Archives for 2013

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is another triple-header, in which I review Westport Country Playhouse’s revival of George Kelly’s The Show-Off and two New York productions, Daniel Sullivan’s Shakespeare in the Park outdoor staging of The Comedy of Errors and Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Show-Off,” George Kelly’s 1924 tale of a genial, fraudulent blowhard and the mother-in-law who despises him, used to be one of America’s best-loved comedies. It’s been done six times on Broadway and filmed three times in Hollywood, most famously with Spencer Tracy playing the title role. But just as Kelly himself is no longer remembered save as the uncle of Grace Kelly, so has “The Show-Off” come over time to be seen as an amiable but slight period piece. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1992 revival closed after just five weeks, and since then high-profile stagings have been scarce to the point of near-nonexistence. All praise, then, to Westport Country Playhouse for mounting a revival of “The Show-Off” directed by Nicholas Martin (“Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike”) that leaves no doubt of the play’s enduring excellence, simultaneously giving Jayne Houdyshell yet another opportunity to demonstrate that she’s the best of all possible character actors.
Never having seen “The Show-Off,” I took for granted from what I’d read about the play that it was an old-fashioned domestic comedy noteworthy only for being good of its kind. It is, in fact, a dark, sometimes startlingly harsh character study of Aubrey Piper (Will Rogers), a ne’er-do-well railroad clerk who brags endlessly about his made-up achievements in order to cover up his own sense of failure. Not at all surprisingly, Mrs. Fisher (Ms. Houdyshell), the hard-headed mother of Amy (Clea Alsip), Aubrey’s fiancée, sees through his rodomontade and dismisses him with the cold-eyed cruelty of a working-class Irishwoman who shed her last illusions long ago….
Ms. Houdyshell’s performance is cold, hard and relentless–you can see how pleased she is by the prospect of seeing Aubrey get his final comeuppance–and most of her fellow cast members give equally believable performances that root the humor of “The Show-Off” in real, closely observed life.
Mr. Martin has been known on occasion to go in for too-easy exaggeration. This predilection may help to explain Mr. Rogers’ acting, which is anachronistically goofy (he reminded me of Bill Murray) in a way that works on its own terms but nevertheless seems out of tune both with the play itself and with the rest of the staging….
The Public Theater has kicked off this year’s Shakespeare in the Park season with a sure thing, a pratfall-intensive version of “The Comedy of Errors” in which Daniel Sullivan turns Shakespeare’s shortest, silliest play into a splendidly festive romp staged in the hectic manner of a Warner Bros. swing-era film farce. Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (who is well on the way to becoming one of our top Shakespearean clowns) are in charge of the lunacy…
“The Two-Character Play,” first performed in its present form in 1975 and rarely seen thereafter, is about a pair of broken-down actors (Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer) who are touring the provinces in a play called “The Two-Character Play” in which they are cast as a pair of broken-down hermits who can’t get up the nerve to kill themselves. The results are so full of half-digested, pseudo-poetic theater-of-the-absurd burble (“And, oh, God, the air isn’t cold like ordinary cold but like the sort of cold there must be at the far, the farthest, the go-no-more last edge of space!”) as to suggest a parody of Williams written by Edward Albee, or maybe vice versa….
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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I reflect on the art collection of Bill Paley. Here’s an excerpt.
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Several of the finest paintings owned by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, including Pablo Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse” (1905-06) and Henri Matisse’s “Odalisque with a Tambourine” (1925-26), won’t be there for the next few months. Right now they’re in Maine, where “The William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism” is on view at the Portland Museum of Art. The show, which was first seen at San Francisco’s de Young Museum and will be traveling to Quebec’s Musée National des Beaux-Arts and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, consists of 61 paintings, sculptures and works on paper drawn from the personal collection of the man who ran CBS from 1928 until a few years before his death in 1990.
Most people knew Bill Paley as a giant of radio and TV, but in the rarefied world of art he was also universally known as a passionate advocate of European modernism. He left his collection to MoMA, which put it on display in 1992 and has now sent it on tour. In addition to six works by Matisse and eight by Picasso, “A Taste for Modernism” contains major pieces by Bonnard, Braque, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Gris, Manet, Miró and Renoir–a lineup that is spectacular by any standard.
Part of what makes his collection so fascinating is that it really was his collection, not an exercise in corporate window-dressing owned by an investment-conscious CEO who leaves the chore of picking his paintings to a professional consultant. No sooner did Paley discover modern art in the ’30s than he decided that he wanted “to surround myself with this kind of painting,” and that was what he did. Part of his collection was hung on the walls of his Fifth Avenue apartment and part of it in his office at CBS, where visitors were invariably stunned to see top-tier masterpieces by Picasso, Giacometti and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The only thing missing from the show and its excellent catalogue is a discussion of how Paley’s private life as an art collector intersected with his public life as a broadcasting pioneer. Almost a quarter-century after his death, it’s easy to forget that he was a businessman first and foremost, the son of a cigar manufacturer who got interested in radio because he thought it would be a good way to sell his father’s product. And while he contrived to turn himself into a cultivated gentleman, he made his own money from pop culture, some of it wonderful (it was Paley who first put Bing Crosby and Duke Ellington on network radio) and much of it brainless….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Although he could put up with pain tolerably well he had always found boredom mortal.”
Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission

