Archives for 2011

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it.”
George Saintsbury, A Last Vintage

I’ve hit a bad patch on Broadway. In today’s Wall Street Journal I pan High and Wonderland. Here’s an excerpt.
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Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she’s not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade. To say that Ms. Turner plays an alcoholic nun in Matthew Lombardo’s “High” comes close to giving away the whole game. Yes, Sister Jamison Connelly is a foul-mouthed, tough-talking dame with a heart of brass-plated gold, and yes, Ms. Turner’s Janie-One-Note performance is so thickly mannered as to suggest that the producers of “High” have engaged a Kathleen Turner robot instead of the real thing. She rattles off her lines in a hoarse, staccato baritone voice that sounds as if it had been brought into being through daily doses of Drano administered by mouth, and she never does anything that you can’t see coming several hundred miles away.
Neither does Mr. Lombardo, a specialist in coarsely wrought small-cast vehicles for Hollywood refugees of a certain age. Last year it was “Looped,” in which Valerie Harper played Tallulah Bankhead. This year it’s “High,” a three-hander in which Ms. Turner attempts to save the body and soul of Cody (Evan Jonigkeit), a dope-addled street hustler whose self-destructive behavior is enabled by the solicitude of a well-meaning but foolish priest (Stephen Kunken). “High” is the sort of play in which a character (Ms. Turner, naturally) utters sentences like “Okay, God, here’s the deal,” then expects the audience not to giggle contemptuously in response….
The problem with Frank Wildhorn musicals is that they contain Frank Wildhorn songs. “Wonderland,” an updated stage version of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” is stuffed full of easy-listening pop ditties written in the out-the-other-ear style to which Mr. Wildhorn long ago accustomed his fans. As for Jack Murphy’s lyrics, suffice it to say that he lays his creative cards on the table in the very first number: “Larger smaller–keep it real/Change just happens, learn to deal.”
If you’ve spent any time at all watching the dreck dished up on contemporary children’s TV, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Mr. Wildhorn and his collaborators have done to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The time is right this second and the place is Queens. Alice (Janet Dacal) is a well-dressed, temporarily single working mom whose unemployed, temporarily unenlightened husband (Darren Ritchie) has left her because he’s embarrassed not to be the family breadwinner. Chloe (Carly Rose Sonenclar), their daughter, is an unnaturally mature-sounding 11-year-old Broadway diva who is incapable of uttering an unsarcastic word. Alice bumps her head in the elevator, lies down to take a nap and finds herself in Wonderland, a country whose inhabitants all speak the same tired argot, half smart-assery and half meta-humor…
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Read the whole thing here.

Paul Lynde, June Carroll, and Alice Ghostley in a very rare kinescope of excerpts from New Faces of 1952, originally telecast in 1960. The songs are “Guess Who I Saw Today” and “Boston Beguine”:

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

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics

Danse Russe will be premiered in Philadelphia next Thursday, and Paul Moravec and I are beating the bushes to spread the word about opening night. This afternoon we’ll be talking about our second opera with John Schaefer on my favorite radio show, WNYC’s Soundcheck. By a strange and wonderful coincidence, the first half of the program will be devoted to a debate about the merits of Steely Dan’s Aja, one of the few pop albums of my college days to which I still listen regularly and with the utmost pleasure. Afterward, Paul and I will talk about and play excerpts from Danse Russe.
Soundcheck airs between two and three p.m. ET. To listen live via terrestrial radio, tune to 93.9 on your FM dial (no static at all!). To listen via streaming audio, go here.

Steely Dan plays “Peg” live in 2003:

“Technology never changed anything except to make us more efficient at being who we were all along.”
Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl (Mar. 29, 2011)

Time was when I prided myself on ignoring the weather. Rain or shine, cold or hot, I rose above it, paying no psychic attention to the outside world. Or at least I pretended to pay no attention–and very often I even fooled myself.
In recent years, however, I’ve discovered, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the weather matters to me, and having spent good-sized chunks of the past two winters in Florida, I now find that it matters a lot. Fall remains my favorite season, but I like sunshine, and when I returned to New York from Winter Park last month, the near-complete absence of it sent my general frame of mind into a low-grade tailspin. So when the sun came briefly out last week and spring declared itself to be here de facto, I rejoiced.
Given the fact that I’ve just finished writing a libretto for an opera about the making of The Rite of Spring, this would seem to be a perfectly logical thing to have done. But for the moment, Danse Russe is going on without me. Yes, it’s being rehearsed in Philadelphia, but I’m completely tied up with Broadway press previews, and it won’t be until next Monday’s piano dress rehearsal that I’ll finally be able to get out of town and see what Andrew Kurtz and Center City Opera Theater have wrought.
Don’t take this as indifference. I’m enormously eager to see what Danse Russe looks like on stage–but for the moment there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can’t get out of New York for anything short of a life-or-death crisis, and the opening of my second opera, sad (or not) to say, doesn’t qualify. So far as I know, everything is going just fine down in Philadelphia, and my presence isn’t required. Paul Moravec and I put the opera through an elaborate workshop process, and we hope we fumigated it enough to kill all the bugs. No doubt we’ll need to make some last-minute fixes, just as we did for the premiere of The Letter in 2009, but my guess is that if we do, they’ll be small.
So here I sit, thankful that spring has made its belated appearance and wishing that I were at today’s rehearsal. Instead I’m writing about a Broadway show that I didn’t much like and keeping one eye on the clock, since I have to go down to Paul’s Upper West Side Apartment and tape a radio interview about Danse Russe later today. Life is what it is, and it rarely works out precisely as we’d like–which is no reason not to be basically happy with most of it, and wildly happy with some of it. Just because I wish I were somewhere else doesn’t mean I’m not glad to be here.
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Tom Lehrer sings about the coming of spring: