Archives for March 2015

Helen Frankenthaler answers questions at Portland State University in May of 1972:

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

“As you get older the real war is against being consumed by nostalgia.”

Marc Maron (@marcmaron, Twitter, Mar. 8, 2015)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a pair of New York comedies, David Ives’ Lives of the Saints and Larry David’s Fish in the Dark. One is a lot better than the other. Here’s an excerpt.

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To the earnest, comedy is confusing. How can anything funny be truly serious? Their idea of a good time is a three-hour, six-hankie weeper about an atheist oncologist who comes home from a hard day at the storefront clinic to find his wife hanging from the showerhead, though they’ll settle for “Death of a Salesman.” If you doubt that such folk exist in abundance, ask yourself this: When did you last see David Ives’ name on anybody’s short list of major American playwrights? Yet Mr. Ives, who made his name writing comic sketches of the utmost brilliance and creativity before stepping up to the full-length plate with masterly plays like “New Jerusalem” and “Venus in Fur,” is one of this country’s half-dozen greatest living dramatists. An artist of the highest possible seriousness, he prefers to laugh at the vanity of human wishes instead of weeping.

“Lives of the Saints,” Mr. Ives’ latest off-Broadway venture, is a mixed bill of six one-act comedies, three of which are new and only one of which has previously been performed on a New York stage. If you’ve never seen any of his short plays, you’ll be staggered by how much meaning he can pack into 15 tightly written minutes. One of the new plays, “Life Signs,” is an epitome of his jovially surreal method. The curtain rises on a young man, his wife, his late mother and her spectacularly tactless doctor, who has just pronounced her dead. Only she isn’t: No sooner does the doctor leave the room than she comes back to life and starts revealing jaw-dropping secrets about her sex life. The shock effect is explosively funny, but within a few minutes you start to figure out that “Life Signs” is really a disguised version of “Our Town” in miniature, and all at once everyone in the theater catches on, stops laughing and becomes swept up in matters of profound import….

“Fish in the Dark,” which Larry David wrote as a vehicle for himself, is more in the nature of a well-remunerated personal appearance than an actual play. A thimbleweight comedy about two bickering brothers (played by Mr. David and Ben Shenkman) brought together by the death of their father, it consists of several thousand jokes, most of which involve somebody saying something inappropriate. Imagine a Neil Simon play without a plot—or three bottom-drawer episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” hastily knocked together into a two-hour script—and you’ll get the idea….

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To read my review of Lives of the Saints, go here.

To read my review of Fish in the Dark, go here.

An interview with David Ives, John Rando, and members of the cast of Lives of the Saints:

“Little bits of things make me do it;—perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago;—the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.”

Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?

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, most performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN VERO BEACH, FLA.:
• West Side Story (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Iceman Cometh (drama, PG-13, remounting of Chicago production, closes Mar. 15, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN ORLANDO, FLA.:
• To Kill a Mockingbird (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

“But she knew this,—that it was necessary for her happiness that she should devote herself to some one. All the elegancies and outward charms of life were delightful, if only they could be used as the means to some end. As an end themselves they were nothing. ”

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Redux

A rare TV appearance by Mark Rothko:

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

UPDATE: A reader advises me that this is in fact a fictional scene from the BBC series The Power of Art in which the actor Allan Corduner plays Rothko. My apologies for the error.

“A man who would tell me that I am pretty, unless he is over seventy, ought to be kicked out of the room. But a man who can’t show me that he thinks me so without saying a word about it, is a lout.”

Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn