Archives for November 2013

If you live in Kansas City and its environs, I’ll be appearing today on KCUR’s Up to Date to talk with Steve Kraske about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. The segment will start around 12:25 ET.
You can listen live in streaming audio by going here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two much-praised New York shows, Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bruce Norris’ Domesticated, neither of which pleased me. Here’s an excerpt.
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After “Spider-man,” what? Julie Taymor, whose professional reputation was severely bruised two years ago when she was shoved out of the creative team that put together Broadway’s best-looking mediocre musical, has now returned to the green pastures of high art with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the inaugural offering of Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. As befits the opening of a brand-new theater, Ms. Taymor’s production is a spectacular affair, not as budget-bustingly so as “Spider-man” but very much in its spare-no-expense vein. Actors fly through the air, disappear through trap doors, even grow 20 feet tall before your astonished eyes, all accompanied by the festively spooky Hollywood-style incidental music of Elliot Goldenthal, Ms. Taymor’s creative partner and real-life husband. I’ve never seen a Shakespeare staging in which more things happened in less time, and I wanted very much to like the results, which are nothing if not likable–relentlessly so, if truth be told.
What stopped me from doing so was Ms. Taymor’s near-exclusive emphasis on the visual. She has, as everyone who’s seen “The Lion King” knows, a singular ability to create poetic stage pictures, and her “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is full to overflowing of eye-popping images…
Therein lies the flaw in this production: It’s all about what you see and never about what is said. Nearly every speech is decorated with a corresponding piece of stage trickery, and it doesn’t take long before you lose sight of the play itself. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that none of the acting is memorable, or that Ms. Taymor stoops to cute Disneyish caricature whenever she pauses to characterize an individual player. Puck is Roger Rabbit, Oberon is Darth Vader, while the Rude Mechanicals come off like an updated version of the Seven Dwarves. The result is a staging that looks like a piece of performance art à la Cirque du Soleil and plays like a children’s show….
“Domesticated,” Bruce Norris’ new play, is just like “Clybourne Park,” which made him rich and famous. Only the subject matter has been changed, presumably to protect the author from well-founded charges of repetition: “Clybourne Park” is about race and “Domesticated” is about sex. Otherwise the two shows are essentially indistinguishable. Once again we are presented with a bad guy, in this case a politician with zipper disease (Jeff Goldblum, who is way too nebbishy) who commits an unforgivable sin (in a nutshell, he acts like Anthony Weiner, only worse). Once again Mr. Norris confuses the issue by briefly making the bad guy look sympathetic, after which he allows the good gal (Laurie Metcalf, who is formidable as Mr. Goldblum’s furious wife) to unmask him as a monster of carnal appetite. Once again the climax of the play is a catfight that fails to conceal the arthritic pacing of the second act. And once again it all adds up to a comprehensively phony piece of deck-stacked pandering…
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I look at the high-art attendance crisis and draw a ruthless conclusion. Here’s an excerpt.
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Everyone who keeps up with the National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts data knows that high-culture attendance numbers have been shrinking across the board for well over. Opera, theater, dance, symphony orchestras, even big-city art museums: All are drawing smaller crowds. So what’s the larger meaning of these figures? Three recent articles that view the problem from different perspectives come to similar conclusions:
• Says Jaime Weinman in the Canadian magazine Maclean’s: “The lack of funding for orchestras and opera companies may already be raising the question of whether North America has too many of them–or whether, as with other institutions, there should be more streamlining and consolidations….The Baby Boomers who are becoming the new generation of old people have grown up with rock music, and may not be very likely to invest in classical music.”
• Theater blogger Howard Sherman sees much the same thing happening in his area of expertise: “While in the first half of my life I watched the burgeoning of the resident theatre movement, which in turn seeded the growth of countless smaller local companies, my later years will see a contraction in overall production at the professional level; it’s already begun, as a few companies seem to go under every year and have been for some time.”
• Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, writes in the Huffington Post that we may be “witnessing a major transition in the arts from regional organizations to fewer mega-organizations with the sophistication to mount large-scale productions, to market them well and to raise large sums of money….Does this spell the end of the mid-sized regional arts organization? Will it be increasingly difficult to build an audience and a donor base for a $10 million arts organization? Will boards simply give up trying to fund ever-increasing budgets? Will many of these organizations shrink, or disappear entirely?”
Here’s another question: Might it be possible that some of them should disappear?…
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Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: In the first sentence of this column, not visible here, I originally referred to the Minnesota Orchestra as “strike-bound.” The orchestra is, of course, locked out, not on strike. My mistake–I fell victim to a fit of absentmindedness. (The Journal has corrected the online version of the column.)

