Archives for April 2014

Preposterous ass, that never read so far

To know the cause why music was ordain’d!

Was it not to refresh the mind of man,

After his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Because of the crush of New York openings this month, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column today in which to review the Atlantic Theater Company’s revival of The Threepenny Opera and the New York premiere of Will Eno’s The Realistic Joneses. Here’s an excerpt.
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Anybody who feels like sticking it to capitalism couldn’t do better than to revive “The Threepenny Opera,” the 1928 Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill masterpiece whose murderous anti-hero justifies his criminal career by asking this pointed question: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” By coupling such sentiments with a jaunty, sharp-cornered score that is equally indebted to early jazz and modern classical music, Brecht and Weill pulled the pin on a theatrical time bomb that has been going off at regular intervals ever since. Marc Blitzstein’s English-language adaptation, which opened Off Broadway in 1954, ran there for six years, and “The Threepenny Opera” has since been mounted three times on Broadway. No pre-“Oklahoma!” musical has had a more enduring stage life–proof that American theatergoers like nothing better than to be told what greedy bastards they are.
The economy being the way it is, I suppose it was high time for somebody to tell once more the tale of Mack the Knife and his crooked cohorts. Hence the Atlantic Theater Company’s Off-Broadway revival of Blitzstein’s pungently singable version, directed and choreographed by Martha Clarke. But Ms. Clarke, who came to fame as one of the founders of Pilobolus Dance Theatre and has since specialized in dance-driven performance-art works, is less at home with words. Not only do the dialogue scenes lack bite, but the staging is unfocused (too much stylized group movement, not enough here’s-who’s-talking clarity).
While I’ve never heard a “Threepenny” production that was better sung or played, the rough edges of Weill’s score have been blunted in the process. It doesn’t help that the cast is for the most part both smooth-faced and pretty-voiced…
Will Eno is the male Sarah Ruhl, a postmodern semi-surrealist who specializes in coyly metatheatrical comedies. Such flyweight folk cannot but prosper in the age of Irony Lite, and “The Realistic Joneses,” which has moved to Broadway after a run at the Yale Repertory Theater, is surely destined for similar success there and elsewhere.
The cast consists of two married small-town couples, both named Jones, who live next door to one another. Bob and Jennifer (Tracy Letts and Toni Collette) are older and sadder, John and Pony (Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei) younger and seemingly more frivolous, but they’re all stuck in the same leaky boat. Bob and John, it turns out, are both afflicted with an “irreversible and degenerative nerve disease” called Harriman Leavey Syndrome (yes, it’s fictional) that is gradually gnawing away at their language skills and motor functions, and Jennifer and Pony are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with their slow but inexorable disintegration.
That’s a familiar but nonetheless promising premise for a black comedy. Unfortunately, Mr. Eno, as is his wont, has swathed it in cute repartee…
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Read the whole thing here.
Lotte Lenya sings “Pirate Jenny” in G.W. Pabst’s 1931 film version of The Threepenny Opera:

From 2004:

“The only modern inventions that have been of any real use to me are the typewriter and the Pullman car,” H.L. Mencken told a reporter for Life in 1946. Kurt Andersen asked me the other day whether I thought Mencken would have taken to blogging. I think it’s possible (just), but I’m absolutely sure he would have bought an answering machine. I’ve used one for the past quarter-century, and I can’t imagine how I ever got through the day without it. I even bought my septuagenarian mother her first answering machine…

Read the whole thing here.

“Music exists only in the moment of its performance, for if one were ever so skillful in reading notes and had ever so lively an imagination, it cannot be denied that it is only in an unreal sense that music exists when it is read. It really exists only being performed. This might seem to be an imperfection in this art as compared with the others whose productions remain, because they have their existence in the sensuous. Yet this is not so. It is rather a proof of the fact that music is a higher, or more spiritual art.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

