The Wicked Stage

AP Style?

2008-10-06T14:53:00.000-04:00

From Michael Kuchwara's Equus review:

Far better are the brief scenes between Alan and the young woman who works at the stable. She's portrayed by the appealing Anna Camp, whose unaffected naturalness is a welcome anecdote to some of the play's more emotionally florid family confrontations.

An anecdote is always welcome, but come on--AP copy editors aren't usually this lax, are they?

A Phair Point

2008-10-06T13:40:00.000-04:00

Liz Phair puts her work--and by extension a lot of what we all care so much about--in perspective:

I came from a bunch of professionals — a lot of my family are doctors. Compared to doctoring — like saving lives or watching people slip away — everyone was so bejiggity about music. My dad worked with AIDS patients — I mean, that was heavy. I couldn’t go to him and say, “Dad! Whip-Smart is not as beloved as Guyville! What do I do?”

The Brooklyn Booth

2008-10-03T17:13:00.001-04:00

I went to the newest TKTS Discount Booth this morning on assignment from my employer and captured a few eager discount ticketbuyers just before opening.

On a personal note, I haven't done man-on-the-street reporting regularly since my days at the Downtown News, and I haven't edited video since film school. Well, let me tell you, it's like riding a tricycle--you never forget and it's still loads of fun.

Art Vs. Politics

2008-10-03T13:13:00.001-04:00

This mildly contentious passage, in the midst of Adam Gopnik's enjoyable if characteristically glib piece on John Stuart Mill in a recent New Yorker, stuck in my craw. He's talking about how Mill, one of the great liberal thinkers of all time, moderated his rational radicalism upon exposure to art:

Aesthetes always bend to the right, in part because the best music and the best buildings were made in the past, and become an argument for its qualities. Someone entering Chartres becomes, for a moment, a medieval Catholic, and a person looking at Bellini or Titian has to admit that an unequal society can make unequalled pictures. To love old art is to honor old arrangements.

An arguable point at best, particularly given that Mill was steeped nearly from the cradle in the wisdom of the ancients, and, well, Plato was hardly a liberal. There may be some truth in the notion that art can scramble and complicate political allegiances, and that in some sense an aesthetic view of the world leaves us open--sometimes dangerously but almost always to our benefit--to seeing things differently, and appreciating the complicated humanity of people we might otherwise think we should deplore, from Wagner to Waugh.

To his credit, Gopnik's next statement is stark, similarly provocative yet harder to dispute:

But even new and progressive art is, as Mill knew, a product of imagination and inspiration, not of fair dealing and transparent processes; the central concerns of liberalism—fairness, equity, individual rights—really don’t enter into it. Mozart, whom Mill loved, would have benefitted as a person had he lived in a world that gave him the right to vote for his congressman, collect an old-age pension, and write letters to the editor on general subjects, and that gave his older sister her chance at composing, too. But not a note of his music would have been any better.

The real thorny (not to mention unanswerable) question is not how good or bad Mozart's music would have been given a freer social milieu, but whether Mozart would have written a note of it if he lived in, say, the Victorian era, or our own.

Karam Session

2008-10-02T10:54:00.001-04:00

Stephen Karam's lively three-hander Speech and Debate is now playing in L.A., and I spoke to him about the show, and his budding career, for the LA Times. (A note about my headline: It may mislead you on pronunciation. Apparently it's "CARE-em," not "ka-RAM.")

Diggs Deeper

2008-10-01T14:59:00.000-04:00

I didn't think I'd much care for a multigenerational domestic comedy-drama set in the Berkshires, but Elizabeth Diggs' Close Ties pleasantly surprised me. Not earth-shaking, by any means, but a hearty theatrical meal nonetheless.

Bob and the Bard

2008-10-01T11:16:00.001-04:00

A few colleagues seemed taken with The English Channel, Robert Brustein's play about a certain young "sonneteer and sometime maker of plays," starring Richie Cunningham and Javier Bardem, above (just kidding, it's Sean Dugan and Stafford Clark-Price). I was less so.

Corinthians Against Prop. 8

2008-09-30T12:07:00.000-04:00

On the LA Times' new arts blog Culture Monster, I caught this lovely two-minute anti-anti-gay-marriage proposition video by Dave Barton of Rude Guerrilla Theatre. I know this post is likely to reach mainly the converted and/or non-California voters, but it seems well worth reposting here, there, and everywhere (to lead a better life).

