Archives for August 2011

It’s been quite a while since I last read anything by Colette, one of my favorite writers, so I recently decided to spend some time getting reacquainted with her, and this week’s almanac entries will reflect the fruits of my labor (if that’s the word for so pleasurable a task).
In addition to being a remarkable writer, Colette was also one of the most photogenic artists of the twentieth century, not merely in her youth but long after arthritis had gnarled her features and condemned her to an indoor life of immobility and pain. The painting that you see above (the artist is Jacques Humbert) dates from 1896, and shows her as a beautiful young woman, teetering on the edge of knowingness. The second image is a reproduction of a photographic portrait of Colette shot by Irving Penn in 1951. Both images capture something of her intriguing, ever-elusive essence.
I also spent a few minutes trolling through YouTube in search of Colette-related video, and came up with two clips from Colette, a film documentary made in 1951 by Yannick Bellon. (Yes, it’s in French, but it’s subtitled.) Alas, I can’t embed the clips, but you can view them by going here and here. Colette herself appears on camera and can be heard speaking in both sequences, the second of which is a survey of her fascinating career as a music-hall performer.
If you happen to be a Francophone, you can also listen to a 1950 radio program about Colette by going here. The piece of music heard at the beginning is Ravel’s Jeux d’eau.
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The Glyndebourne Festival’s 1987 production of Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, designed by Maurice Sendak, directed by Frank Corsaro, and conducted by Simon Rattle. The libretto is by Colette:

“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”
Colette, Paris from My Window

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on the new off-Broadway production of Rent. Here’s an excerpt.
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Fifteen years ago, Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was the hippest musical on Broadway–which wasn’t saying much. Virtually all of the musicals that opened there in the ’90s were totally forgettable and are deservedly forgotten. “Rent,” on the other hand, is well remembered, partly because it stayed open until 2008 and partly because it was the most influential show of the post-Sondheim era, a rock musical that contrived to put AIDS, drug addiction, drag queenery and homo- and bisexuality onstage without simultaneously putting off the tourist trade. Nor does its 5,123-performance Broadway run appear to have exhausted the marketability of “Rent.” A new Off-Broadway production has just opened at New World Stages, the complex to which “Avenue Q” transferred two years ago after its own long run on Broadway.
Despite the fact that Michael Greif, the show’s first director, has restaged it, this “Rent” is not a remounting but a true revival, featuring an all-new cast and freshly designed sets by Mark Wendland whose metal scaffolding echoes the fire-escape motif of Oliver Smith’s now-legendary décor for “West Side Story.” At the same time, no attempt has been made to update the show, and its overall effect is essentially the same. All that’s changed is the people in the audience: They’re still young, but precisely because they’re so youthful, Mr. Larson’s affectionate portrait of bohemian New York in the early ’90s clearly comes across to them not as an exercise in nostalgia for the good old bad old days but as a theme-park recreation of a world they never knew. They might as well be watching “Woodstock”–or “West Side Story,” for that matter.
And what of the show itself? If you were following the theater scene in 1996, you’ll remember the wild hoopla that greeted the opening of “Rent,” which snagged the best-musical Tony and even won a Pulitzer Prize. No doubt the fact that Mr. Larson died the day after the dress rehearsal for the original Off-Broadway production had something to do with the show’s enthusiastic reception, but to revisit “Rent” a decade and a half after the fact is to suspect that its drag-queens-are-people-too subject matter was the real source of its popularity. Viewed in the harsh light of hindsight, “Rent” is by turns chirpy and sentimental…
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Read the whole thing here.

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“We sink too easily into stupid and overfed sensuality, our bodies thickening even more quickly than our minds.”
M.F.K. Fisher, Serve It Forth

Sean Connery and Zoe Caldwell in a scene from Macbeth, telecast by the CBC in 1961:

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

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
Jane Austen, letter to her sister Cassandra (Dec. 24, 1798)