Archives for 2011

I have much wholehearted praise for the Mint Theater Company’s revival of Rachel Crothers’ A Little Journey. Here’s an excerpt.
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The Mint Theater Company, one of New York’s most admired Off-Broadway troupes, specializes in neglected plays that have slipped through the cracks. More often than not it comes up with gems, among the most notable of which was Rachel Crothers’ “Susan and God,” first seen in 1937 and revived by the Mint to impressive effect in 2006. Now the company has gone back to the same well with an equally strong staging of another Crothers play, “A Little Journey,” which hasn’t been performed professionally in New York since it closed on Broadway in 1919–and guess what? It’s just as good.
Crothers, America’s most successful woman playwright, is all but unknown today. Born in 1878, she wrote some 30-odd plays that made it to Broadway prior to her death in 1958, most of which she also directed and many of which, like “A Little Journey” and “Susan and God,” were hits that were later filmed. How could so distinguished a female artist have vanished into the memory hole? You’d think that literary-minded feminists would have been her most outspoken champions. But Crothers, like Lillian Hellman, was a commercial playwright who specialized in “well-made” plays, a genre that became unfashionable after Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller trashed the theatrical rulebook, and the fact that she’d been so popular in her lifetime worked against her posthumously. Not until the Mint exhumed “Susan and God” did it occur to anyone that her body of work deserved a second look.
All of which brings us to “A Little Journey,” an unusually well-crafted play about a group of strangers of widely varied backgrounds who get to know one another while traveling by train from Grand Central Station to the West Coast. You’re heard that one before, right? In fact, it’s one of the best-known of storytelling tricks, but “A Little Journey” predates Vicki Baum’s “Grand Hotel” by a decade, and Crothers may actually have invented the device herself. More importantly, she uses it with great freshness, tucking a surprise into the last act that will make you jump….
The Mint long ago mastered the magical art of cramming big shows onto its shoebox-sized stage without breaking anything. Roger Hanna’s set for “A Little Journey,” for instance, turns Crothers’ sleeper car into a simple but handsome-looking revolving carousel, a sleight-of-hand trick that gives the production a feeling of forward movement unrivaled by infinitely more complicated (and expensive) Pullman-car sets….
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Read the whole thing here.

“It seemed to him there was never much time with women. Before you could look at one twice, you were into an argument, and they were telling you what was going to happen.”
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

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 Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

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

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes July 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, closes July 24, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The Front Page (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Porgy and Bess (operatic musical, PG-13, extended through July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Old Times (drama, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• Heartbreak House (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

People think of the strangest things in a crisis. When Mrs. T and I were getting ready to carry my mother to our rental car in order to rush her to the emergency room last Wednesday, I said to myself, Whenever you have to do something in a hurry, make yourself slow down. All at once I found myself recalling two of Richard Strauss’ “Golden Rules for the Album of a Young Conductor”:
• “You should not perspire when conducting. Only the audience should get warm.”
• “When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, take the tempo half as fast. (Mozart conductors, please note!)”
That’s good advice, whatever the circumstances.
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Wilhelm Furtwängler leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a 1950 performance of Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks:

“The boy was young and had all his hopes, while Deets was older and had fewer. Newt sometimes asked so many questions that Deets had to laugh–he was like a cistern, from which questions flowed instead of water. Some Deets answered and some he didn’t. He didn’t tell Newt all he knew. He didn’t tell him that even when life seemed easy, it kept on getting harder.”
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has finally opened, and my review is in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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If beauty were really only skin deep, then “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” would be the perfect musical. Every cent of the $70 million budget is visible. George Tsypin’s sets, Kyle Cooper’s digital projections and Eiko Ishioka’s costumes have been melded into an exquisitely exact stage equivalent of the sharp-angled, high-contrast drawing style of the Marvel comic books in which Peter Parker and his web-spinning alter ego first came to fictional life. The show’s sheer visual dynamism is staggering–but except for one great performance, it has little else to offer. It’s the best-looking mediocre musical ever to open on Broadway….
Poetry, not special effects, is the engine that drives lyric theater, and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is as unpoetic as you can get. Mr. Aguirre-Sacasa’s book is flabby and witless. The score, by U2’s Bono and The Edge, sounds like a double album of B-sides (“Don’t think about tomorrow/We’ve only got today”). Not only are the songs forgettable, but they never succeed in generating any dramatic momentum–all they do is get louder. As for Mr. Carney and Ms. Damiano, they’re pretty, bland and devoid of charisma….
Outside of the décor, what does “Spider-Man” have going for it? The bad guy. Patrick Page is a classical actor of high distinction whom New York playgoers will remember as the mercurial Henry VIII of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s marvelous 2008 revival of “A Man for All Seasons.” Mr. Page has a voice like a cathedral organ and enough charisma to blast Mr. Carney off the stage and into the next county, and you can tell that he’s having a grand old time playing a super-villain….
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Read the whole thing here.

Booker T. and the MGs play “Time Is Tight”:

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