“When will I ever learn? When will I ever understand that what’s astonishing about the number of men who remain faithful is not that it’s so small but that there are any of them at all?”
Nora Ephron, Heartburn

In case you haven’t heard, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center is presenting a Duke Ellington tribute concert called “Portrait of Duke” on Saturday afternoon as part of its week-long James Moody Democracy of Jazz Festival. I’m the curator of and master of ceremonies for the program, which features performances by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks (about whom much more here) of original big-band charts by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, including “Chelsea Bridge,” “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blues,” “Ko-Ko,” “Mood Indigo,” and “The Mooche.”
Hilary Gardner, a fabulous young singer about whose debut album I recently raved in this space, is supplying the vocals. As for me, I’ll be reading excerpts from Duke and introducing rare film clips of Ellington on and off stage.
The show starts at two p.m. Admission is $49. To buy a ticket or 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, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, 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)

• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, extended through Dec. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, extended through Dec. 8, reviewed here)

• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, closes Dec. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Winslow Boy (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes Dec. 2, reviewed here)

“She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights…that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way.”
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood

In April I was reunited with an old friend from Kansas City whom I hadn’t seen in the flesh for a couple of decades. She recently sent me a half-dozen snapshots that she took some thirty-five years ago, of which this one is the funniest and, I think, the most characteristic.
We were at an outdoor jazz concert that I was reviewing for the Kansas City Star. I can’t remember who was playing in Brush Creek Plaza that sunny summer afternoon, or why I chose to strike the preposterous pose that my friend captured on film, but I still thought it might amuse you to see what I looked like in my long-gone youth.
Because I’ve hung onto no more than a handful of old photos, none of them dating back more than a decade or so, it always takes me by surprise to see the older ones that my friends and family have preserved. The “me” in my mind’s eye is the person whom I see in the bathroom mirror every morning, a pleasant-looking gent on whom middle age crept up so stealthily that he never saw it coming.
Most people tell me that I look younger than my fifty-seven years, which I suppose should be heartening, but when I look at the youngster pictured above, all I can see is the countless changes wrought by time’s cruel hand. Yes, he and I are recognizably the same person, but my hair is unequivocally gray now, while my eyes are rimmed with crow’s feet and shadowed with the unsought knowledge to which Philip Larkin alluded in the great poem that gave me the title of this posting. In it I describe the effect of seeing a class photo from 1962 that was sent to me four years ago by another friend of my youth:

What do I have in common with the boy on the front row? I’m still left-handed, brown-eyed, and clumsy. I still love to read–and I’m still shy, though I’ve learned to behave otherwise. But I moved away from Smalltown well over half a lifetime ago, and I left behind much of what I thought I was. First I wanted to be a fireman, then a concert violinist, then a schoolteacher. Never did I imagine myself living in New York, writing books, or becoming a drama critic. Nor would the boy in the picture have been able to grasp what it would mean to do any of those things.

“It’s a good thing we don’t know what it’s like to be grown up when we’re small,” I told a colleague of mine the other day. “If we did, we’d kill ourselves.” He laughed, as I meant for him to do–but I was kidding on the square. I love my life, my job, my after-hours pursuits, my adored Mrs. T. At the same time, though, I also know, unlike the cheery fellow with the pencil who is pictured above, that even at its smoothest, the road of life is full of potholes, some of them deep enough to bend the axle of the best-built car.
I’m glad that he didn’t know about some of the bigger ones that were waiting for him up around the bend, that he was content that day to enjoy the company of the lively young woman who took the snapshot at which he would marvel half a lifetime later. Sufficient unto the summer is the happiness thereof.
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Melissa Errico sings “Once Upon a Summertime.” The music and orchestral arrangement are by Michel Legrand and the words are by Johnny Mercer: