Archives for March 2015

Edward R. Murrow interviews Frank Sinatra on Person to Person, originally telecast on CBS on Sept. 14, 1956:

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

“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

This meme made the rounds in 2014:

List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. They do not have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way.

Facebook’s Data Science team subsequently analyzed 130,000 status updates that were specifically responsive to this meme. Here were the top ten choices:

Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (21.08%)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (14.48%)

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (13.86%)
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (7.48%)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (7.28%)
The Holy Bible (7.21%)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (5.97%)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (5.82%)
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (5.70%)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (5.61%)

To see the top one hundred choices, go here.

To see my own choices as of 2014, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I have next to nothing good to say about the Broadway transfer of The Audience. Here’s an excerpt.

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No Broadway season is complete without at least one glittering piece of sucker bait for Anglophiles. In order to go over big at the box office, the show in question needs to meet as many as possible of the following specifications: The production must have originated in England and should be visibly costly. In addition, the subject matter must be exclusively and conspicuously English. Finally, the cast should feature at least one English actor who is popular on this side of the Atlantic. Do all four of these things and you can’t miss…

Seasoned theatrical handicappers are thus betting on Peter Morgan’s “The Audience,” which has just transferred to Broadway from London’s West End, to finish in the big money. Not only does it star Helen Mirren, but she plays Queen Elizabeth II, and Mr. Morgan’s cast of characters also includes such luminaries as Winston Churchill (Dakin Matthews) and Margaret Thatcher (Judith Ivey). What’s more, the subject matter is so determinedly English that the printed program contains a supplementary flyer identifying the supporting characters for the benefit of historically challenged ticket holders: “Winston Churchill, inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain to victory in World War II.”

Mr. Morgan, who previously wrote “Frost/Nixon” and the screenplay for “The Queen,” specializes in slick confections that are shallowly rooted in matters of fact. This one arises from a premise stated with elephantine simplicity in the opening lines: “Every week the Queen of the United Kingdom has a private audience with her Prime Minister. It is not an obligation. It is a courtesy extended by the Prime Minister to bring Her Majesty up to speed. The meeting takes place in the Private Audience Room located on the first floor of Buckingham Palace.” Aaaand…we’re off! The play consists of made-up portrayals of Queen Elizabeth’s private audiences with eight of her real-life prime ministers, starting with Churchill and ending with David Cameron (Rufus Wright), the present occupant of the post….

What we have here, in short, is an actor’s tour de force, a piece of richly appointed servant porn in which Ms. Mirren changes age and costume instantaneously and in full view of the audience. In the first scene she’s 69 years old, then 25, and so on and so forth. Each scene is a vignette, yet another piece in the great mosaic that is British history, and the fact that the queen’s audiences with her prime ministers always take place behind closed doors allows Mr. Morgan to let his imagination run rampant, there being no primary source material on which he can base his yarn-spinning.

It’s a clever enough premise save for one incapacitating flaw, which is that “The Audience” has no plot. Yes, we watch Queen Elizabeth growing up, and Ms. Mirren impersonates her (as she did in “The Queen”) with total plausibility all along the way. But the result is a stately pageant, not a conflict-driven play, and if you aren’t more than casually familiar with postwar British history, you’ll likely find some of the scenes numbingly hard to follow….

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Read the whole thing here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s film about the life and work of J.M.W. Turner. Here’s an excerpt.

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Life usually tells the best stories—but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. That’s why so many novelists, filmmakers and playwrights are drawn to fictionalized biography, which at its best can plumb the complexities of a life in ways that aren’t available to even the most accomplished of conventional biographers. Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” tells us more about Huey Long’s fractured character than any existing biography of Louisiana’s most celebrated politician, just as Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” shines a brighter light on the passions and peculiarities of William Randolph Hearst than a well-chosen five-foot shelf of non-fiction books about the man and his times.

Nevertheless, “All the King’s Men” and “Citizen Kane” are works of fiction freely based on fact (even the names were changed) that make no claims to historical accuracy. Explicitly biographical art, by contrast, can be a considerably trickier proposition. Peter Morgan’s “The Audience” and “Frost/Nixon” are fictionalized stage versions of actual occurrences in the lives of well-known men and women—and both of these exceedingly well-manicured plays remind us that dramatization too often amounts to trivialization.

This is never more true than when it comes to films that purport to tell the story of a creative artist’s life. (Two words: Cole Porter.) But if you want to see a biopic about an artist that gets everything right—and one that is also a major work of art in its own right—then make haste to seek out “Mr. Turner,” Mike Leigh’s film about the man widely and rightly thought to be England’s greatest painter….

Except for “Topsy-Turvy,” Mr. Leigh’s identically penetrating 1999 study of how Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Mikado,” “Mr. Turner” is truer to the realities of the artist’s life than any other movie ever made. But what really sets it apart from such previous art-themed films as “Lust for Life,” Vincente Minnelli’s excellent 1956 study of Vincent Van Gogh, is that “Mr. Turner” isn’t just about Turner. It’s also about the long-lost world in which he lived, England in the first half of the 19th century, and part of what makes it a great film is the thickly layered complexity with which it illustrates that world.

The special genius of film is that it is a realistic, quasi-documentary pictorial medium. Hence it lends itself to the construction of cinematic “time machines” like “Mr. Turner” and “Topsy-Turvy,” in which layer upon layer of painstakingly realized visual details create an uncanny impression of historical reality. No stage production can summon up that kind of you-are-there illusion…

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Read the whole thing here.

The theatrical trailer for Mr. Turner:

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”

V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Six years ago I wrote a Wall Street Journal column called “Can Jazz Be Saved?” that was misread, misunderstood, misquoted, and dismissed by large numbers of shortsighted musicians who were determined not to face the facts.

Contrary to widespread popular belief, I didn’t say anywhere in that column that jazz is dead. This is what I really said:

It’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.

The bad news came from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the fourth to be conducted by the NEA (in participation with the U.S. Census Bureau) since 1982. These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up and take notice:

• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.

• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older—fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.

• Older people are also much less likely to attend jazz performances today than they were a few years ago. The percentage of Americans between the ages of 45 and 54 who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 9.8%. In 2002, it was 13.9%. That’s a 30% drop in attendance….

What I find no less revealing, though, is that the median age of the jazz audience is now comparable to the ages for attendees of live performances of classical music (49 in 2008 vs. 40 in 1982), opera (48 in 2008 vs. 43 in 1982), nonmusical plays (47 in 2008 vs. 39 in 1982) and ballet (46 in 2008 vs. 37 in 1982). In 1982, by contrast, jazz fans were much younger than their high-culture counterparts.

What does this tell us? I suspect it means, among other things, that the average American now sees jazz as a form of high art. Nor should this come as a surprise to anyone, since most of the jazz musicians that I know feel pretty much the same way. They regard themselves as artists, not entertainers, masters of a musical language that is comparable in seriousness to classical music—and just as off-putting to pop-loving listeners who have no more use for Wynton Marsalis than they do for Felix Mendelssohn….

I stopped responding long ago to people who complained about my column without having read it (a category that all too obviously encompassed a considerable number of the people who wrote about it at the time). Now, though, comes a new set of numbers reported earlier this week in The Jazz Line under the headline “Jazz Has Become the Least-Popular Genre in the U.S.” that I feel obliged to share:

According to Nielsen’s 2014 Year-End Report, jazz is continuing to fall out of favor with American listeners and has tied with classical music as the least-consumed music in the U.S., after children’s music.

Both jazz and classical represent just 1.4% of total U.S. music consumption apiece. However, classical album sales were higher for 2014, which puts jazz at the bottom of the barrel.

This continues an alarming trend that has seen more and more listeners move away from jazz every year.

Album sales have long been a key measure of the popularity of individual genres, and year after year jazz album sales continue to fall.

In 2011, a total of 11 million jazz albums (CD, cassette, vinyl, & digital) were sold, according to BusinessWeek. This represents 2.8% of all music sold in that year. However, just a year later, in 2012, that percentage fell to 2.2%. It rose slightly to 2.3% in 2013 before falling once again to just 2% in 2014.

That 2% represents just 5.2 million albums sold by all jazz artists in 2014. In comparison, the best-selling artist of 2014, Taylor Swift, sold 3.7 million copies of her latest album, 1989, in the last 2 months of 2014 alone.

Believe me, I’m not happy to pass on these latest numbers. I didn’t want to be right back in 2009, either. But I was—and I am.

I had no quick-fix recipes to offer six years ago. Instead, I concluded “Can Jazz Be Saved?” by suggesting that if Americans really were coming to see jazz as an art music, then jazz musicians needed to do what a growing number of forward-looking classical musicians and administrators were finally starting to do:

Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they should like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. If you’re marketing Schubert and Stravinsky to those listeners, you have no choice but to start from scratch and make the case for the beauty of their music to otherwise intelligent people who simply don’t take it for granted. By the same token, jazz musicians who want to keep their own equally beautiful music alive and well have got to start thinking hard about how to pitch it to young listeners—not next month, not next week, but right now.

For the most part, they didn’t—and the results of their refusal to face the facts are now painfully clear.

UPDATE: If you think I’m saying that contemporary jazz is not creatively vital, you didn’t read what I wrote.

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:
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, closes June 7, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (historical musical, PG-13, closes May 3, moves to Broadway Aug. 6, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Both Your Houses (political satire, G/PG-13, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)
• The Matchmaker (romantic farce, G, closes Apr. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Between Riverside and Crazy (drama, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes Mar. 22, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, some performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Lives of the Saints (six one-act comedies, PG-13/R, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• Henry V (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN VERO BEACH, FLA.:
• West Side Story (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, remounting of Chicago production, original production reviewed here)