Archives for March 2011

“Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might also be said that nature is usually wrong.”
James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

I had planned to take the weekend off and putter, but on Thursday I started writing a new play called Brother Al, and by Friday night the words were pouring out of me so fast that I decided to put aside everything else and see what happened. Well, what ended up happening was that I finished writing the first draft of the three-character play on Sunday afternoon, all two acts and fourteen thousand words of it. I spent the rest of the day feeling astonished, as though I’d been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale, and by the time I went to bed, a theater-savvy friend had read the script and told me that she thought it worked.
Plays, unlike novels, do get written that fast–sometimes. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of Private Lives in four days, though he spent a week and a half sketching out the plot before sitting down to write the dialogue. I’m not Noël Coward, needless to say, but it took me about that long to write the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last winter, and I was so surprised by the quickness with which it took shape that quite some time went by before I could be persuaded that it might possibly be anything other than lousy. “Don’t worry,” a very experienced playwright told me a few weeks later. “With a play, that kind of speed can be a good sign, proof of inspiration.”
It’s way too soon for me to do anything but spend the next few days sitting on the new play, after which I’ll read the first draft again and see what I think of it. I need to cool down before drawing any conclusions, and I’ve got more than enough to do this week and next to keep me well and truly distracted. But the mere fact that I was able to do such a thing at the age of fifty-five is in and of itself profoundly gratifying.
Not until I started work on The Letter did I imagine myself capable of producing anything more creative than a well-written biography. Today I have two opera libretti under my belt, plus a one-man play about Louis Armstrong that has survived the grueling test of two readings, one private and one public, and is looking stageworthy, not just to me but also to several case-hardened professionals. Now I’ve written a second play. Go figure, and let me know what you decide.
As for me, I’m not quite sure who I am this morning, but whoever this guy is, I think I like him.

I love my new neighborhood:

“I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion; I loathe the country.”
William Congreve, The Way of the World

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of David Leveaux’s London revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. I wanted it to be a lot better than it was. Here’s an excerpt.
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Enough about “Spider-Man” already–Tom Stoppard is back on Broadway! Only time will tell whether “Arcadia” is Mr. Stoppard’s masterpiece, but I don’t think it’s premature to call it one of the key English-language plays of the postwar era, and even in a staging that is less than satisfactory, it makes a rich and affecting impression. Now for the bad news: David Leveaux’s revival of “Arcadia,” which was originally mounted in London two years ago with a different cast, isn’t much better than adequate. When you’re talking about a high-profile revival of a great play, good enough won’t cut it.
More about that shortly, but first a few heartfelt words about “Arcadia” itself. Last seen on Broadway in 1995, it is an entrancingly clever whodunit for eggheads whose underlying purpose is to dramatize the central problem of modernity: How are we to live our lives if it turns out that they have no ultimate meaning? The play, which is set in an English country house, moves back and forth in time between 1809 and today, and the two main modern-day characters, Hannah (Lia Williams) and Bernard (Billy Crudup), are scholars who are trying to figure out what was going on in the house two centuries earlier. The answer is both astonishing and improbable: Thomasina (Bel Powley), a 13-year-old child prodigy, has figured out the Second Law of Thermodynamics all by herself, much to the bewilderment of Septimus (Tom Riley), her rakish tutor, to whom she is no less precociously attracted.
The reason why this matters is twofold. Not only does it mean that the universe is slowly and inexorably running down, but it casts a dark shadow of doubt on the optimistic certitude with which Septimus and his contemporaries (not to mention most of us today) lead their well-ordered lives….
“Arcadia,” like “The Coast of Utopia,” is–or should be–far easier to experience than it is to explain. Mr. Stoppard has embedded his philosophical interests in an ingeniously structured double-decker plot that is studded with glints of wicked wit (“Nobody would kill a man and then pan his book. I mean, not in that order”). You don’t have to be a physicist, much less a philosopher, to see what Mr. Stoppard is up to, so long as “Arcadia” is staged and the lines spoken with complete clarity and correct emphasis.
This, alas, is where Mr. Leveaux and his cast go wrong. Time and again Mr. Stoppard’s punch lines go astray or get thrown away, and the trouble starts as soon as the curtain goes up…
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Read the whole thing here.
Tom Stoppard talks about playwrighting with Charlie Rose:

As fine-arts institutions grapple with the growing problem of declining mainstream media interest in their activities, they’re looking to the Web for solutions. Hence my “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal, a report on the Cleveland Orchestra’s new attempt to take up the slack. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Cleveland Orchestra helped get one critic fired. Now it’s hired another one. In February Enrique Fernández reported for duty as “critic-in-residence” in Miami, where the orchestra has been playing an annual residency since 2007. Mr. Fernández is not, however, your run-of-the-mill music critic. For one thing, he doesn’t write reviews; for another, his pieces don’t appear in a newspaper or magazine. Instead he writes a blog on the Cleveland Orchestra’s Miami-based website. His job is to get Floridans talking about the orchestra–and posting their own opinions of its concerts.
The ironies surrounding Mr. Fernández’ appointment are manifold. In 2008 Don Rosenberg, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s classical music critic, was reassigned to another beat for having written predominantly negative reviews of Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director–reviews about which the orchestra’s management had previously complained to the paper’s editors. Mr. Rosenberg responded by suing the paper for defamation and age discrimination. He lost, but the resulting stink has yet to dissipate.
Is the Cleveland Orchestra having second thoughts? I doubt it. Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on “blog,” is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra’s performances: “Online everybody’s a critic….Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it’s your ticket, rave on, pan on.”
Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the “online communities” that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums…
Mr. Fernández’s title points to the great flaw of institutional blogging, which is that it is institutional. Whatever else he does with “his” blog, you can bet he won’t be saying anything on it that’s even mildly critical of the Cleveland Orchestra….
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Read the whole thing here.

“In a flash, Emmerich had made a startling discovery. When humiliation reached a certain point, death was preferable. He had heard the fact stated many times, in and out of course, sometimes seriously, sometmes ironically. It had always struck him as a preposterous assumption–belonging to another age. But it was true.”
W.R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle

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.

BROADWAY:

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

• Driving Miss Daisy (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

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

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 24, 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)

• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)

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

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, Washington remounting of Chicago production, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 10, Chicago run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• Ghost-Writer (drama, G, closes Apr. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, playing in rotating repertory, reviewed here)