Archives for September 2012

I love nearly everything about my life as a peripatetic drama critic, but it does have its disadvantages, one of which is that I sometimes have to work in odd places. On Thursday, for instance, I flew to Chicago and drove from there to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I saw three shows at American Players Theatre. While waiting for my plane in New York, I corrected the proofs of the revised piano score of The Letter and fielded queries from my editors at The Wall Street Journal about that week’s drama column.
Such pesky chores are easier to do at home, but I haven’t been there much of late. In the past three months, I think I’ve spent something like five nights–maybe fewer, definitely not more–at the Manhattan apartment where Mrs. T and I affect to hang our hats. What with my reviewing trips to California, Canada, Chicago, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, my five-week stay at the MacDowell Colony, and the like amount of time that I spent rehearsing and attending performances of Satchmo at the Waldorf, I haven’t had time to do anything but (as my brother likes to say) put one foot in front of the other, day after day after day.
You wouldn’t think that correcting The Letter would be so urgent a task, seeing as how it won’t be receiving its New York premiere until next February. But operas have a longer lead time than plays, and it’s essential that Subito Music, the publisher of The Letter, get the revised piano score into print right away so that the singers who will perform it five months from now can start learning their roles.
Fortunately, working on the fly doesn’t faze me. As longtime readers of this blog will recall, I wrote much of the original version of The Letter en route from one unlikely destination to another, and I actually proofread the orchestral score of the first four scenes while sitting in a train station in San Diego. I didn’t like it, but I did it. To quote for the umpteenth time the wise words of James Burnham, “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”
For all the aforementioned reasons, I haven’t been doing much reading for pleasure lately, whether on paper or via the web, though I did find time to peruse Jordan Levin’s Miami Herald appreciation of Edward Villella and his legacy (I agree with every word) and Sarah Weinman’s essay on the novels of Dorothy B. Hughes (which interested me so much that I immediately ordered a copy of The Expendable Man).
Otherwise I stuck to the treadmill, devoting such occasional moments of leisure as I had to the novels of Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, and P.G. Wodehouse, all of which stimulate my mind without distracting me from the tasks at hand, whatever they may be.
(First of two parts)

Robert Mitchum appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?:

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

“Leisure is the time for doing something useful. This leisure the diligent person will obtain, the lazy one never.”
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Shaw Festival productions, Misalliance and Present Laughter. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Only four Shaw revivals have been mounted on Broadway since the turn of the century, and few regional theaters are doing much better. Not so Ontario’s Shaw Festival, which continues to present the plays of its namesake, most recently “Misalliance,” on a blessedly regular basis. All praise to the festival for doing so, and for putting on so fine a production of so fascinatingly quirky a play.
Shaw had started to pull away from the well-made neatness of his early stage works by the time “Misalliance” first opened in London in 1910. Michael Holroyd, his biographer, likens the play’s fantastic events to something you might expect to encounter in the topsy-turvy world of Eugène Ionesco. Joe Orton was so struck by Shaw’s plunge into the deep waters of absurdity that he used a line from the play as the epigraph to “Loot”: “Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.” The flavor of “Misalliance” lies somewhere in between these signposts. It’s a giddy “debate in one sitting” (to quote Shaw’s subtitle) in which a wrangle over marriage and its discontents is lightly disguised as a country-house farce….
Hypatia neatly sums up the play’s major failing in this exasperated outburst: “Oh, if I might only have a holiday in an asylum for the dumb!…It never stops: talk, talk, talk, talk.” Garrulity was always Shaw’s weakness, and he never let himself go more completely than in “Misalliance.” Those who, like Hypatia, favor action over words should seek their amusement elsewhere, but they’ll miss a stylish staging in which Eda Holmes, the director, keeps the conversational ball bouncing from character to character with breezy effortlessness….
Permanent ensembles typically lack the star-driven firepower of a first-class commercial production. That’s what’s missing from the Shaw Festival’s otherwise solid version of Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter,” which has been directed with special vividness by David Schurmann.
Coward wrote the part of Garry Essendine, the high-strung but irresistibly charming actor around whose whims “Present Laughter” revolves, for himself to play. Steven Sutcliffe, the very fine Canadian actor who is assuming the role at the Shaw Festival, doesn’t make the mistake of trying to “do” the inimitable Coward, but he’s still a size too small in the charisma department. If you readjust your expectations, though, you’ll likely find Mr. Sutcliffe’s performance to be both intelligent and convincing…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
A trailer for the Shaw Festival’s production of Misalliance:

“I was never less alone than when by myself.”
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs

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:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, 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)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Carousel (musical, G, closes Sept. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• French Without Tears (comedy, PG-13, closes Sept. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Nor is it bearable. To acknowledge no values at all is to deny a difference between ourselves and other particles that tumble in space. The irreducible value, though not the exclusive one, is the idea of law. Law is more than just another opinion; not because it embodies all right values, or because the values it does embody tend from time to time to reflect those of a majority or plurality, but because it is the value of values. Law is the principal institution through which a society can assert its values.”
Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent (courtesy of Peter Wehner)