Archives for February 2017

“Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.”

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

I flew up from Sarasota to New York on Wednesday to review the Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard for The Wall Street Journal. My plan was to go straight from the theater to an airport hotel, write and file the review there, grab a few hours’ sleep, then take an early-morning flight back to Sarasota and Mrs. T.

It was a good plan as plans go, and as plans go, it went. No sooner did I get off the plane in New York and turn on my cellphone than I discovered that the pending arrival of Winter Storm Niko had already brought about the cancellation of my return flight on Thursday, as well as every other flight from the New York area to Sarasota, not to mention hundreds of other flights to and from other cities. The chaos arising from these cancellations was so profound that JetBlue threw its corporate hands in the air and simply stopped answering the phone for the rest of the day, thereby leaving me high, temporarily dry, and irked beyond belief.

I sat down at my desk when I reached the apartment, plugged in my laptop, and started hunting for alternatives. I didn’t have many from which to choose: I had to find a way to get back to Sarasota in time to see a show on Friday night, then get up the next morning and drive myself and Mrs. T to Winter Park to see another show on Sunday afternoon. Fortunately for me, not to mention The Wall Street Journal, I was able to book the last remaining seat on the last remaining Friday-morning flight from Newark to Sarasota. Having done so, I breathed a noisy sigh of relief, then started opening three weeks’ worth of accumulated snail mail. I went to Sunset Boulevard that night, wrote my review at home the next morning, and spent the rest of the day looking out the window at Winter Storm Niko and thinking unlovely thoughts.

At three-thirty on Friday morning I woke up, confused and disoriented. Where am I? I asked myself. Then it hit me: I was in my own bedroom in New York. An hour and a half later I was on my way to Newark International Airport, and by noon I was back in Sarasota again, singing “Happy Birthday” to Mrs. T.

One of the packages that awaited me in New York contained a copy of Mark Vanhoenacker’s Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot, a memoir by a 747 pilot who gave up a promising career as a management consultant to spend his life flying all over the world. It contains the following passage:

Jet lag results from our rapid motion between time zones, across the lines that we have drawn on the earth that equate light with time, and time with geography. Yet our sense of place is scrambled as easily as our body’s circadian rhythms. Because jet lag refers only to a confusion of time, to a difference measured by hours, I call this other feeling “place lag”: the imaginative drag that results from our jet-age displacements over every kind of distance; from the inability of our deep old sense of place to keep up with our aeroplanes.

I read those words somewhere in the skies between Newark and Sarasota, smiling wryly as I did so. While I don’t travel nearly as much as Mark Vanhoenacker, I do it often enough to know just what he means by “place lag,” and I was definitely suffering from a mild case of it by the time I returned to Mrs. T on Friday. To travel from a cozy beachfront condo on Longboat Key to the aisle of a Broadway theater and back again in the space of forty-eight hours is disorienting enough. To travel from the Gulf of Mexico to a snow-clogged city and back again in the same span of time is…well, downright confusing.

Snipping a whole day out of my carefully planned schedule inevitably made Friday a bit hectic. We’d planned to cook out on Thursday evening, then see our show the following night. Instead I took a hasty nap as soon as I got back to the condo, lit the charcoal and grilled hot dogs late in the afternoon, then changed clothes and drove into Sarasota with Mrs. T to catch the opening of a revival of Born Yesterday.

We got up first thing Saturday morning and packed the car, then hit the road for Winter Park. Fortunately, the sun was shining and we weren’t in a hurry, so we decided to get off the interstate and retrace the route of a magical and unforgettable drive that the two of us took five years ago:

On Monday Mrs. T and I decided to take the long way from Sarasota to Winter Park. Shunning the interstate highways, we drove down two-lane roads that passed by countless orange groves and through tiny towns with names like Ona, Zolfo Springs, Avon Park, and–my favorite–Frostproof. Even the landmarks along the way bore picturesque names (first Troublesome Creek, then Peace River). Alas, we were only passing through, for I would have liked to spend a night at the Hotel Jacaranda, whose website recalls the long-ago days when Clark Gable and Babe Ruth graced its spacious rooms. But we had to return to Winter Park in time to meet a dinner guest, so we kept on driving.

