Archives for 2017

“It is a curious and diabolical fact of life that a sincere wish to do good can be more productive of mischief than almost anything else.”

Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

I’m thrilled to announce that Houston’s Alley Theatre, one of America’s finest regional companies, is presenting Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, next season. The production will be a remount of the second staging of Satchmo, directed by Gordon Edelstein, which to date has been presented off Broadway and at Shakespeare & Company of Lenox, Mass., New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, and Colorado Springs’ Theatreworks.

Satchmo begins previews in Houston on March 2, 2018, then runs from March 7 through March 25. For more information about the production, go here.

In case it’s slipped your mind, Satchmo at the Waldorf will also be performed this summer by Triangle Productions of Portland, Oregon, opening there on May 4 and running through May 27. For more information about that production, which stars Salim Sanchez, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report with the utmost enthusiasm on the Transport Group’s revivals of a pair of plays by William Inge. (I also take note of the newly opened Broadway transfer of Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, about which I raved when it was presented downtown last November at the Public Theater.) Here’s an excerpt.

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William Inge was a theatrical giant whose artistic stature is no longer as widely acknowledged as it ought to be. Fortunately, his plays have started to be revived with increasing frequency in New York and throughout America, and the Transport Group, which specializes in innovative off-Broadway productions of new and old American plays, is now mounting an Inge mini-festival. The company is presenting “Come Back, Little Sheba” and “Picnic,” Inge’s first two plays, in rotating repertory at the Gym at Judson, a downtown avant-garde performance space. That may seem like a stretch for a writer who knocked out four Broadway hits in a row between 1950 and 1957, all of which were turned into successful Hollywood movies. But Inge was no mere confectioner of cozy melodramas for the carriage trade: He was a soft-spoken poet of small-town loneliness and despair, and these revivals, staged by Jack Cummings III and acted by a first-class ensemble cast—14 actors, five of whom appear in both shows—will leave you in no doubt that he was one of America’s half-dozen greatest playwrights….

Simplicity and intimacy are the keys to these stagings, which are presented in a converted gymnasium before an audience of 85, most of whose members are close enough to the actors to be able to reach out and touch them. Storytelling is all: Mr. Cummings lets his actors go about their business without pasting a high directorial concept on top of either script. “Sheba” is played in the round on a stage full of shabby furniture, while the “set” for “Picnic” consists of three unpainted wooden flats and seven cheap, rusty metal lawn chairs. The acting is as naturalistic as are Ásta Bennie Hostetter’s penny-plain period costumes, and the playing area is small enough that nobody has to exaggerate: It’s as though you’ve stopped by for a visit, inadvertently arriving in the middle of a family crisis….

If you’ve never seen either play, trust me: This is how they ought to be done. If you have, you’ll feel as if you were looking at a pair of lovingly restored paintings from which thick layers of grime have been painstakingly scrubbed away….

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Read the whole thing here.

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster appear in a scene from the 1952 film version of Come Back, Little Sheba, adapted for the screen by Ketti Frings and directed by Daniel Mann. Booth created her role in the original 1950 stage production of the play:

Scenes from the Roundabout Theatre Company’s 2013 Broadway revival of Picnic, directed by Sam Gold:

Count Basie and Oscar Peterson talk about Art Tatum on an episode of Oscar Peterson: Words and Music, originally telecast by the BBC in 1980:

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

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; so that a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a venerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

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)
• The Price (drama, G, too long and serious for children, virtually all shows sold out last week, extended through May 14, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, most shows sold out last week, original production reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes June 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Come Back, Little Sheba/Picnic (dramas, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, extended through April 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Born Yesterday (comedy, PG-13, closes April 15, reviewed here)

“Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.”

Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart work on a new song in an excerpt from Makers of Melody, a 1929 short directed by S. Jay Kaufman:

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