Terry (and everybody), miss you too!

Howdy. Sorry to be getting to this so late in the weekend. I’ve just seen off my weekend guest and am more convinced than ever that guests are a wonderful thing. Not only is my apartment cleaner than usual; not only did I enjoy the considerable pleasure of my friend’s company; on top of all that, I doubt I would have caught either Art Chicago in the Park or the Chicago production of Lisa Loomer’s play Living Out at American Theater Company (in collaboration with Teatro Vista) if she hadn’t visited.

We had a good time at Art Chicago. I spent a lot more time looking at old-guard work (Marin, Cornell, Frankenthaler, Hockney) than new, and I admit to being surprised and feeling a little shortchanged when we ran out of exhibits just as it felt like we were warming up. It says here that the show is indeed smaller and less spectacular than it used to be (thanks to Iconoduel for the link). But the weekender and I used the remainder of the afternoon to take the full tour of Millennium Park, sans bean, sad to say–“Cloud Gate” is still under wraps from the winter, having its seams welded out. With clouds rife in the sky and the light changing rapidly, it would have been a great day to watch the weather reflected in the steel. Through what I hope is the tail end of the cover-up, we piners for the bean can console ourselves with this revealing photo essay about its construction.

The part of Millennium Park I still can’t figure out is the part that seems to be a jail for trees. Were they bad? Are they eligible for parole? The Park website is only partly illuminating on this topic–it says that the metal framework hemming in the trees is the “Armature,” which “provides a simple and permanent clipping guide for precisely maintaining the curved profile of the mature Shoulder Hedge” and, more mystifyingly still, “also pre-figures the Hedge form.” Um, whatever they say. But I can’t help waiting for the day when some arboreal activist sets the poor trees free–they truly do look miserable.

After a little late-afternoon wine, potato chips, and napping, we struck out again and met up with my friend the Law Prof and his weekend guest for dinner and the play. Both guests were attorneys, and a little way into the play it was clear that there’s no more receptive audience for the lawyer humor that pervades Living Out than a lot of self-deprecating lawyers. This element of the play merely picked up a thread that my companions had gotten going at dinner.

We liked the play, which I picked because it was a Critic’s Choice in the Chicago Reader, but more so because I remembered Terry’s rave review for the Journal when it premiered in New York in 2003. Lisa Loomer’s play follows the intertwined fortunes of two young mothers in Southern California who are employer and employee. Ana is an immigrant from El Salvador raising one child and trying to get a second to the States. Nancy is a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who hires Ana as a nanny for her newborn so she can return to work. Both are well-meaning, and as Terry’s review emphasized, the heart of the play is the friendship they almost find despite the yawning gulf of privilege and opportunity dividing them. It’s a sobering story, holding out the possibility of connection over this gulf, but holding it just out of reach.

The actors in the ATC production are very good, especially Sandra Marquez in the most important role as Ana. Her colleagues do well too, but there were a few times during the performance I saw when Marquez single-handedly saved a joke with her funny, knowing expressions. I found some of the jokes targeting yuppies too easy by half, especially those aimed at Nancy’s doofus Legal-Aid-type husband. Luckily, actor Thomas Gebbia tackles the part with enough gusto to carry some of the lamer jokes by sheer force of spastic energy. After Marquez’s, though, the most enchanting performance comes from Tanya Saracho as a Mexican nanny whom Anna befriends; Saracho’s character Sandra has a monologue in the second act about a trip to Texas–a beautifully written speech, funny and heartbreaking–that she sends soaring out of the park. (The still here captures a little bit of the exhilaration of her delivery. I haven’t looked at the clips, but presumably one of them shows part of this speech.)

Living Out has performances scheduled through May 22. Get your tickets here.

Wow, I just saw a few minutes of a terrible Lifetime movie (redundant, I know) starring Jenna Elfman. I never watched Dharma and Greg, but I did like Elfman in Ed Norton’s 2000 film Keeping the Faith. That was a while ago now, and I haven’t thought a whit about Elfman in the interim. So when I saw her prowl campily across my small screen just now, it hit me like a freight train: what we have here is the downwardly mobile, blond Lauren Graham. They’re eerily alike in manner and stature. If it weren’t so obvious who’s on an upswing and who’s, well, on Lifetime, they’d make a perfect pairing for Fametracker’s Two Stars, One Slot feature: battle of the leggy, wisecracking Amazon women.

Here’s how busy I am: I almost forgot to post the weekly teaser for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. Yikes! Fortunately, I came to my senses at half past midnight, possibly because I’d been listening to a live recording by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony of Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony, an experience not altogether dissimilar to having a bucket of ice water dumped over your head on a really hot day.

Now that I’m reconnected with my cerebral cortex, please allow me to draw your attention to my reviews of A Streetcar Named Desire and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, both of which are definitely worth seeing, albeit for very different reasons:

Most of the people I know who’ve seen (or heard about) the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which opened Tuesday at Studio 54, agree that John C. Reilly, who plays Stanley Kowalski, should have played Mitch instead. Nor do I beg to differ: Mr. Reilly is one of the best actors around, but he looks and sounds like a natural-born nice guy, just the kind of fellow who in real life might well make the mistake of falling for a loosely screwed dame like Blanche DuBois. That’s Mitch all over, whereas Stanley is trouble on a stick, a walking, talking phallus who’s as likely to knock a girl down and rape her as give her a lecture on the vices and versas of the Napoleonic Code. A Stanley who lacks the hard edge of sexual threat can’t be right, no matter what else he has to offer.

