Archives for January 2016

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a show in Sarasota, Florida, Asolo Repertory Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s one of the American theater’s supreme ironies that Eugene O’Neill, the grimmest of our great playwrights, somehow managed to write a play as hopeful as “Ah, Wilderness!” First performed in 1933, it is his only comedy, a sweet but not sugary coming-of-age tale that unfolds in Waterbury, a small Connecticut town, on July 4, 1906. O’Neill wasn’t joking when he described “Ah, Wilderness!” as “not in the satiric vein.” On the contrary, it’s as sunny as the day that it describes. But bright sunshine casts dark shadows, and part of what makes “Ah, Wilderness!” so excellent is that it doesn’t ignore the complexities of life. So it’s good news that Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre is presenting a revival of “Ah, Wilderness!” that is finely acted, intelligently staged and outstandingly well designed—in short, everything I’ve come to expect from Asolo Rep.

O’Neill described “Ah, Wilderness!” as “a sort of wishing out loud. That’s the way I would have liked my childhood to have been.” Another way to understand it is as a near-exact inversion of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” his autobiographical tragedy about an Irish-American family on the brink of devastation. It, too, features a magnetic patriarch (David Breitbarth) and his idealistic son (Tom Harney). But Nat Miller, the father, is not a tyrannical stage actor but an even-tempered, worldly-wise newspaper editor who isn’t as provincial as he looks, while young Richard is destined for a life as conventional as his father’s. All he needs to steer clear of the looming slough of adolescent despond is some gentle parental guidance—and he gets it, this being a comedy, though not without a leavening touch of farce along the way.

Yet “Ah, Wilderness!” isn’t at all bland. Like Thornton Wilder in “Our Town,” which followed it to Broadway five years later, O’Neill takes care to remind us that life in Waterbury can also be full of frustration. Take Sid (Douglas Jones), Nat’s bright but ineffectual brother-in-law, whose chronic alcoholism has kept Essie (Peggy Roeder), Nat’s spinster sister, from marrying him. Sid is charming, but he’s also pitiful…

Asolo Rep, which is both a professional theater company and a drama school, is in a position to revive large-cast plays with elaborate scenic requirements, and it does so consistently and effectively, casting them with a mixture of veteran regional stage actors and promising students. Mr. Jones, for example, stole the show as the racist juror in Asolo’s 2011 production of “Twelve Angry Men,” and he’s no less impressive this time around, gracefully conveying the melancholy beneath Sid’s geniality….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Clarence Brown’s 1935 film version of Ah, Wilderness! The screenplay was adapted from Eugene O’Neill’s original stage play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Lionel Barrymore plays Nat and Wallace Beery plays Sid:

CORRECTION: A reader points out that Ah, Wilderness! actually takes place in an unnamed, fictionalized version of New London, the O’Neill family’s summer home, not Waterbury, the real-life Connecticut town mentioned by name in the play to which Sid has been exiled. My apologies.

“Emeralds,” the first act of Jewels, a three-act plotless ballet by George Balanchine. This act, set to the music of Gabriel Fauré, is performed by St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Ballet. The soloists are Ulyana Lopatkina, Igor Zelensky, Irina Golub, Andrian Fadeyev, and Zhanna Ayupova and the orchestra is conducted by Tugan Sokhiev. Balanchine was a member of the Mariinsky Ballet before defecting from the former Soviet Union to the West in 1924:

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

“Attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.”

Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson)

My Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column (which now appears every other Thursday) is occasioned this week by Alicia Kopfstein-Penk’s Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts. Here’s an excerpt.

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What was the most important thing to happen to American classical music after World War II? Many knowledgeable observers would point to Leonard Bernstein’s appointment in 1957 as the first American-born, American-trained music director of the New York Philharmonic. Were I to single out one of his many achievements as uniquely consequential, though, it would be his Young People’s Concerts, which aired on CBS from 1958 to 1972. Pitched to children and adolescents but presented without eat-your-spinach condescension, they became popular with “young people” of all ages….