This is the other difficult season, the time of year when every drama critic in New York is complaining about having to see too much stuff in too short a span of time. I saw three shows on consecutive days last weekend, and I’ll be going to and writing about nine Broadway shows and one off-Broadway show between now and the April 23, after which I take a train to Washington, D.C., and start my summer theater travels.
My job, of course, is to keep all of those plays and musicals straight in my head, if only for long enough to write my reviews. And it is, as I have regular occasion to say, a great job, the best one I know. But forced consumption, even of the finest art, is bad for the soul–and forced consumption of fair-to-middling art, which is what you often get on Broadway, wreaks even more psychic havoc. Years ago, when I was covering music for the Kansas City Star, I reviewed so many fair-to-middling classical concerts that something happened to me that I’d previously thought impossible: I burned out. After I gave up that line of work and moved to another city, two full years went by before I voluntarily went to another public performance of classical music.
From then on I deliberately diversified my critical life, and the problem of burnout vanished, never again to recur. I did much the same thing a year or so after becoming the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal in 2003: I started getting out of town and reviewing regional theater. The Journal expects me to cover all Broadway openings, but otherwise I’m on my own, meaning that I pick the shows I see. That keeps me fresh–except in April, when I’m tied to the Broadway tracks.
Even then, my lot is infinitely more tolerable than that of a movie critic. I used to write a monthly column about film for Crisis, but I shut it down nine years ago. One of the reasons why I gave it up was that I’d gotten too busy doing other things, but another, equally compelling reason was that I’d discovered that new American movies no longer interested me other than occasionally. As I wrote in my valedictory column:

What makes me especially sad is that the first few years of this column (which I started writing in 1998) were a wonderful time for film in America, a time that now seems to have passed….I find myself less interested in writing about film, not because my love for the medium has diminished but because American filmmakers are now making so few movies worth seeing. These things happen in the arts–ballet and modern dance have also been going through a similarly bad patch–and rather than continue to rail against the self-evident each month, I’ve decided to till greener pastures.

Nothing that’s happened since then has made me want to resume the drudgery of seeing two or three new films each month, and it appears that a fast-growing number of my fellow Americans are coming to feel the same way.
Theater is different, if only because so much of a critic’s time on the aisle is spent watching new productions of old plays. While many American theater companies have lately grown less adventurous in choosing older plays to revive, it’s still easy enough for me to find shows that I not only want to see but, in many cases, long to see. My tentative reviewing plans for the summer, for instance, include:
• The U.S. premiere of Conor McPherson’s English-language adaptation of August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death
• An extremely rare revival of Juno, Marc Blitzstein’s musical version of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock
• A production of The Tempest staged by Teller, with songs by Tom Waits
• A Canadian revival of J.B. Priestley’s When We Were Married, which I’ve never seen or read
With such shows on my plate, I’ll have no trouble toughing out whatever Broadway has in store for me in the next three weeks. That said, I’m well aware of the spiritual dangers of getting stuffed up with less stimulating fare. Few things can blunt a critic’s sensibility quite so comprehensively as mediocrity. If I were only allowed to write about Broadway…well, I might go mad.
If, on the other hand, I were only allowed to write about Shakespeare, I’d do my best to remember the wise counsel of Neville Cardus, one of my favorite classical music critics. As I wrote in the Journal in 2002:

Cardus…spent World War II in Australia. Most Aussies then were well behind the cultural curve, and Cardus learned to his dismay that the centerpiece of the first concert he was to review for the Sydney Morning Herald was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the “Mona Lisa” of classical music. What could he possibly say about a warhorse he’d heard at least a hundred times?
That night, though, he glanced around the concert hall and realized that at least half ot the audience had never before heard a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth. “To those Australians, in the Sydney Town Hall, the Fifth Symphony was a revelation,” he later recalled. “I found this a tremendous inspiration….the concert was for me an illumination and living proof that there are no hackneyed masterpieces, only hackneyed critics.”

That’s good advice–sometimes hard to take, but essential to keep in mind, just as it’s important to remember that the muse descends on her schedule, not yours. I had no idea when I went to see the new Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, a familiar play that I’d already reviewed twice in the Journal, that the production would hit me as hard as it did.
C.S. Lewis said it: you must always be ready to be surprised by joy. Even on Broadway. And I am.

• Laura Lippman, the best-selling crime novelist of whose writing I am a fan of very long standing, recently gave an interview to Leah Harper of the Guardian for that paper’s “On My Radar” series. It contains a list of her current “cultural highlights,” and one of them, to my great surprise and absolute delight, was Satchmo at the Waldorf:

This is a one-man play written by the Wall Street Journal ‘s theatre critic, Terry Teachout. I think you have to have such confidence to be a theatre critic and write a play. He’s really opened himself up. He wrote a terrific biography of Louis Armstrong, aka Satchmo, and this play just recently opened…I’m really keen to see it.

Read the whole thing here.
• Dana Tyler’s WCBS interview with John Douglas Thompson and me aired on Sunday, and I was quite pleased with the results:

A 1965 episode of The Celebrity Game, a TV show hosted by Carl Reiner. The guests include Gypsy Rose Lee, Oscar Levant, Lee Marvin, Sal Mineo, and Mickey Rooney:

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

“The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.”
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game