Archives for December 2017

Billy and Me, my second play, closes on Sunday in West Palm Beach. I’ve hung up my traveling shoes to await the Big Call with Mrs. T, so I won’t be on hand for the last performance. I’ll be there in spirit, though, watching Nicholas Richberg, Tom Wahl, and Cliff Burgess bring the story of the friendship of Tennessee Williams and William Inge to life one more time. Their performances are remarkable—Palm Beach Dramaworks has received a lot of messages to that effect from satisfied audience members—and the play itself went over extraordinarily and gratifyingly well.

Needless to say, I have a long list of other people to whom I owe debts of gratitude that can never be repaid, starting with Bill Hayes, PBD’s artistic director, who gave me the idea for Billy and Me, shepherded it through a hundred drafts, and put it on stage with the utmost faithfulness and flair. Without Bill, not to mention Victor Becker, Paul Black, Brian O’Keefe, and David Thomas, the members of the design team for Billy and Me, and Debi Marcucci, Stefanie Anarumo, Katie Pyne, Kelly Sirbola, Michael Amico, Celeste de St. Auban, and Rebecca Pancoast, the leaders of the backstage pack, the latest of my theatrical dreams could never have come true. All of them deserve to take deep, deep bows. Likewise the long list of other Palm Beach Dramaworks stalwarts who have in the past two years become members of my extended theatrical family. You know who you are—and so do I.

Everybody wants to know where Billy and Me will go next. Several artistic directors have expressed interest in the script, and I feel pretty confident that other stagings of Billy and Me will take place somewhere down the line. For me, though, the first production was the thing, and it couldn’t have been better. I’ve now had two plays produced professionally, which makes me a full-fledged professional playwright. Like the song says, they can’t take that away from me.

Meanwhile, Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, just keeps rolling along. It’ll be staged in February at Houston’s Alley Theatre, and while I have to miss that production as well, I’ll be thinking about it with something not unlike nostalgia as opening night draws nearer, wondering when I’ll next renew my membership in the Society of People Putting on a Show.

Until then…well, I’ll reluctantly resume my status as a civilian, a part-time theater person who, I suspect, will never again feel quite right anywhere else but in a rehearsal room. The bug has bitten me hard, and I’m already longing for it to do so again.

For the moment, though, I’ll content myself with my memories, which are as warm as they can possibly be. I’ve gotten lucky twice in a row, and precious few people in the fearfully hard business of theater get to say that.

Thanks, everybody. I miss you already—terribly.

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The video trailer for Palm Beach Dramaworks’ premiere production of Billy and Me:

Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire perform the “jukebox dance” in Broadway Melody of 1940, directed by Norman Taurog. The number was jointly choreographed by Astaire and Powell and the music is by Walter Ruick, Powell’s rehearsal pianist:

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

“Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.”

Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living

The fourth episode of Three on the Aisle, the new podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

In this month’s episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I look back at the shows we saw. Says the Three on the Aisle web page:

The conversation ranges from the trends and controversies that preoccupied playmakers across the country over the last 12 months, to the plays and performers who made captivating impressions on them and other theatregoers. All in a year that presaged seismic changes in artistic leadership of many major theatre companies—and in the attention paid to such issues as gender parity and sexual harassment.

In lieu of the usual show-ending segment in which we talk about the shows we saw since our last podcast, we wrap things up this time by going around the table and describing something that each of us would like to see on an American stage in 2018. The “table” in question is, however, purely metaphorical—my contribution to the proceedings was transmitted to New York via Skype from West Palm Beach, where I was rehearsing Billy and Me.

In case you haven’t noticed, Peter, Elisabeth, and I are having a lot of fun with our new toy. We like talking about theater and we like talking to one another, and I’m starting to think that we might just be onto something here.

To listen, download the fourth episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any of the first three episodes, you’ll find them all here.

My friend Ethan Iverson, a charter member of the Bad Plus, will be leaving the group on Sunday after they finish a week-long run at the Village Vanguard. I met Ethan in 1999 when I was working on a profile of Mark Morris, for whose dance troupe he was then the rehearsal pianist. Not long after that, Ethan, Reid Anderson, and David King decided to start performing together regularly, and in 2003 they signed with Columbia and put out their first major-label album, These Are the Vistas.

