Archives for October 25, 2013

The Wall Street Journal has given me extra space this week to review three particularly interesting New York openings, Fun Home, Juno and the Paycock, and The Snow Geese. Here’s an excerpt.
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Most musicals are more or less traditional boy-gets-girl romantic comedies. “Fun Home” contains a romantic subplot–albeit a lesbian one–but otherwise Alison Bechdel’s powerfully poignant 2006 comic-book memoir about the suicide of her homosexual father couldn’t be less traditional, and the decision of Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori to turn Ms. Bechdel’s “family tragicomic” (her phrase) into a musical will likely strike many theatergoers as little short of lunatic. Not so. Ms. Kron and Ms. Tesori have done a skillful job of reshaping a gripping but elusively idiosyncratic piece of source material into a fluid, quick-paced chamber musical. No, it’s not “Guys and Dolls” by the longest of shots, but “Fun Home,” judging by the preview that I saw last Saturday, has real mainstream audience appeal. The problem is that the stage version, though it faithfully follows the plot of the book, is fundamentally untrue to its distinctive tone–and even if you’ve never read “Fun Home,” I think you’ll suspect that something is off.
Bruce Bechdel (Michael Cerveris), the anti-hero of “Fun Home,” is a high-school English teacher who doubles as the funeral director of the small Pennsylvania town in which he and his family live. Alison (played at various ages by Beth Malone, Alexandra Socha and Sydney Lucas), his boyish daughter, gradually realizes that she is, as she puts it, a “butch lesbian.” At 19 she comes out to her parents and falls in love, after which Helen (Judy Kuhn), her mother, blindsides Alison by confessing that Bruce is a closeted gay man who has had surreptitious sexual relations with his teenaged students….
In her book, Ms. Bechdel tells this agonizing tale frankly but with what she correctly describes as “cool aesthetic distance.” The dry, detached candor of her first-person narration is part of what made “Fun Home” so distinctive, and it is almost entirely missing from the stage version. So, too, are the jagged edges of Bruce’s personality. In the book he is a tightly wound emotional cripple whose self-loathing manifests itself in brutal verbal assaults on his wife and children. In the musical, by contrast, he is shy, scared, ingratiating and full of repressed desires to which he gives voice in song, something that the real-life Bruce could never have done. Meanwhile, Ms. Bechdel herself has undergone no less drastic a transformation, becoming in the show an adorable tomboy from whom the irony with which she holds the world at arm’s length has been stripped away.
I don’t deny that these changes, or something not unlike them, were probably necessary in order to turn “Fun Home” into a musical. But their collective effect has been to soften and sweeten Ms. Bechdel’s book, at times almost beyond recognition….
Sometimes you don’t need to say much about a show beyond the fact that it’s open, so here goes: The Irish Repertory Theatre is presenting a rare American revival of “Juno and the Paycock,” Sean O’Casey’s 1924 masterpiece about a ne’er-do-well blowhard and his hope-starved wife, in which the title roles are played by J. Smith-Cameron, one of America’s greatest stage actors, and Ciarán O’Reilly, the company’s much-admired producing director. I doubt that “Juno” will receive a more eloquent or sympathetic production in my lifetime than this one….
Sharr White, who scored a surprise success on Broadway last season with “The Other Place,” is back again with “The Snow Geese,” a freshly minted school-of-Chekhov period piece set in 1917 (there’s even a Ukrainian cook) in which we meet a not-quite-upper-middle-class American family whose financial luck has just run out. I had trouble with the first act, which never seemed to take wing, and though the second act was more involving, I felt at play’s end that the last word had been spoken an hour and a half earlier by one of the unhappy characters: “God knows what would happen if we ever stopped talking and actually did something around here.”…
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Read the whole thing here.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film version of Juno and the Paycock:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I use the release of two new Bach albums by Jeremy Denk and Chris Thile as the occasion for reflecting on the eternal problem of keeping the classics fresh. Here’s an excerpt.
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Of all America’s up-and-coming classical instrumentalists, Jeremy Denk, the pianist-blogger who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in September, might well be the most interesting. A brainy virtuoso at home in the world of words, he plays with a striking blend of deeply considered expression and total technical command. Mr. Denk records for Nonesuch, which favors smart artists who do it their way, and he made his solo debut for the label last year with a coupling of Beethoven’s knotty C Minor Piano Sonata, Op. 111, and György Ligeti’s bracingly modern Piano Etudes, a fusion of past and present that set the critics to buzzing.
Now Mr. Denk has released his second Nonesuch album, a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, the mammoth keyboard masterpiece to which eggheads of all sorts have long been irresistibly drawn. It’s gorgeously and insightfully played, and I can’t imagine any musician not wanting to hear what so thoughtful an artist has to say about so towering a musical monument.
But what about everybody else? The “Goldbergs,” after all, have already been recorded by such celebrated pianists and harpsichordists as Daniel Barenboim, Simone Dinnerstein, Keith Jarrett, Wanda Landowska, Murray Perahia, and András Schiff, as well as in arrangements for brass choir, harp, marimba, organ and string trio. Glenn Gould recorded the “Goldbergs” twice, in 1955 and 1985, and both of his versions are widely and rightly regarded as indispensable. All this being the case, is it possible for any musician, even one as gifted as Mr. Denk, to further enhance our understanding of so oft-told a musical tale? Or would he have done better to pick a less well-known piece?…
Mr. Denk, who is nobody’s fool, has shrewdly chosen to release his version of the “Goldbergs” as part of a two-disc set that also contains a DVD devoted to “video liner notes” in which he speaks with uncommon perspicuity about how the piece is put together, accompanying himself on piano. That’s one way–and a good one–to stand out from the pack. An even better one is exemplified by another of Nonesuch’s recent releases, an album in which Chris Thile plays three of Bach’s sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin on mandolin. Mr. Thile, who is better known for the riotously creative music that he plays with the Punch Brothers, his progressive bluegrass-pop combo, is by no means a classical-music dilettante. His delicate yet propulsive interpretation of the G Minor Sonata would be more than worth hearing on violin, and the pointed sound of the mandolin endows it with a thrillingly new palette of instrumental colors….
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Read the whole thing here.
An excerpt from the “video liner notes” for Jeremy Denk’s new recording of the Goldberg Variations:

A movement from Chris Thile’s new recording of Bach’s G Minor Sonata:

Today I’m flying to Austin, where I’ll be talking about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday at 12:15.
For more information about my appearance, go here.

Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn play Strayhorn’s “Take the A Train”:

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics