Archives for 2010

Dame Margot Fonteyn dances Frederick Ashton’s Salut d’amour, set to the music of Edward Elgar:

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

“My dear, it would be a terrible poverty of life if music were political. I cannot imagine it because what does this mean–‘political music’? That is why I ignore questions about political music because music is music. Painting is painting.”
Henryk Górecki, interview with Bruce Duffie (April 1994)

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”
H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (Aug. 9, 1926)

Brendan Fraser has just made his Broadway debut in the American premiere of Elling, an occasion that attracted the attention of the editors of the Greater New York section of The Wall Street Journal, who asked me to review the opening for today’s paper. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
My preliminary expectations about Simon Bent’s “Elling” can be summed up as follows: Why would any American producer in his right mind choose to put money into a British stage play adapted from a Norwegian film based on a series of allegedly comic novels about two mentally ill men, one prim and fussy and the other loud and sloppy? What good could come of so patently misguided an investment? None whatsoever, I regret to say: “Elling” is relentlessly sentimental and comprehensively unfunny, so much so that I had to struggle to stay awake all the way to the bitter end.
I may well be underestimating the potency of Norwegian humor, for which I humbly apologize in advance. That said, the premise of “Elling,” in which the title character (Denis O’Hare) and his roommate Kjell Bjarne (Brendan Fraser) are transferred from an insane asylum to a halfway house in order to adjust to life in the outside world, strikes me as…well, not very funny. Not knowing the novels by Ingvar Ambjornsen on which “Elling” is based, I can’t say anything about their theatrical potential, but it strikes me that Mr. Bent has turned them into a rigidly commercial comedy that plays like a cross between “The Odd Couple” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” with a bit of “Waiting for Godot” thrown in to confuse the issue….
Mr. Fraser is, or can be, an accomplished film actor–he was quite good as Ian McKellen’s innocent foil in “Gods and Monsters”–but his one-dimensional performance is both unvaried and unmemorable….
* * *
The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of Elling by going here.

If thou dislik’st the Piece thou light’st on first;

Thinke that of All, that I have writ, the worst:

But if thou read’st my Book unto the end,

And still do’st this, and that verse, reprehend:

O Perverse man! If All disgustfull be,

The Extreame Scabbe take thee, and thine, for me.

Robert Herrick, “To the Soure Reader” (courtesy of Hannah Farber)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two important shows about different aspects of the black experience in America, the world premiere of John Guare’s A Free Man of Color and the Arizona Theatre Company’s revival of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
To call a play “sprawling” is not necessarily a bad thing. Some canvases are naturally larger than others, and critics who (like me) have a built-in bias in favor of careful craftsmanship must always be on guard lest it cause them to underrate a work of genius whose corners aren’t tucked in. If neatness is what you expect from John Guare’s “A Free Man of Color,” you’ll be doomed to disappointment. Mr. Guare’s ambitious new play, which tells the fantastic tale of Jacques Cornet (Jeffrey Wright), a 19th-century millionaire playboy from New Orleans who happens to be black, has a cast of 33 and runs for two and a half crowded hours. Yes, it sprawls, but for all its hectic messiness, “A Free Man of Color” is one of the three or four most stirring new plays I’ve seen since I started writing this column seven years ago.
Set in 1801, just before the Louisiana Purchase brought New Orleans under the thumb of Washington, “A Free Man of Color” starts out as a bawdy Restoration-style comedy of bad manners in which the Big Easy is portrayed as a prelapsarian Eden to whose richer citizens the concept of racial prejudice is as alien as the shadow of sexual guilt. Even though he’s black, Jacques Cornet is well-heeled enough to have slaves of his own, and the fact that he is so wealthy and attractive (Mr. Guare describes him as “a dazzling piece of work”) insulates him from the common plight of his fellow blacks. The first act, in which his sexual misadventures are catalogued in frenzied detail, plays like a 10-door farce salted with so many laughs that you won’t have time to catch your breath.
In the second act, history catches up with Monsieur Cornet. No sooner does Thomas Jefferson (John McMartin) approve the purchase of the Louisiana Territory than his status as a “free man of color” is revoked, and New Orleans’ gaudiest peacock is shorn of his feathers and sold into slavery, a terrible denouement described by Mr. Guare in language that approaches the condition of poetry…
The Arizona Theatre Company, whose shows are seen in Phoenix and Tucson, is currently doing “Ma Rainey” as well as I can imagine it being done. The staging is by Lou Bellamy, the artistic director of St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre Company, whose magnificent Off-Broadway revival of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” was one of the highlights of the 2006-07 season. Like that well-remembered production, it is earthily direct, wholly to the point and impeccably cast, with Jevetta Steele hitting the center of the bull’s-eye as the bisexual blues shouter whose sidemen are at murderous odds with one another. Vicki Smith’s three-level recording-studio set is a model of smell-the-coffee realism….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“The blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone. There’s something else in the world. Something’s been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something.”
August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Kenny Burrell, Bob Magnusson, and Sherman Ferguson play “All Blues”: