Archives for November 2012

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day–and the sitting down is all.”
Joseph Conrad, letter to Edward Garnett, Mar. 29, 1898 (courtesy of Jon Winokur)

…but Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, transfers this weekend to Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, where it will run through December 2. Previews on Friday night and Saturday afternoon, followed by the official opening on Saturday night, at which I’ll be present. Come if you haven’t–or even if you have!
For more information, go here.

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:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

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

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, 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 NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Freedom of the City (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 25, reviewed here)

“A biography is always constructed from ruins but, as any archaeologist will tell you, there is never the means to unearth all the rooms, or follow the buried roads, or dig into every cistern for treasure. You try to see what the ruin meant to whoever inhabited it and, if you are lucky, you see a little way backward into time.”
Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life

Because of a glut of openings on Broadway, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which I review the Roundabout Theatre Company’s excellent new revival of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Here’s an excerpt.
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If Charles Dickens had lived to finish “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” it might have ended up becoming one of his best-remembered books, though not so much for its literary quality as its subject matter. Imagine, if you dare, a novel about an outwardly respectable choirmaster who is secretly addicted to opium and who strangles his nephew in a fit of passion (or does he?) because they’re both in love with the same woman. Who could resist a yarn like that? It’s got everything but serial murder! Alas, Dickens died of a stroke in 1870 before he could pen the final chapters, and the unfinished manuscript became a half-forgotten curiosity known only to Dickens buffs and scholars of Victorian literature–until Rupert Holmes came along.
Mr. Holmes, a multitalented singer-songwriter who topped the pop charts in 1979 with “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” had the uncommonly clever idea to turn “Drood” into a Broadway musical in which the audience is invited to vote on the ending. Is Edwin Drood really dead? If so, did John Jasper, the mad choirmaster, kill him–or was he murdered by one of the other characters? As gimmicks go, that’s a pretty slick one, and though Mr. Holmes had never previously written anything for the stage, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” ran for 608 performances. Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has brought “Drood” back to Broadway in a revival directed with rip-roaring éclat by Scott Ellis, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t run at least as long as the original 1985 production. For sheer fun, this show is hard to top….
Mr. Ellis keeps his actors on the gallop, and they give every sign of having the time of their lives, especially the plummy-voiced Jim Norton, who never met an “r” he didn’t rrrrroll. No less amusing is Chita Rivera, the proprietress of the opium den in which Jasper (Will Chase) takes his discreet leisure. Ms. Rivera delivers her lines in an accent that is an indescribably complicated and preposterous mixture of mock-Cockney and…well, something else. While the singular talents of Jessie Mueller, one of the most gifted young singers to hit Broadway in the past decade, are largely wasted on the supporting role of Helena Landless, an exotic babe from Ceylon, it’s still a pleasure to see and hear her in any capacity whatsoever….
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Read the whole thing here.

New York City Ballet performs two excerpts from George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer, set to music by Brahms. This performance was originally telecast on CBC’s L’Heure du concert in 1961. The featured dancers in the first sequence are Jillana and Conrad Ludlow:

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

“Omission and simplification help us to understand–but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator’s neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

From 2006:

Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d’art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don’t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film–not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it–is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities….

Read the whole thing here.