Archives for May 23, 2011

Depending on when you get around to reading these words, Mrs. T and I will either be in Chicago, in Washington, D.C., or somewhere in between. We’re flying to Washington this afternoon to see Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday and the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times on Thursday, and I plan to spend my afternoons rooting around in the Smithsonian Institution’s Duke Ellington Collection. I’ll also be knocking out a couple of columns in our hotel room when not otherwise occupied.
This is not, in other words, a vacation, though our travels very often have a carefree air, mainly because we spend so much time seeing plays and musicals. We saw, for instance, three shows in Chicago and its environs over the weekend, The Front Page, Porgy and Bess, and Heartbreak House, about which I’ll be saying my say in The Wall Street Journal starting on Friday. It happens that both The Front Page and Heartbreak House were performed in the round in tiny theaters, and the Court’s Porgy and Bess was a small-scale production (fifteen actors, six instrumentalists) mounted in a 250-seat house. I like a really big show as much as the next guy, but having just spent the past two months seeing virtually nothing but Broadway shows, with visits to Carnegie Hall and the New York State Theater thrown in for good measure, it was a pleasure–almost a relief–to spend the weekend in such intimate surroundings.
In addition, we finally visited the fancy new modern wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was designed by Renzo Piano. It’s as gorgeous as you’ve heard, though I haven’t spent nearly enough time there to be able to say with confidence whether it’s a good place in which to look at art. (You have to live with a new museum building to get a clear sense of its strengths and weaknesses.) I gather that the new wing doesn’t provide the museum with a significant increase in display space, but I did encounter some paintings that were new to me on Friday, including a very late canvas by Edouard Vuillard called Vuillard’s Room at the Château des Clayes (it dates from 1932) that I can’t recall having seen hanging at the Art Institute or anywhere else.
Our Girl in Chicago, logically enough, joined us for our wanderings through Chicagoland, and it was a joy to be with her again after a too-long separation. The three of us ate splendidly well at a pair of favorite haunts, Wrigleyville’s Uncommon Ground and Glencoe’s Prairie Grass Café. I hope we do as well for ourselves in Washington!
Mrs. T departs on Thursday, I on Friday. I’ve got things to do in Manhattan over the weekend, but on Monday I’ll rejoin her at our place in Connecticut, which I haven’t seen since we flew down to Florida in January. It’ll be nice to be in the country again, both for its own sake and because I find it easier to write there than in hotel rooms or departure lounges. I have some revisions to do on Satchmo at the Waldorf, my Louis Armstrong play, and I long to resume work on my Ellington biography. (I blush to say that it’s been on ice ever since I returned to New York in March and embarked on the Great Broadway Marathon of 2011.) Come next Saturday, though, we’ll be off and running yet again.
Such is our summer routine, and most of the time, today included, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“If one simply wants to make a living by putting words on paper, then the BBC, the film companies and the like are reasonably helpful. But if one wants to be primarily a writer, then, in our society, one is an animal that is tolerated but not encouraged–something rather like a house sparrow–and one gets on better if one realises one’s position from the start.”
George Orwell, “The Cost of Letters” (Horizon, September 1946)