Sun Sets

2008-09-30T11:10:00.001-04:00

I hold no brief for the politics of The New York Sun, which has officially folded, but I will miss its arts coverage--particularly the astute reviews my colleague, Eric Grode, one of the finest in the business. His last review: a fine, nuanced reading of Equus.

Quote for Today

2008-09-29T10:26:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Jane Jacobs' classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which is about urban planning but ultimately about so much more, and this quote from Eugene Raskin, an architecture professor at Columbia, explaining how a neigborhood's aesthetic monotony can't be concealed by superficial flourishes, popped out and stopped me cold:

Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully.

Positively Wildean.

I know it's wrong, but...

2008-09-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

...the only thing getting me and the better half through this surreal campaign is the nonstop snark at Wonkette.

Mac World

2008-09-25T06:44:00.000-04:00

Mac Wellman goes into orbit with 1965UU, though I found the results curiously, and somewhat endearingly earthbound.

(Photo of Paul Lazar by the Chocolate Factory.)

At Long Last, TKTS

2008-09-24T14:03:00.001-04:00

On Oct. 16, the new TKTS booth and redone Duffy Square will at last reopen. I've been hearing about the new booth ever since I started at TDFin Oct., 2006, so this is a big deal. A promising write-up here.

Criticism for Its Own Sake

2008-09-22T16:46:00.003-04:00

For a talk I'm giving later this week, I searched for what I remembered as one of the best pieces I've ever read on the proper role of critics in our media-saturated age; I used to distribute copies of it to cub critics at Back Stage West, and to anyone else who asked. I still occasionally quote the 84 percent figure from an eye-opening study cited in the piece (see below).

Well, I couldn't find my hard copy, but some digging on the Web turned it up. It was written by the Irish theater critic Fintan O'Toole, on invitation by The Economist. And though it's 12 years old, it rings ever true. A clarifying sample:

Critics should be honest enough to accept that they represent nobody but themselves--not the art form, not even in any real sense the newspapers that employ them. Their job is not to report on how a work was received by an audience. It is not to sell books or tickets. It is not to reform or mould the practice of theatre or music or poetry. And it is not to maintain, as arbiters of taste and value, the authority of the institutions who print their opinions.

The job of the critic is to try to ignore the magnifying effect of print and hyperbole, to preserve a sense of proportion, and to give a genuinely individual opinion. It is a modest but by no means a contemptible task. And it is one that is inextricable from the artistic process itself.

As for that study:

An American sociologist, Wesley Monroe Shrum, in a recent study of the relationship between critics and performers at the Edinburgh Festival fringe, provides some empirical evidence for the belief that critics often say what artists think. He asked 43 directors and actors to say what was good and bad about their own show. The vast majority (84%) used "phrases or comments" that were similar to those used by one or more of the critics. Some of the artists were much more dismissive of their own work than the critics were. In one play, for instance, the critic praised the acting but the director thought it was "nervous" and "patchy."

The whole thing is well worth your time.

"Trees" Underground

2008-09-22T14:09:00.001-04:00

One of last year's most pleasant surprises was Stephen Karam's Speech & Debate, the inaugural production of Roundabout Underground, a tiny basement theater under the Laura Pels. How are they going to follow up that ingratiating, oft-extended hit (now getting a production in L.A., by the way)? With another fascinating new play by a Brown-educated, Vogel-ized young playwright, Steven Levenson. I cover it for TDF here.

Tiny "Ragtime"

2008-09-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite contemporary musicals is Ragtime--I saw its U.S. premiere in L.A. an inordinate number of times (and found that production, which starred Brian Stokes Mitchell, LaChanze, Marcia Mitzman Gaven and John Dossett, superior to the later Broadway production), and I've had the pleasure of reviewing it a few times. So it was a pleasant surprise to read that it's getting a splendid, can-do 99-seat revival in L.A. Make them hear you, indeed.

(Uncredited photo of Josie Yount as Evelyn Nesbit.)

On a scale of "9 to 5," a 5?

2008-09-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's not that bad, but Bob Verini's Variety review, the first out for Dolly Parton's Broadway-bound 9 to 5 musical, makes the show sound like a reasonably good time (particularly for the presence of Allison Janney) with a few bloat problems and a book that hasn't addressed some of the movie's more pronounced problems. My favorite graf:

Taste nadir is reached by intercutting (without irony) [the boss] Hart's trussed-up kidnapping in a car trunk, then hanging from the rafters, with the triumphant Girl Power ballad "Shine Like the Sun." [Director Joe] Mantello surely intends a contrast with his act one "Wicked" finale: Females still sing of self-empowerment, though someone very different is defying gravity. But there's something cringe-inducing in musical self-congratulations for terror arguably worse than the victim's workplace misdeeds.

Yeah, I remember that weird S&M bit from the movie, and even as a kid I could tell that scene was off.

Mose Allison on Sarah Palin

2008-09-21T19:39:00.001-04:00

OK, not really. But this rang out:

You're quoting figures, you're dropping names
You're telling stories, you're playing games
You always laughin' when things ain't funny
You try to sound like big money
If talk was criminal, you'd lead a life of crime
'Cause your mind is on vacation and your mouth is working overtime

(h/t: my better half.)

Proofread Is Thing

2008-09-19T19:37:00.000-04:00

A bus on 8th Ave.

Feeling Better Now?

2008-09-19T16:19:00.000-04:00

Broad Brush

2008-09-18T08:36:00.000-04:00

I don't know all that much about black theater artists and their relationship to the American theatrical avant-garde, but even I felt something amiss in the broad generalizations that start off Hilton Als' new review of Thomas Bradshaw's Southern Promises. He cites Robert Wilson's casting Sheryl Sutton in Deafman Glance and later Einstein on the Beach as cases of "purposefully incorporating blackness into America’s primarily white avant-garde theatre." Fair enough, but then Als writes:

Since Sutton’s début, no other black actor, writer, or director has had the same impact on our theatrical avant-garde. Aside from the early work of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy—particularly her 1965 piece, “A Beast’s Story,” and 1969’s “Sun”—black theatre in this country has remained, for the most part, mired in folklore and its various offshoots: minstrel shows that pass as naturalistic family dramas; “get whitey” spectacles; nostalgia-tinged song-and-dance revues. This trend is disrupted only when artists like Wilson and the late Iranian playwright and director Reza Abdoh—whose 1993 play “Tight Right White” is one of the most insightful and entertaining treatises on race that we’re likely to see—amass enough power to hire black actors, and to force the audience to see things as they do. (When companies like the Wooster Group want to inject race into a show, more often than not their white actors don blackface and coon it up as a “critique” of the performance of blackness.)

Again, it's not my area of expertise, but does Suzan-Lori Parks not count? Or George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum? And is that unappetizing list of black theater sub-genres, which I guess includes and dismisses everything by August Wilson, Douglas Turner Ward, Lynn Nottage, Kia Corthron (and these are just the names I can pluck off the top of my head), really relevant to the question of the scarcity of black artists in the avant-garde theater? Hilton seems to be moving the goalposts there.

All of this seems a rather poor introduction to the work of Thomas Bradshaw, whose play "Southern Promises," as far as I can tell, may be considered avant-garde primarily because it's being performed at PS 122.

Southern Drag

2008-09-17T11:36:00.000-04:00

I'm as much a sucker for a snappy period piece as anyone--for what a waggish colleague of mine calls "AMC theater"--but Peccadillo's new revival of Charles MacArthur's Johnny on a Spot didn't quite send me.

"Southern" Discomfort

2008-09-17T08:14:00.001-04:00

Inspired by the story of Henry "Box" Brown, a slave who literally mailed himself to freedom, Thomas Bradshaw has written a very strange play, Southern Promises, and with such a straight face it's hard to know how to take it. That, as I note in my Voice review, may be the point.

(Photo by Sarina Finkelstein.)

Timely Tips

2008-09-15T15:24:00.000-04:00

An excellent primer on how to challenge racist language and behavior, which I think could apply any number of other "ist" offenses. Particularly helpful amid the current resurgence of identity-political correctness. (h/t Young Jean Lee)

Row K, Seat 9

2008-09-15T11:20:00.000-04:00

Costume designer Bobby Pearce and his very well-behaved theatergoing companion, who sat three seats away from me at the Marvelous Wonderettes premiere.