Archives for July 17, 2015

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey revival of Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman and the Broadway premiere of Amazing Grace. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

To American audiences, Ferenc Molnár is one of the best-known unknown playwrights of the twentieth century. In addition to “Liliom,” which Rodgers and Hammerstein turned into “Carousel,” more than a dozen English-language versions of his other Hungarian comedies were produced on Broadway throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s. But Molnár, who fled to the U.S. in 1940 to escape Hitler’s wrath, was thereafter unable to rekindle his theatrical career other than fitfully prior to his death in 1952. Hence the importance of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey revival of “The Guardsman,” freshly adapted and zestily staged by Bonnie Monte, the company’s artistic director. Not only is it great fun to watch, but you’ll come home wondering why Molnár’s plays are so rarely performed in this country. If they’re all as good as “The Guardsman,” we’ve been missing a bet.

Originally written in 1910, “The Guardsman” is a dizzy farce about a theatrical couple (Jon Barker and Victoria Mack) whose six-month-old marriage is in serious trouble. The problem: He thinks she has a wandering eye. The solution: He disguises himself as a dashing young guardsman and puts her faithfulness to the test by attempting to seduce her. The catch: How can he be absolutely sure that she doesn’t know it’s him? While the premise is Shakespearean, the treatment suggests a screwball comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with spasms of darkly neurotic obsession (“What is truth, old man, are the lies a woman tells”) and ornate roulades of self-reflexive modernism that are all Molnár’s own. Small wonder that Harold Pinter is said to have used “The Guardsman” as the basis for “The Lover”: It’s just his kind of did-she-or-didn’t-she puzzle….

Ms. Monte is as fine a director as she is a writer, and her ensemble cast is up to all of Molnár’s challenges, with Ms. Mack, a familiar face off Broadway, making the strongest impression as an elegant, startlingly tough-minded coquette…..

New musicals that open in the summer tend to be ill-fated, and “Amazing Grace,” which purports to tell the “awe-inspiring true story” (so says the news release, anyway) of John Newton (Josh Young), the British slave trader turned abolitionist who wrote the words to the 1779 hymn, is unlikely to break that rule. It’s not so much a musical as an anti-slavery pageant, with innocuous songs by Christopher Smith and a vertiginously high-minded book by Mr. Smith and Arthur Giron. This is the kind of musical in which the actors are required to say things like “It could be that you were given your gifts for just such a time as this” with straight faces….

* * *

To read my review of The Guardsman, go here.

To read my review of Amazing Grace, go here.

The original theatrical trailer for the 1931 film version of The Guardsman, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Edward G. Robinson’s art collection. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

What do the moguls of modern-day Hollywood do with their megabucks? When not illegally watering their megalawns, some of them megacollect art. Wealth-X, a consulting firm that specializes in what it calls “wealth intelligence,” published a list of Hollywood’s 10 top art collectors in April, and David Geffen, co-founder of DreamWorks, topped the roster. The estimated value of his smallish but choice modern-art collection (he is known to own paintings by the likes of Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko) is $2.3 billion, a third of his net worth. He reportedly sold Jackson Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948” for $140 million—more than 40% of the Metropolitan Opera’s entire annual budget—in 2006.

Hollywood’s top-dollar collectors prefer to keep their leisure-time activities hush-hush, so it’s hard to know how many of them are as serious about art as Mr. Geffen, or how much they really know about it. It seems a safe bet, though, that most of them go in for whatever is trendiest and/or costliest, and I doubt that many of them are remotely as passionate about art as was Edward G. Robinson, Hollywood’s first major collector…

Robinson started out playing gun-toting gangsters in Depression-era hit movies like “Little Caesar,” then shifted to more challenging character roles in such later films as “The Cincinnati Kid,” “Double Indemnity,” “Scarlet Street” and “Soylent Green.” (He’s still one of the best-remembered studio-era stars: TCM will be showing “The Cincinnati Kid” and “Little Caesar” next month.) In private life, though, he was nothing like the tough guys that were his original screen specialty. A classically trained stage actor and classical-music buff—his friends included George Gershwin and Igor Stravinsky—he started purchasing impressionist and post-impressionist canvases in earnest on a 1936 trip to Europe, five years after “Little Caesar” made him a superstar. Eight years later, he built his own private gallery to house the hundred-odd paintings in his collection. New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Washington’s National Gallery exhibited 40 of them in 1953, and the lineup included Bonnard, Cézanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir and van Gogh.

What began as a hobby turned into a compulsion, so much so that he and his first wife and son sat in 1939 for Édouard Vuillard, who did a pastel portrait of them. “It is short of a masterwork,” Robinson cheerfully admitted. “Paintings on commission usually are. But it beats hell out of a Kodak snapshot.” He even painted in his spare time, turning out, among other things, a very creditable copy of Cézanne’s “The Black Clock,” the jewel of his collection….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

In case you didn’t see it a couple of weeks ago, here is Edward G. Robinson’s “window cameo” from “Batman’s Satisfaction,” an episode of Batman originally telecast by ABC on March 2, 1967:

Courtesy of Doug Ramsey, Gjon Mili’s Stompin’ for Mili, a short film made in 1954 at a recording session by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, featuring Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Bob Bates on bass, and Joe Dodge on drums:

To read about the circumstances under which this film was shot, go here.

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

“I finally decided writing was like playing jazz—it can be learned, but not taught.”

Paul Desmond (quoted in Marian McPartland, “A Portrait of Desperate Desmond,” Downbeat, Sept. 15, 1960)