It happens that my Washington Post review of These Are the Vistas was one of the very first pieces about the group to appear in a general-interest publication. Since then, of course, the Bad Plus has long since become one of the most talked-about groups in jazz, and I’m proud to have written about them so early on.

To commemorate Ethan’s departure, I’m posting my 2003 review, which has never been reprinted since it originally appeared in the Post.

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The Bad Plus is a piano trio, one of jazz’s most familiar lineups—only Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson and David King don’t sound anything like Ahmad Jamal or Oscar Peterson. Instead of the usual show tunes and jazz standards, they play “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Heart of Glass,” and weirdly tilted original compositions with titles like “Silence Is the Question” and “Keep the Bugs Off Your Glass and the Bears Off Your Ass.” Their producer is Tchad Blake, whose credits include albums by Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega and Pearl Jam. And “These Are the Vistas” (Columbia), their major-label debut, isn’t just a breath of fresh air—it’s a tornado.

You probably don’t know any of the members of the Bad Plus by name (unless you happen to be a modern-dance buff, in which case you’ll remember Iverson from his day job as music director of the Mark Morris Dance Group). New Yorkers who keep up with the progressive jazz scene, though, know them as three of the most daring players in town, and when they started working together in 2000, it seemed a pretty safe bet that surprising things were going to happen. The biggest surprise, though, may be that they somehow managed to get Columbia to take an interest in their challenging music. The pop factor is the obvious reason, but the Bad Plus doesn’t do cutesy watered-down covers of hit singles. Instead, they deconstruct the songs of Blondie, Nirvana and Aphex Twin with the same rigorous conceptual clarity that goes into their own originals, and their group sound—blunt, clear-cut, full of splintery dissonances and jolting musical jokes—blends jazz, rock and classical music so indissolubly as to make the differences between the three musics seem trivial.

Even the recorded sound of “These Are the Vistas” is startling. Though the album was recorded live in the studio without overdubs or edits, Tchad Blake has supplied countless pop-type touches, none of them blatant (a bit of distortion here, an unexpected sonic perspective there) but all of which, taken together, leave no possible doubt that this isn’t your standard piano-trio album.

Throughout the past decade, much of the creative energy in American popular music has come from the deliberate hybridizing of seemingly unrelated idioms. This polystylistic approach has been strangely slow to leave its mark on jazz, in which the studied neoclassicism of self-consciously traditional musicians like Wynton Marsalis has been the dominant force since the ’80s. But younger, more adventurous players and composers are jump-starting a music that once seemed to be dead in the water, and with the release of “These Are the Vistas,” the Bad Plus has catapulted to the front of their ranks. A few older pianists, among them Keith Jarrett and Fred Hersch, have continued to make distinctive use of the piano-bass-drums lineup, but no one under 40 was saying anything remotely new with the format—until now. If you want to know where jazz is headed next, look here.

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The Bad Plus plays “Smells Like Teen Spirit” live in Hollywood in 2008:

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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• 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)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, remounting of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production, closes Jan. 6, original production reviewed here)

Why, man, she is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar and the rocks pure gold.

William Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona

I’m not nearly as good as I should be about answering my reader mail, especially during stretches of time when my life becomes more complicated than usual. So I spent an hour on Christmas afternoon clearing out my accumulated e-mail, and found this letter from a Wall Street Journal reader. I thought it might be of interest to you:

You remind me of my favorite professors in college. I could never quite figure out their political disposition, and they would have considered it unprofessional to reveal it. You appear to advocate only truth, beauty, and artistic freedom, and I wanted to take a moment to thank you for your hard work and the consistent excellence of your column.

I think this might just be the best fan letter I’ve ever gotten. It’s certainly the most gratifying one, because it sums up in one succinct paragraph everything that I try to do as a drama critic. That’s why I’m posting it—because I want you to know exactly what I think I’m up to.