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, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, closes Aug. 11, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Sept. 1, reviewed here)

• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Aug. 25, most performances sold out last week, original production 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)

• The Weir (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C:

• The Real THing (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Far From Heaven (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ARLINGTON, VA.:

• Company (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN RED BANK, N.J.:

• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Caucasian Chalk Circle (drama with music, PG-13, reviewed here)

• 3 Kinds of Exile (drama with music, PG-13, reviewed here)

“He had been weak enough to let himself be influenced by Jack’s dismay at the childish omen, and by the young man’s death; and although this was in some ways the easiest of his important missions he had a premonition of disaster. He wondered at it, and at his own attachment to life. There were so many exquisite things in it–the smell of the clean sea, the golden light of the westering sun, to say nothing of an eagle soaring on the wind. His strength was not as great as he had supposed.”
Patrick O’Brian, The Surgeon’s Mate

Jascha Heifetz plays the Chaconne from Bach’s D Minor Partita:

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

“Now when the fiddle sang at all it sang alone: but since Stephen’s departure he had rarely been in a mood for music and in any case the partita that he was now engaged upon, one of the manuscript works that he had bought in London, grew more and more strange the deeper he went into it. The opening movements were full of technical difficulties and he doubted he would ever be able to do them anything like justice, but it was the great chaconne which followed that really disturbed him. On the face of it the statements made in the beginning were clear enough: their closely argued variations, though complex, could certainly be followed with full acceptation, and they were not particularly hard to play; yet at one point, after a curiously insistent repetition of the second theme, the rhythm changed and with it the whole logic of the discourse. There was something dangerous about what followed, something not unlike the edge of madness or at least of a nightmare; and although Jack recognized that the whole sonata and particularly the chaconne was a most impressive composition he felt that if he were to go on playing it with all his heart it might lead him to very strange regions indeed.”
Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission

From 2003:

A drama critic who spends most of his evenings covering Broadway and off-Broadway openings tends to forget that most of the plays being staged in New York on any given night are performed in tiny little theaters consisting of a ratty lobby, a smallish rectangular performance space whose ceiling, walls, and floor are painted black (hence the name “black-box theater”), and an even smaller backstage area (often indistinguishable from the hall). Such places are typically situated on blocks so unfashionable that you look twice at your appointment book to be sure you’ve come to the right place. Then you climb up a flight or three of stairs, settle into a creaky old theater seat, and wait to see what happens next. Often it’s painfully earnest. Sometimes it’s downright awful. Every once in a while, though, the black box turns into a time machine in which you spend an hour or two exploring a parallel universe of the imagination, and when the lights come up again, you remember why you love theater, and why the waitress who served you brunch in between callbacks loves it, too….

Read the whole thing here.