Archives for March 5, 2020

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

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

This week we have the playwright and director Conor McPherson in the studio to talk about his artistic philosophy, the ghostly worlds of his plays, and the process of creating the Bob Dylan quasi-musical, now on Broadway, Girl From the North Country. The critics also discuss the recent production of To Kill a Mockingbird that staged at Madison Square Garden for an audience of 18,000, Tumacho at Clubbed Thumb, Kate Hamill’s Dracula at Classic Stage Company, and James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner at Shakespeare Theatre Company.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss Hollywood movies whose subject matter is infectious disease, with special reference to Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan. Here’s an excerpt.

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Carl Goldman, a 67-year-old California radio-station owner,was infected with COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Today he is in quarantine in a facility in Omaha run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Washington Post called “I Have the Coronavirus. So Far, It Isn’t That Bad” in which he remarked that his quarantine location, which was last used for the 2014 Ebola outbreak, “looked like something out of ‘The Andromeda Strain,’” Robert Wise’s high-tech screen version of Michael Crichton’s 1969 novel about a mysterious illness that turns out to have been caused by an extraterrestrial virus.

One of the things about Mr. Goldman’s piece that struck me most forcibly was that he resorted so naturally to a movie-based metaphor to describe his experience. If you’re a baby boomer, you’re likely to do that fairly often, since the boomers all grew up watching the same “water-cooler movies.” Even the CDC does it: Thomas R. Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, wrote in the Atlantic that “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a broadly similar pandemic, was “a fair and accurate portrayal of how the public health community might respond to a disease outbreak like the fictional one in the film.”

That was quite an endorsement, especially given the fact that countless such movies, most of them eminently forgettable and deservedly forgotten, have been ground out by Hollywood.  (“The Killer That Stalked New York,” anyone?) A few, however, have been rather more noteworthy…

Moreover, one such film, Elia Kazan’s “Panic in the Streets” (1950), is not merely a nail-nibbling thriller but Kazan’s first indisputably major film, a now-classic piece of noir-style urban cinematic storytelling….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Panic in the Streets:

“There must always be two kinds of art, escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.”

W.H. Auden, “Psychology and Art To-day”