We didn’t spend the night at the Hotel Jacaranda this time, either, but we did stop, much to my undisguised delight, in Frostproof, eating lunch there at a diner called Johnny’s Egg Works that serves, among other homely but delectable dishes, chicken-fried steak smothered in sausage gravy. It was a blissfully uneventful trip, and by the time we pulled into the driveway of our rented bungalow in Winter Park, I’d succeeded at last in catching up with myself again.

Kierkegaard said it: “Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.” I don’t think I do that, but I know that being a peripatetic drama critic occasionally requires me to cram too much life into not enough time. Not on Saturday, though. Instead of trying to beat the clock, Mrs. T and I spent the whole of a sunny day doing nothing but getting from point A to point B in the most unhurried way possible, and when I woke up the next morning, I didn’t have to look out the window to know where I was.

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Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden play Henry Mancini’s “Two for the Road”:

Les Paul and Mary Ford appear as the mystery guests on What’s My Line? This episode was originally telecast by CBS on June 13, 1954. The panelists are Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Margaret Truman and the host is John Charles Daly:

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

“In love of home, the love of country has its rise.”

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of the English National Opera revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, starring Glenn Close. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Sunset Boulevard,” Billy Wilder’s noir-flavored 1950 screen melodrama about a forgotten silent-movie star turned mad murderess, is back on Broadway. So is Glenn Close, who played Norma Desmond in 1994 but has mostly steered clear of the stage since then. Now that her film career is quiescent, it makes sense that she should return to Broadway in one of her most celebrated roles. The catch is the show itself is unworthy of the classic picture on which it is based.

Not so Ms. Close. To be sure, she is 69, much older than the 50-year-old character whom she plays, but that doesn’t matter in the least. If anything, her greater age makes Norma’s plight all the more pitiable, and Ms. Close’s performance, by turns adamantine and childishly needy, is as memorable in its own way as was that of Gloria Swanson in the movie. No, the fundamental problem with turning “Sunset Boulevard” into a musical is that it was already perfect, a fact that is well understood by Don Black and Christopher Hampton, whose book is largely faithful to the Wilder-Charles Brackett script…

Mr. Webber, however, decided that his kind-of-sort-of-classical style was equal to the task. So did the English National Opera, where this revival, directed by Lonny Price, originated. It is not, however, a full-scale blowout but a scaled-down, semi-staged production of the kind in which Mr. Price specializes.

The directorial conceit of the revival is that the action takes place in the mind of Joe Gillis (played here by Michael Xavier), the failed screenwriter turned kept man who narrates “Sunset Boulevard.” To this end, it is played out on a stylized Hollywood soundstage and accompanied by a 40-piece onstage orchestra. That’s a smart idea in theory, but the placement of the orchestra makes the playing area so shallow that the show looks cluttered….

More to the point, “Sunset Boulevard” needs to be mounted on an operatic scale in order to be effective. Shorn of the blank-check spectacle of Trevor Nunn’s original production, it has nothing to offer but its gooey score, which softens and sentimentalizes Wilder’s brutal satire of golden-age Hollywood and its callous ways….

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Read the whole thing here.

The finale of the original 1994 Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard, starring Glenn Close and directed by Trevor Nunn:

The final scene of Sunset Boulevard, starring Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim and narrated by William Holden:

Benno Moiseiwitsch plays Schumann’s “Träumerei” (from Kinderscenen) on the BBC in 1954:

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

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (trans. Lewis Galantière)

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:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CORAL GABLES, FLA.:
• Between Riverside and Crazy (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• The Piano Lesson (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PRINCETON, N.J.:
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (Shakespeare and Shaw, PG-13, remounting in rotating repertory of 2012 and 2013 off-Broadway productions, closes Feb. 12, original productions reviewed here and here)