Mr. Reilly, with his smiling eyes and bulbous clown nose, is all wrong as Stanley. But because he’s also a smart, thoughtful artist with lots and lots to offer, he finds things in the part that previous actors, Marlon Brando included, have hitherto failed to suggest. Do you remember, for instance, what Stanley does for a living? No? Well, he’s a traveling salesman–and Mr. Reilly brilliantly conveys his glad-handing, back-slapping side, an aspect of his character that’s easy to overlook. He’s also desperately, even abjectly in love with Stella (played to prize-winning perfection by Amy Ryan), and Mr. Reilly nails that, too. Never do you doubt that he’d do anything to hold onto his similarly obsessed wife. If this be miscasting, then Mr. Reilly, for all his inescapable limitations, makes the most of it….

I don’t have any kids of my own, but I think I know a good time when I see one, and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” now playing at the Hilton Theatre, has fun written all over it. For openers, there’s that car, a $1.4 million racer that, uh, flies. (I know, I know, it isn’t really flying, but the illusion of flight contrived by designer Anthony Ward is jaw-droppingly persuasive.) There’s also a flying villain, fancy sets, two confetti drops, and–not least–a high-octane cast led by Ra

Until last week I hadn’t peered into Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (familiarly known in Shakespearean English as Remembrance of Things Past for reasons known only to Proust’s first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff) since college days, save to check the odd quote from time to time. Don’t ask me why, but when I flew my Upper West Side coop for a couple of days of silence and sunshine by the Hudson River, I tossed the first installment of the Modern Library’s 1934 two-volume omnibus edition of A la recherche into my shoulder bag. I cracked it open as I sat by the river, and since then I haven’t looked back.

No sooner did I return to Manhattan than I was filled with an irresistible desire to listen to the piece of music that is the real-life model for the imaginary sonata by M. Vinteuil with whose “little phrase” the narrator of A la recherche is obsessed (and which is the subject of today’s almanac entry). If you’ve read George Painter’s biography of Proust, you know what it is. If not, read on, bearing in mind that Reynaldo Hahn, the musician referred to below, was Proust’s lover:

Reynaldo’s traditionalism was no doubt salutary for himself, but would only have been disastrous for Proust: it could never have led to the invention of Vinteuil. To please Reynaldo he did his best to like Saint-Sa

“When the least
obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already,
borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those
that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were
beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive
moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never
possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less
disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving
us all their best. In Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one
discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired,
and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different
from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have
withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its
composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to
our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and
this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it,
which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force
of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this
comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall
relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have
taken longer to get to love it.”

Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)

In case you’ve forgotten, or haven’t been paying attention, the brainy and beauteous Our Girl in Chicago, who has a new job that’s keeping her busy all the way from Monday to Friday, is now occupying the “About Last Night” blogger’s chair on weekends, while I devote myself exclusively to chronicling the life, times, and dietary practices of Louis Armstrong. I don’t know what she’s got planned for this weekend, but I know it’ll be good, so come take a peek.

As for me, I’ll be back on Monday, probably neither rested nor refreshed, though I do plan to engage in a whole lot of cool activities when not whacking away at the old iBook. To be perfectly honest, I’d rather stay in bed, but duty calls. In the meantime, be sure to look in on OGIC while I’m doing the town.

(By the way, Girl, I miss you!)

THURSDAY: Up early for breakfast with Laura Lippman, who’s in town for the Edgar Awards. Spend remainder of morning working on dummy layout for new Wall Street Journal capsule-review box. Lunch with Naomi Schaefer Riley to celebrate publication of her first book, God on the Quad (I helped!). Spend afternoon and evening frenziedly writing 10,000-word essay for Commentary about future of blogging, due next Monday. (It was supposed to be the first half of a two-part 7,000-word essay due this Monday, but my editor developed an acute case of folie de grandeur when I turned in the first installment, and now I’m tied to the tracks of the next issue.) Write, code, and post tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, along with witty reminder that Our Girl in Chicago now blogs on weekends only. Try to remember to take walk, look at Teachout Museum, read more Proust, call Mom in Smalltown, U.S.A., and go to bed no later than midnight. Do not hang by thumbs.

FRIDAY: Spend whole day frantically trying to polish off Commentary essay ahead of schedule, thus making it possible to spend weekend working on first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (which I rashly promised to deliver by hand to my editor at Harcourt over lunch next Thursday). Nap as needed. Meet newest friend (in whom I am well pleased) for dinner and preview of Broadway transfer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Be sure to tell her how megacool she looked on TV the other night.

SATURDAY: Brunch with out-of-town jazz friends, followed by matinee preview of Glengarry Glen Ross, followed by as much writing as I can stand.

SUNDAY: Finish Commentary essay if it’s not already done (if not, why not?). Otherwise, spend morning working on Hotter Than That. Cross fingers and pray that press preview of Sweet Charity takes place as expected this afternoon (it still hasn’t been confirmed!). Catch Dena DeRose’s first set at the Jazz Standard (see below). Blog if possible. If not, post unapologetic link to this posting.

MONDAY: D-Day at Commentary. Spend morning working on Hotter Than That and afternoon writing Wall Street Journal book review from scratch. Dinner in neighborhood, followed by in-house movie with visiting friend from deepest Brooklyn (viewing options include The Lavender Hill Mob, Sherlock, Jr., and The Palm Beach Story).

TUESDAY: Write Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday. If Sweet Charity preview took place on Sunday, catch train to Washington, D.C., to see Shakespeare Theatre’s production of The Tempest. Otherwise, spend afternoon working on Hotter Than That, followed by evening preview of Sweet Charity (in which case this week’s drama column will get written and filed tomorrow instead of today).

WEDNESDAY: Return to New York (if not already there) and finish first chapter of Hotter Than That. Suicide is not an option!

THURSDAY: D-Day No. 2. Go to bed after lunch. Stay there. Do not go out for dinner. Do not answer phone. Do not surf Web. Do not blog.