Archives for December 2017

Doc Watson performs John D. Loudermilk’s “Windy and Warm” on TV in 1991:

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

“Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other—usually an exile like myself—and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment.”

Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer

From 2003:

I’m always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I’d never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally “modern” in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody’s walls. It’s as though time had stopped in 1900. None of the video stores carries more than a handful of “older” films (i.e., made prior to 1975). I was astonished to find Citizen Kane and Casablanca at the neighborhood video store this afternoon….

Read the whole thing here.

“Error is not blindness, error is cowardice.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Mrs. T and I had expected to wake up on Sanibel Island this morning, spending Christmas in our favorite place in the world for the first time. Now that my mother is dead and Mrs. T’s family is mostly dispersed, it struck us that we might as well go down to Florida a couple of weeks earlier than is our custom, especially since I was already going to be in West Palm Beach for the opening night of my second play.

Such, at any rate, was our well-laid plan, over which we’ve been rubbing our hands with glee ever since we came up with it in January. But you know what they say: if you want to hear God laugh, make a plan. Life came at us very quickly in 2017, and instead of watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico, we’re holed up in our little farmhouse in rural Connecticut, watching snow fall on the front lawn and hoping that the Big Call doesn’t come today.

I won’t try to tell you that we’re not disappointed to be up north instead of down south. Seven winters on Sanibel Island have accustomed the two of us to the snowbird’s life, and we’re still having a fair amount of trouble getting used to the fact that it’s always cold outside. On the other hand, we’re also profoundly grateful, not just on this particular day but on every single day of our lives. It doesn’t much matter where Mrs. T and I are, or what the weather is like: the important thing is that we’re together. What’s more, her doctors tell us that we have a reasonable chance of being together for many more years to come.

Christmas used to be a difficult season for me. As I explained in this space four years ago:

Once I thought that Christmas was, like the song says, the most wonderful time of the year. Then, eighteen years ago today, my closest friend died, painfully and pointlessly, and for a long time afterward I found it impossible to rejoice at Christmas. I went through the motions, but there was a hole in my heart.

Ten years later, almost to the day, I was hospitalized with congestive heart failure. By a coincidence at which I would surely have turned up my nose had I encountered it on stage, I fell in love with Mrs. T at the very same moment. We’ve been together ever since.

I suppose the holiday season can never mean the same thing to a middle-aged man that it does to an innocent, unknowing child. For a decade it meant death to me. Now it means life, hope, and gratitude—which is, needless to say, what it’s supposed to mean. The hole in my heart has healed, and I now know myself to be the luckiest person imaginable…

I still feel that way.

Yes, Mrs. T and I have a lot to worry about these days—but neither one of us has to do it alone. That makes all the difference in the world. And whatever Christmas means to you, wherever you happen to be spending it, my prayer is that your own life may be no less full of hope, gratitude, and reasons to rejoice.

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“The Difficult Season,” written and performed by Dave Frishberg:

“I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” by Kim Gannon and Walter Kent, performed by Nancy LaMott and Christopher Marlowe on Live with Regis & Kathie Lee. This episode aired on December 22, 1994. Nancy died a year later:

An extremely rare color kinescope of an abridged version of George Balanchine’s version of The Nutcracker, narrated by June Lockhart, directed by Ralph Nelson, and originally telecast by CBS on December 24, 1958 as an episode of Playhouse 90. The score is by Tchaikovsky. The cast includes Diana Adams, Allegra Kent, Arthur Mitchell, and Edward Villella, with Balanchine playing the role of Dr. Drosselmeyer:

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

O Lord, that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!

William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Two

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of Farinelli and the King. Here’s an excerpt.

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How good must a show be to make it worth seeing? I found myself asking this question on the way home from “Farinelli and the King,” the new play by Claire van Kampen that has brought Mark Rylance back to Broadway. On paper, “Farinelli” is scarcely more than a tissue-thin vehicle for Mr. Rylance, whose star-turn performance is a quirky catalogue of his usual stage tricks. By all rights it ought not to work at all—yet “Farinelli” still contrives to cast an odd spell on the viewer, and its best moments have a delicate beauty that will stay with you.

Part of what makes “Farinelli” so memorable is its subject matter. It’s a history play about one of the most mysterious relationships in the history of classical music, that between Spain’s King Philip V (referred to in the play as “Philippe” and played by Mr. Rylance), who suffered from what is widely thought to have been an incapacitating case of manic depression, and Farinelli, the legendary 18th century Italian castrato, whose exquisite singing eased the king’s suffering. In 1737, the 32-year-old Farinelli abandoned his operatic career to become Philippe’s court musician, and never sang in public again. Not at all surprisingly, his improbable life has already been portrayed in a biopic and several operas. Now comes Ms. van Kampen, Mr. Rylance’s wife and the longtime house composer at Shakespeare’s Globe, who had never before written a play but became so fascinated by Farinelli that she decided to take a fresh crack at putting him on stage….

As has been widely noted, “Farinelli and the King” bears a decided family resemblance to Alan Bennett’s “The Madness of George III” (with a bit of “The King’s Speech” stirred in to sweeten the pot). This close resemblance underlines the chief weakness of Ms. van Kampen’s play, which is that none of her characters ever says anything interesting or memorable….

This brings us to Mr. Rylance, who is at his best when playing strongly defined characters, as he does in “Bridge of Spies” and “Dunkirk.” In the absence of firm authorial guidance, his acting is apt to dissolve into a cloud of twee mannerisms, which is what happens here….

What, then, makes “Farinelli and the King” worth the price of the ticket? The production, for openers. Designed by Jonathan Fensom, it is closely similar in approach to the Elizabethan-style stagings of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night” that Mr. Rylance and the Globe brought to Broadway in 2013, only fancier. The proscenium stage of the Belasco Theatre is lit with candles and fitted out with boxes, and a seven-piece period-instruments band accompanies Farinelli in eight lovely Handel arias that are not unlike the kind of thing the real-life Farinelli might have sung. Moreover, Ms. van Kampen and John Dove, the director, have had the ingenious idea of using two performers, Sam Crane and Iestyn Davies, the British countertenor, to play Farinelli. Each time Mr. Crane opens his mouth to sing, Mr. Davies appears onstage as if by magic, filling the air with sounds of unearthly beauty….

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Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from Farinelli and the King, featuring Mark Rylance and Iestyn Davies: