Archives for June 19, 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a webcast version of Lincoln Center Theater’s 2014 production of James Lapine’s Act One. Here’s an excerpt.

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James Lapine’s stage version of “Act One,” Moss Hart’s 1959 autobiography, dates from 2014, when the show ran in the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center’s 1,200-seat Broadway house. I reviewed it live and had no reservations of any kind: It was one of the most satisfying shows I saw that year, on Broadway or anywhere else. I didn’t see the PBS version, though, perhaps because I was skeptical about how Beowulf Boritt’s triple-decker turntable set would look on TV. If so, my worries proved to be unfounded. “Act One” all but explodes off the small screen…

Hart, who died in 1961, is best remembered today for the stage comedies that he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman and for “Act One.” In it, he tells how a stage-struck second-generation Jewish American raised in poverty in the Bronx became one of the most popular playwrights of his day. The book ends on the morning after “Once in a Lifetime,” Hart’s first collaboration with Kaufman, opened to rave reviews in 1930. It is, quite literally, an incredible tale, and Hart embroidered certain parts of it in the telling, but the greater part of “Act One” is true—he mostly sinned by omission—and no one has ever written a better or more poignant backstage memoir.

Dore Schary turned “Act One” into a perfectly frightful movie in 1963, which may explain why no one ever tried to make a play out of it until Mr. Lapine gave it a shot. In his hands, it became a kind of pageant, a 22-actor extravaganza with two narrators, Hart in middle age (Tony Shalhoub) and in youth (Santino Fontana), plus a third actor, Matthew Schechter, who plays him as a child. By all rights the results should have been top-heavy and lumbering, but Mr. Lapine’s version moves with light-footed agility, in part because of Mr. Boritt’s set, which catapults the audience from scene to scene with near-cinematic velocity….

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Read the whole thing here.

A montage of scenes from Act One:

My latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about Lennox Berkeley, an English composer whose music is all but unknown in this country and deserves much wider recognition. Here’s an excerpt.

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I’ve been “binge-listening” to the music of Lennox Berkeley (pronounced BARK-lee), whose work was all but unknown to me a year ago. Not that there’s anything surprising about that: Berkeley’s elegant yet excitingly vital scores are rarely heard in the U.S., where Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten are the only modern English classical composers who get performed with any regularity. Yet Berkeley, who died in 1989 at the age of 86, was both prolific and widely admired in England….

I suspect that the main reason why Berkeley’s music has failed to travel outside his native land is that it sounds nothing like what you expect to hear from an English composer. A student of Nadia Boulanger, the great French composition teacher whose best-known pupils included Aaron Copland and Darius Milhaud, Berkeley was strongly influenced by such French composers as Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc—both of whom he knew personally—as well as Igor Stravinsky, Boulanger’s idol, whose crisp middle-period idiom he learned from her. Unlike Vaughan Williams and Britten, whose music is deeply rooted in English folk song and other English musical traditions, he was a European-style neoclassicist through and through….

Not only was Berkeley a marvelous composer, but he led an intriguing private life, one chronicled to extremely readable effect in “Lennox & Freda,” Tony Scotland’s 2010 dual biography of the composer and his wife, who married in 1946, had three sons and were by all accounts the happiest of couples. Everyone who knew Berkeley in his youth was startled by this development, for his previous relationships had all been with men and he moved in elite gay circles (he was often to be seen at Somerset Maugham’s villa on the French Riviera, a resort that Maugham himself wittily described as “a sunny place for shady people”). At the same time, he was also a deeply religious man with a mystical streak who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1929, and he appears prior to his marriage to have had considerable difficulty reconciling the two sides of his nature….

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Read the whole thing here.

Laura Snowden plays Lennox Berkeley’s Guitar Sonatina:

Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, performs Berkeley’s “I sing of a maiden”:

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: 

Today we talk to Tamilla Woodard, the co-artistic director of Working Theater and the Five Boroughs/One City Project, a multi-year initiative of the Working Theater. She talks with us about her experience growing up in the theatre community, including the time she spent in acting conservatory undergrad programsand the insidious ways that racial bias influenced her time there; the Working Theater, its mission and its important site-specific and people-specific work; what we value as a theatrical community and how those values need to shift if we are going to champion a message that theatre belongs to all people; and the ways in which theatres are grappling with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the recent police killings of black people.

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.

“But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence. The least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.”

Lord Byron, letter to Thomas Moore (October 28, 1815)