Archives for December 2011

“I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”
T.S. Eliot, letter to Stephen Spender, March 1931
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The Busch Quartet plays the third movement of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet, Op. 132, recorded in 1937:

Mrs. T and I have spent the past week in Smalltown, U.S.A., where my mother is seriously ill. Her condition appears to have stabilized for now and she is resting as comfortably as can be expected, so we’re planning to return to New York on Sunday night, though we’re prepared to fly back to Smalltown on short notice.
To those of you who follow my Twitter feed and know about my mother’s condition, many thanks for your kind words. We’re coping as best we can, and the good people of the Clearview Nursing Center are taking wonderful care of my mother, as are David and Kathy, my brother and sister-in-law. These are hard times, but your concern is a continuing comfort.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Philadelphia show, the Walnut Street Theatre revival of The King and I. Here’s an excerpt.
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Of all the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, “The King and I,” in which a high-handed Siamese potentate is given a lesson in democracy by a prim Welsh schoolmarm, is the one to which time has been kindest. Sixty years after it first opened on Broadway, “The King and I” remains both charming and–if done well–theatrically potent….
But the show, with its palatial décor and giant-sized cast, doesn’t lend itself to small-scale production, and if you cut corners when putting it on, the results will look cheap at best, amateurish at worst. Hence it is a real pleasure to report that Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre has just mounted a strongly cast, newly choreographed revival of “The King and I” that looks anything but chintzy.
The biggest difficulty facing any company that seeks to put its stamp on “The King and I” is getting out from under the shadow of Yul Brynner, who created the role of the King of Siam in 1951, starred in the 1956 film version of the show and continued to play the part onstage at regular intervals until his death in 1985. As a result, everybody who thinks of “The King and I” usually thinks first of Brynner, and most of the actors who have since assumed his role have evoked–deliberately or not–his performance, which was so distinctive as to be easily caricatured. Not Mel Sagrado Maghuyop, a Filipino-American musical-comedy singer who neither looks nor sounds like Brynner (he has a higher-pitched voice and is shorter than Rachel York, his leading lady). Mr. Maghuyop’s king is petulant to the point of childishness, which makes his climactic explosion of rage all the more frightening, and he is both physically lithe and an adept comedian….
Marc Robin, the director and choreographer, has daringly chosen to jettison Jerome Robbins’ well-known dances, turning “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” into a classical-style tutu-and-toe-shoes story ballet (Robbins staged it as a Thai-style dance-and-mime pastiche) and putting a comic spin on “Shall We Dance?” Though Robbins’ dance version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was one of the most memorable pieces of choreography ever created for the Broadway stage, Mr. Robin’s miniature ballet is a lovely piece of work in its own right, and I liked his “Shall We Dance?” at least as much as Robbins’ more straightforward version….
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Read the whole thing here.
Jerome Robbins’ “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” from the 1951 film version of The King and I:

“Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it–so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Apr. 29, reviewed here)

• Chinglish (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 29, reviewed here)

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)

• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cherry Orchard (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Neighbourhood Watch (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“By ‘a good audience,’ an artist means, in the first place, a crowd that is receptive, easily roused, which unresistingly succumbs to mass suggestion, whatever the actual musical standard of its members. But an audience may be very cultured musically and yet be ‘bad,’ namely frosty, critical and fault-finding.”
Carl Flesch, Memoirs (trans. Hans Keller)

The opening scene of a rare kinescope of a 1955 Ford Star Jubilee telecast of the original Broadway production of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, directed by Charles Laughton and starring Lloyd Nolan as Captain Queeg:

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

“In any kind of artistic activity, it is always the impulse, the expressive need, the inner compulsion which dictates in the first place, and not the technical equipment. Just as a hungry man will always get hold of food, if need be by force, so every original artist finds, as a rule unconsciously, the necessary technical means to still his spiritual hunger.”
Carl Flesch, Memoirs (trans. Hans Keller)