Archives for May 2012

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Shakespeare productions, Chicago Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and Classic Stage Company’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s an excerpt.
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In Barbara Gaines’ version of the rarely performed “Timon of Athens,” the title character (played with coolly arrogant panache by Ian McDiarmid) becomes a high-rolling futures trader who gets caught in a credit crunch and finds one day that his closest “friends” have stopped returning his calls. What brings Ms. Gaines’ idea to life is the boldness of her theatrical gestures, coupled with the clarity of her thinking. For her, Timon is a vain, self-centered fool who makes the mistake of thinking that the smooth sycophants who surround him like blood-sniffing sharks care for him, not his money. Give them iPads and put them in bespoke suits and you get a “Timon of Athens” that plays like a cross between “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Citizen Kane.”
The comparison to “Kane” is of the utmost relevance, not only because the fast-moving cross-cutting of Ms. Gaines’ staging is conspicuously cinematic but because she and Mr. McDiarmid have trimmed Shakespeare’s text as ruthlessly–and creatively–as did Orson Welles, “Kane”‘s maker, when he edited “Julius Caesar” for his 1937 Broadway production. This “Timon” has been similarly compressed and reshaped in such a way as to give it the shadowless simplicity of a fable….
When high-concept Shakespeare stagings go astray, you get something not unlike the scattershot first part of Tony Speciale’s up-to-the-second modern-dress version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which feels more like a bag of tricks than a carefully thought-out production. It also feels like a vehicle for two biggish stars, Christina Ricci (as Hermia) and Bebe Neuwirth (doubling as Titania and Hippolyta), neither of whom appears to be at ease with the unsparing demands of classical acting. On the other hand, just about everybody in the cast is trying way, way too hard, going for easy laughs like a purse-snatcher goes for little old ladies with great big handbags.
Be patient: Things start looking up as soon as the sleeping lovers are discovered in the enchanted wood and Puck (Taylor Mac) pulls the donkey’s head off Bottom (Steven Skybell) and turns him back into a human being. Mr. Skybell describes Bottom’s dream with sweetly wide-eyed bemusement, after which he and his fellow “rude mechanicals” enact “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe,” Shakespeare’s brutal parody of a rustic staging of a classical tragedy, with a gentle gravity that is surprising in just the right way….
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Read the whole thing here.

My “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal reflects on the rarity of good novels whose principal characters are professional musicians. Here’s an excerpt.
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Of all the major branches of human endeavor, the one that figures least prominently in serious fiction may be music making. I doubt there have been more than a dozen English-language novels of indisputable significance in which one or more of the central characters was a professional musician, and fewer still in which those characters were portrayed in a way that other musicians would find convincing….
I can think of only two novelists who wrote about music as though they were musicians, even though they weren’t. One is Patrick O’Brian, the author of a much-loved series of adventure novels about Jack Aubrey, an early 19th-century British sea captain, and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon and best friend. Both men are devoted amateur musicians, and Mr. O’Brian brilliantly suggested the rough gusto with which they made music in between battles on the high seas.
The other novelist is Kingsley Amis, who threw critics off the scent by making the anti-hero of his first novel, “Lucky Jim” (1954), a culture-hating philistine who claimed to despise all forms of music, at one point going so far as to refer to the greatest of all classical composers as “filthy Mozart.” Needless to say, nobody who truly loathed Mozart would bother to hurl such abuse at him, and you can’t read far in “Lucky Jim” (which will be reprinted later this year by New York Review Books) without sensing that Jim knows quite a bit more about music than he’s letting on.
Mr. Amis wrote two more novels in which he revealed himself completely. “The Alteration,” published and set in 1976, is the story of Hubert Anvil, a boy soprano who lives in a parallel universe in which the Protestant Reformation never happened. Not only is Western Europe entirely Catholic, but it is still common for talented young male singers to be castrated so that their voices will never change, and Pope John XXIV, a Yorkshireman, wants Hubert to become the soprano soloist of the Vatican choir…permanently.
Even more striking is “Girl, 20” (1971), whose principal character, Sir Roy Vandervane, is a Leonard Bernstein-like conductor who is in the throes of a midlife crisis that has led him to lust after a 17-year-old hippie. When not chasing his teenage mistress, Sir Roy pursues his trade, and everything he says about it is squarely on the mark….
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Read the whole thing here.

I’m one of the guests on this week’s episode of Theater Talk. Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, and I will be talking about the Broadway season just past with Michael Riedel and Susan Haskins. The episode will air on New York’s CUNY-TV at eight-thirty tonight, with additional showings on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
For more information, or to view the episode in streaming video, go here.
(This telecast was taped prior to my mother’s death.)

Without you

No rose can grow;

No leaf be green

If never seen

Your sweetest face;

No bird have grace

Or power to sing;

Or anything

Be kind, or fair,

And you nowhere.

Elinor Wylie, “Little Elegy” (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

My mother loved to be taken for a drive in the country. We rarely went anywhere in particular, just as we rarely talked about anything in particular. She was content simply to ride along, chatting idly about the scenery and reminiscing about this and that. Somewhere along the way we’d stop for ice cream, and by the time we got home, she was perfectly happy.

It was on one of the last of these afternoon drives that I got a call from my agent in New York telling me that Satchmo at the Waldorf would be produced by Shakespeare & Company, a coincidence that delighted my mother (not to mention my agent) no end.

Our final outing was in November. By then my mother was so weak that I had to prop her up with one hand while steering with the other. Even so, she was visibly overjoyed to see the byways of southeast Missouri one last time.

Today I set out alone, driving down the back roads that my mother had loved so well, and I did in solitude what I had been unable to do at her funeral. Grief embraced me, and I mourned her loss.

And so goodbye.

Jim Hall and Ron Carter play “Skylark”:

“Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.”
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Courtesy of Our Girl in Chicago, Rosanne Cash sings “I Was Watching You” on The Tonight Show in 2006: