Archives for 2011

“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• 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, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 13, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

“The business of the dramatist is to keep out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene-shifter.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Milton”

I’m in suspended animation, sort of. I was supposed to fly last night from Sarasota, Florida, to New York’s Kennedy Airport, but my flight was canceled in the afternoon and rescheduled for this morning. Later in the day my new flight was canceled, leading to a mildly amusing absurdity: JetBlue then rescheduled me to arrive in New York at 11:32 Thursday morning and depart again for Sarasota at 12:18 that same afternoon.
Not that it mattered, since I’d needed to get to Manhattan in time to see two plays on Wednesday, a matinee and an evening performance, and meet with a stage director in between shows. The canceled flights thus took away the point of my trip, so I decided to be sensible and sit tight in Sarasota for two extra days.
And what am I doing here? Nothing out of the ordinary. Last night I wrote another chunk of the third chapter of my Duke Ellington biography, on which I’ve been working since Mrs. T and I arrived in Florida last week. I got up this morning, ordered a room-service breakfast, knocked out my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and e-mailed it to New York. We’re staying at a waterfront hotel, and though it’s too brisk to swim, the sun is shining brightly, so the next thing on my agenda is a walk.
Needless to say, I’m going to keep on chipping away at the Ellington book while I’m here, but neither Mrs. T nor I has ever been to the Ringling Museum of Art, so an afternoon field trip may be in order. On Friday night we’ll go to Asolo Rep’s revival of Twelve Angry Men, which is why we came to Sarasota in the first place. The next day, weather permitting, I’ll fly up to Philadelphia for the workshop performances of Danse Russe about which I posted earlier today.
I have, in short, plenty to do, but I’m still at loose ends. My life requires me to live by the clock, and it always throws me for a loop when that clock gets stopped, whatever the reason may be. Last week’s vacation on Sanibel Island was part of a carefully wrought plan–seven days of relaxation–and so doing nothing seemed all right to me. Today, by contrast, I ought to be be tearing up and down the snowy streets of Manhattan, slipping and sliding from one appointment to the next. Instead I’m sitting in a hotel room in Sarasota, looking at the sun on the water and feeling vaguely guilty.
Such guilt, I suspect, is one of the curses of modernity: these days precious few of us know know how to turn loose the passing hours and let them go unregretted. Perhaps I’ll feel better about their passing later today, and I already know I should regard it as an act of grace. For the moment, though, I can’t shake off the nagging suspicion that I’m somehow to blame for their demise.

Danse Russe, my latest operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, will be given two staged workshop performances this weekend, the first on Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware, and the second on Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, where Center City Opera Theater will be giving the world premiere on April 28. This one-act opera is a backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring, and Paul and I have been busily revising it ever since the first workshop performance in November. These latest performances are open to the public, and assuming that the sky doesn’t fall again, stranding me somewhere in Florida, I’ll be present at both of them.
For more information, go here.

Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang play “Wild Cat” in King of Jazz:

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

“There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing the fiddle. In all other things we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)