If you watched the Young People’s Concerts when they were originally telecast, you’ll be pleased to hear that all 53 shows have been uploaded to YouTube, and that they’re as good as you remember. Strange, then, that they’ve never figured prominently in discussions of Bernstein’s career. Alicia Kopfstein-Penk’s “Leonard Bernstein and His Young People’s Concerts,” published a year ago by Rowman & Littlefield, is the first full-length study of the concerts—yet I haven’t seen any reviews of the book, which received no notice outside professional journals. I wouldn’t know of its existence had I not stumbled across a copy by chance in a bookstore. It is a bristlingly well-informed monograph that draws on Bernstein’s archives to tell the story of how his Young People’s Concerts telecasts came to be, and why they have had no true successors..

One thing I learned from Ms. Kopfstein-Penk was that the concerts were in essence a one-man show. Bernstein “decided on the topics, wrote the scripts, selected the compositions and guest artists…narrated the programs, conducted, and performed.” I’m surprised that CBS gave him that kind of artistic control. Even more surprising, half of the concerts aired not on Sunday afternoons, the customary slot for highbrow TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but in prime time…

Why was CBS willing to give a classical conductor, even one as popular as Bernstein, a full hour of blue-chip prime time four times each year? The answer, according to Ms. Kopfstein-Penk, is that its executives were afraid of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulated the three major TV networks far more stringently in the ‘60s than it does today. On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, the FCC’s powerful and influential chairman, gave a speech called “Television and the Public Interest” to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he proclaimed that prime-time TV was “a vast wasteland” of “game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons….Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children?” Mr. Minow warned his listeners that he expected them “to make a conscientious, good-faith effort to serve the public interest.” Seven months later, CBS started airing the Young People’s Concerts in prime time….

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Read the whole thing here.

“Aaron Copland Birthday Party,” a Young People’s Concert by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, originally telecast by CBS on February 12, 1961. Bernstein conducts and discusses Copland’s An Outdoor Overture, excerpts from Rodeo and Statements, and the orchestral versions of two Old American Songs arrangements (sung by William Warfield). At the end of the program, Copland conducts a complete performance of El Salón México:

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:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• Noises Off (farce, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, closes March 6, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, reviewed here)

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, remounting of Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, closing Feb. 21, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN FORT MYERS, FLA:
• The Cocktail Hour (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• China Doll (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of the ignorant
More learned than the ears.

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

I think it’s fair to say that most people think of me as a highbrow-egghead type whose tastes in pop music are meticulously consistent with his tastes in the other arts. For this reason, I thought you might possibly enjoy perusing the following non-comprehensive but nonetheless suggestive list of fifteen pop singles that you’ll almost certainly be surprised to learn that I like—a lot.

Don’t ask why. The reasons vary widely and in some cases inexplicably. Suffice it to say that I like the musical aspect of all these songs very much:

• Blue Öyster Cult, Before the Kiss, a Redcap

• Kim Carnes, Bette Davis Eyes

• Pixies, Gigantic

• Huey Lewis and the News, I Want a New Drug

• Right Said Fred, I’m Too Sexy

• Olivia Newton-John, Magic

• Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis

• The Pointer Sisters, Neutron Dance

• Melissa Manchester, Nice Girls

• Alice Cooper, No More Mr. Nice Guy

• Chesney Hawkes, The One and Only (best known in this country as the theme from Doc Hollywood, which is where I first heard it)

• Murray Head, One Night in Bangkok

• Hall & Oates, Private Eyes

• The Bangles, Walk Like an Egyptian

• Toto, 99

Ethel Merman sings Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” on NBC’s Texaco Star Theater. She is introduced by Milton Berle, the host. Merman introduced the song in the original 1934 Broadway production of Anything Goes. This episode was originally telecast on March 22, 1949:

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