Archives for May 22, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report enthusiastically on two new plays, Robert Askins’ Permission and Katori Hall’s The Blood Quilt. Here’s an excerpt.

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Robert Askins’ “Hand to God” set the bar very high for “Permission,” in which he returns for the second time in a row to the mysterious world of fundamentalist-flavored evangelical Christianity as practiced in suburban Texas. Mysterious, that is, to Manhattanites: Most residents of flyover country (as it’s known on the godless coasts) don’t find it strange at all. But here as in “Hand to God,” Mr. Askins has found a decidedly peculiar corner of the culture that spawned him and put it on stage for the rest of us to puzzle out.

“Permission” is about two Christian couples, one of which hews to a cultish practice called “Christian Domestic Discipline” in which the wife is “submissive” to the all-powerful authority of her husband and consents to be spanked by him if she fails to do his bidding. “Permission” proceeds from the premise that CDD (which really exists) is actually a stealthy way of legitimizing the sadomasochistic longings of its practitioners. This notion isn’t all that amusing in and of itself, but Mr. Askins uses it to fuel a knockabout farce (so to speak) in which things get out of hand with dizzying and delicious speed.

Mr. Askins doesn’t content himself with sniping lazily at easy targets. Yes, his benighted characters are engaging in absurd behavior, but they’re real people, not grotesques…

Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” which made it to Broadway in 2011, did nothing for me, but colleagues familiar with her previous work assured me that it didn’t do her justice. Then I saw “Our Lady of Kibeho” and found it impressive—the best new play of 2014, in fact. So I decided to check out Arena Stage’s premiere production of “The Blood Quilt” to see which way the coin would fall, and the verdict is positive. By turns raucously funny and electrically intense, “The Blood Quilt” is a tale of black family life that places Ms. Hall alongside Amy Herzog as the most promising young American playwright of the past decade.

The plot of “The Blood Quilt” is old-fashioned in all the right ways. Four half-sisters (their mother got around) return to the home in rural Georgia where they grew up and where their mother has just died. When she was alive, they came home each year for a quilting bee, and their plan is to continue the ritual. One of them, though, is a big-city lawyer (Meeya Davis) who broke away from the family and didn’t make it back for the funeral, thus setting in motion a well-wrought kitchen-sink drama whose dramaturgy is reminiscent of “A Raisin in the Sun” but whose subject matter is wholly contemporary. In addition, Ms. Hall shares with August Wilson and Horton Foote the magical ability to sift poetry from everyday speech…

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To read my complete review of Permission, go here.

To read my complete review of The Blood Quilt, go here.

A video featurette about Permission:

Katori Hall talks about The Blood Quilt:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I hold forth on the rise, fall, and temporary return of the Broadway musical-comedy overture. Here’s an excerpt.

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If you’re under the age of 50 and you somehow manage to score a ticket to Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of “The King and I,” get set for a surprise at the top of the show. Here’s what happens: The lights go down. Ted Sperling, the conductor, steps into the pit, raises his baton and gives the downbeat. The 28-piece orchestra starts playing…and nothing else happens. No singing, no dancing, no explosions. Instead, you hear a medley of tunes from the show that you’re about to see, and when it’s over, you’re so worked up by the thrilling music and brilliant playing that you give Mr. Sperling and the orchestra a huge round of applause.

Then the show starts.

If, on the other hand, you’re older than 50, you won’t be surprised in the least by what I’ve just described. That’s the way pretty much all Broadway musicals used to begin—with an extended orchestral prelude called an “overture.” Most musical-comedy overtures consist of a string of instrumental excerpts from the songs of a show, played in a continuous sequence with the curtain down and orchestrated in a cymbal-crashing style designed to whip the audience into a frenzy of expectancy. And that they do, on occasion spectacularly so, as in the raucous overture to “Gypsy,” whose climax is a shrieking take-it-all-off trumpet solo that never fails to bring down the house….

Broadway overtures started going out of fashion in the ‘60s and were all but extinct a decade later. Just as Hollywood directors of that era preferred to plunge straight into the action of a film in advance of the credits, so did prominent musical-comedy director-choreographers like Jerome Robbins (“On the Town,” “West Side Story”) and Michael Bennett (“A Chorus Line”) decide that it was more dramatically effective to cut to the chase. Younger audiences suckled on today’s faster-moving TV shows are even less likely to want to sit around for five minutes waiting for the show to get going.

But there’s more than one way to start a musical. Christopher Wheeldon’s “An American in Paris,” for example, begins with an extended dance number that contains no dialogue, while Cy Coleman’s elaborate overture to “On the Twentieth Century” is “accompanied” by equally elaborate stage action. And when you’ve got a full-size synthesizer-free orchestra in the pit, as is the case with “The King and I,” even clock-punching millennials will surely be disarmed by the sheer beauty of its playing….

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Read the whole thing here.

Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony in a 1989 live performance of his overture to Candide:

“A man is never so on trial as in the moment of excessive good fortune.”

Lew Wallace, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