round by a multicultural cast whose members include a Latino Curly (Nicholas Rodriguez) and a black Laurey (Eleasha Gamble). Otherwise, this is much the same “Oklahoma!” that your grandfolks loved.
Is that good enough for 2010 and the inaugural production of the newly built Mead Center for American Theater? Arena Stage’s enthusiastic audiences clearly think so, and up to a point I’m inclined to agree with them. Ms. Smith’s unselfconsciously lively staging, after all, is full of the high-stepping energy without which no production of “Oklahoma!” can hope to make its mark. What I miss, however, is any sense that we’re being told something about the show that we didn’t already know….
Neil LaBute is back again, and I wish I could say that he’s returned to form after a long, dull stretch. No such luck. “The Break of Noon,” like all of his plays since “Fat Pig,” starts strong, loses steam and drifts all over the road before coasting to a dead stop.
Part of the problem is that Mr. LaBute is seeking this time around to breathe life into a musty plot twist that dates back to Edwardian times: How might the modern world respond to a person who claims that God has spoken to him? In this umpteenth iteration, we get a regular-guy businessman named, predictably enough, John Smith (David Duchovny). The only survivor of a mass murder, John believes that God told him midway through the shootings that “you shall be saved.” The experience transforms him, though not so much as to prevent him from capitalizing on the transformation by selling his story to the media, and for the rest of the evening we watch him interact with a string of skeptics, including his ex-wife (Amanda Peet), a cynical talk-show host (Tracee Chimo) and the detective in charge of his case (John Earl Jelks), all of whom are variously disinclined to take his implausible tale at face value.
As usual with Mr. LaBute, the first scene, a monologue in which John tells what happened on the fatal day, is pointed and powerful, but nothing that happens thereafter is half so fresh…
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Read the whole thing here.

I rejoice to report that the 1956 recording of the first Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, starring Bert Lahr, is finally back in print. Since no one else in the world seems to be aware of this wonderful fact, I decided to announce it to the world in my “Sightings” column for today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

Every critic who covered the show heaped praise on Lahr, and the most perceptive ones saw that his performance was profoundly true to the spirit of the play. Though Lahr was no kind of intellectual, he had instinctively understood what Beckett was up to. “I know it’s supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags,” he told his agent after reading the script. So there are, for “Godot” is a Laurel-and-Hardyesque farce about the meaninglessness of life. Even those critics who, like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, found it hard to stomach the play’s dark vision were staggered by the crazed beauty of Lahr’s acting: “His long experience as a bawling mountebank has equipped Mr. Lahr to represent eloquently the tragic comedy of one of the lost souls of the earth.”
Alas, “Godot” closed after just 10 weeks, and Lahr never appeared in it again. But Goddard Lieberson, who produced original-cast albums for Columbia Records, had the brilliant idea to record a complete performance of the play. The existence of the resulting album, which has been out of print for the past quarter-century, is no secret, but its long-standing unavailability has caused it to be overlooked by most people who write about “Godot.” Even John Lahr, the comedian’s younger son, fails to mention it in “Notes on a Cowardly Lion,” the uniquely perceptive biography of his father that he wrote in 1969.
It is, therefore, stop-press news for anybody who loves great theater that the 1956 recording of “Godot” is available once again, not as a CD but as an mp3-only sound file that you can download from Amazon for $3.56 or from iTunes for $5.99. (You can find it on either site by searching for “Bert Lahr.”) Culturally speaking, I’d call that the deal of the decade….
The 1956 production of “Godot” was Lahr’s show all the way, and to hear it now is to boggle at his seemingly infinite comic resourcefulness. He whines, he whimpers, he chortles, he grunts, giving each line precisely the right flavor. Yet never for a moment does his clowning conceal the play’s underlying pathos, and whenever he opens his mouth, it’s always Beckett, not Bert Lahr, that you hear….

Read the whole thing here.

“The fact is that the average man’s love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely.”
H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 12, 1923

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:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

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

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

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

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, 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)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PHOENIX, ARIZ.:

• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed.”
George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma