Terry Teachout's Blog, page 228

BOOK

James Agate, The Selective Ego . You don't have to be an intellectual to be a great diarist, and Agate, the debt-ridden, spectacularly self-involved drama critic of the London Sunday Times from 1923 until his death in 1947, wrote about the printable parts of his life with careful evasion (he was a brothel-loving homosexual given to masochistic practices of the grossest sort) and colossal panache. This compact selection of entries from Ego, the nine-volume series of diaries that Agate published in the Thirties and Forties, is a superlative bedside book, hugely amusing and easily readable in random snatches (TT).

GALLERY

Wolf Kahn: Color and Consequence (Ameringer McEnery Yohe, 525 W. 22, up through July 16). New paintings by an underappreciated modern master, a Hans Hofmann pupil who renders the American landscape in high-key colors that recall the luminous palette of Pierre Bonnard. The result is a deeply personal style in which abstraction and representation are so closely intertwined that they can't be teased apart (TT).

BOOK

Richard Stark, Butcher's Moon (University of Chicago, $15 paper). The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived, in which he goes up against an entire big-city crime syndicate--with a little help from a lot of friends. Out of print for years and years, Butcher's Moon is the ultimate Parker novel, best read as an installment in the series as a whole but comprehensible and wholly satisfying on its own (TT).

CD

The Essential Rosanne Cash (Sony Legacy, two CDs). Thirty-six tracks from one of America's most creative singer-songwriters, chosen by Cash herself. An ideal one-stop introduction to her work, especially when heard in tandem with Composed , Cash's 2010 memoir (TT).

PLAY

Play Dead (Players Theatre, 115 MacDougal, closes July 24). Teller's wonderfully creepy off-Broadway theatrical spook show has posted its closing notice, so if you haven't seen it yet, go while you still can. The illusions are spectacular, the humor delicious. Two pieces of advice: (1) If asked to go onstage, say yes. (2) Wait until after the show to eat dinner (TT).

DVD

Justified: The Complete First Season (Sony, three DVDs). In this cable-TV series, Graham Yost takes U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, one of Elmore Leonard's most attractive recurring characters, and returns him to Kentucky's Harlan County for a series of freshly written adventures that have the true Leonard touch. Timothy Olyphant, who plays Givens, is exactly, exquisitely right. You can't follow the second season on FX without knowing what happened last year, so if you're coming late to the party, buy this box set first and savor each episode (TT).

TT: Welcome back, Rachel Crothers

I have much wholehearted praise for the Mint Theater Company's revival of Rachel Crothers' A Little Journey . Here's an excerpt.

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The Mint Theater Company, one of New York's most admired Off-Broadway troupes, specializes in neglected plays that have slipped through the cracks. More often than not it comes up with gems, among the most notable of which was Rachel Crothers' "Susan and God," first seen in 1937 and revived by the Mint to impressive effect in 2006. Now the company has gone back to the same well with an equally strong staging of another Crothers play, "A Little Journey," which hasn't been performed professionally in New York since it closed on Broadway in 1919--and guess what? It's just as good.

Crothers, America's most successful woman playwright, is all but unknown today. Born in 1878, she wrote some 30-odd plays that made it to Broadway prior to her death in 1958, most of which she also directed and many of which, like "A Little Journey" and "Susan and God," were hits that were later filmed. How could so distinguished a female artist have vanished into the memory hole? You'd think that literary-minded feminists would have been her most outspoken champions. But Crothers, like Lillian Hellman, was a commercial playwright who specialized in "well-made" plays, a genre that became unfashionable after Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller trashed the theatrical rulebook, and the fact that she'd been so popular in her lifetime worked against her posthumously. Not until the Mint exhumed "Susan and God" did it occur to anyone that her body of work deserved a second look.

All of which brings us to "A Little Journey," an unusually well-crafted play about a group of strangers of widely varied backgrounds who get to know one another while traveling by train from Grand Central Station to the West Coast. You're heard that one before, right? In fact, it's one of the best-known of storytelling tricks, but "A Little Journey" predates Vicki Baum's "Grand Hotel" by a decade, and Crothers may actually have invented the device herself. More importantly, she uses it with great freshness, tucking a surprise into the last act that will make you jump....

The Mint long ago mastered the magical art of cramming big shows onto its shoebox-sized stage without breaking anything. Roger Hanna's set for "A Little Journey," for instance, turns Crothers' sleeper car into a simple but handsome-looking revolving carousel, a sleight-of-hand trick that gives the production a feeling of forward movement unrivaled by infinitely more complicated (and expensive) Pullman-car sets....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"It seemed to him there was never much time with women. Before you could look at one twice, you were into an argument, and they were telling you what was going to happen."

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

TT: So you want to see a show?

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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 23, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes July 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, closes July 24, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The Front Page (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Porgy and Bess (operatic musical, PG-13, extended through July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Old Times (drama, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• Heartbreak House (serious comedy, PG-13, closes June 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

TT: Once a musician...

People think of the strangest things in a crisis. When Mrs. T and I were getting ready to carry my mother to our rental car in order to rush her to the emergency room last Wednesday, I said to myself, Whenever you have to do something in a hurry, make yourself slow down. All at once I found myself recalling two of Richard Strauss' "Golden Rules for the Album of a Young Conductor":

• "You should not perspire when conducting. Only the audience should get warm."

• "When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, take the tempo half as fast. (Mozart conductors, please note!)"

That's good advice, whatever the circumstances.

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Wilhelm Furtwängler leads the Vienna Philharmonic in a 1950 performance of Richard Strauss' Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks: