Archives for 2010

The management of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra is grappling with a nine-million-dollar budget shortfall by proposing to cut musicians’ salaries by nearly thirty percent. The musicians have responded by voting to authorize a strike. It’s widely speculated that this could kill the orchestra altogether–but Detroit is a city in the most desperate economic straits imaginable, and it seems highly unlikely that anyone in town would be able or willing to bail the DSO out.
All of which has led me to write a “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal in which I ask the necessary but not-so-obvious question: is it even possible, much less desirable, for a city whose population has shrunk by fifty percent in the past half-century to try to support a world-class orchestra? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

If you should happen to be in or near Winter Park, Florida, on Sunday afternoon, I’m going to be talking about my latest project, a biography of Duke Ellington. My appearance is part of “The New Animated Magazine,” an elaborate and enticing program being put on by Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute, the campus-based think tank under whose auspices I’ll be speaking, teaching, and writing as a resident scholar during the first part of 2011.
The fun starts at 3:30 at Rollins’ Tiedke Concert Hall. Go here and here to read all about it.

“A man may debar nonsense from his library of reason, but not from the arena of his impulses.”
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

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 LOS ANGELES:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SAN DIEGO:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN:

• The Circle (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN:

• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night for the first time since its original release, and was pleased to see that it holds up exceptionally well.

I looked up what I wrote about it in 2004:

Napoleon Dynamite is an unusually smart movie masquerading as a teen-angst farce. The best high-school flicks have a way of being quite unexpectedly touching, and sometimes even subtly observant (Heathers was one of the smartest movies of the past decade), and if I had to choose between, say, Saving Private Ryan and Dazed and Confused, or Bulworth and Clueless, I’d opt for the feather-light soufflé over the heavily earnest main course every time. Napoleon Dynamite, an independent comedy made by a bunch of Idaho-based crazies, is as good as or better than those fondly remembered films, and it also has a touch of strangeness, even surrealism, that makes it pleasingly tricky to categorize.

The underlying plot mechanism is lifted from Revenge of the Nerds, but the title character (exquisitely well played by Jon Heder) is so extreme in his geekery that he never engages your sympathy–nor does he try. That’s what’s makes Napoleon Dynamite interesting: though it’s pulverizingly funny, it’s not a feel-good movie. Instead, it combines the sharp-eyed small-town spoofery of Waiting for Guffman with the tough-minded social satire of Election and Daria. Yet none of these cinematic reference points, relevant though they are, can fully convey its special quality.

I’d stand by those words today.

“To assert dignity is to lose it.”
Rex Stout, The League of Frightened Men

Joe Orton, interviewed on ITV’s The Eamonn Andrews Show five months before his death in 1967:

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