Terry Teachout's Blog, page 240

TT: Just about there

Dress rehearsals for Danse Russe, my new operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, start today. If you're only just joining us, Danse Russe is a backstage comedy--yes, a comedy--about the creation of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. It opens in Philadelphia on Thursday night.

I don't know whether I'll have time to do any more blogging prior to the first performance. In case I'm too busy or preoccupied, I've already posted, in addition to a week's worth of Stravinsky-related almanac entries, a series of relevant daily videos that I hope will divert you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do....

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For more information about Danse Russe, or to order tickets, go here .

To listen to an episode of WNYC's Soundcheck in which Paul Moravec and I talk about Danse Russe, go here .

TT: Down and out in London and New York

Let the bad times roll: I review two more Broadway stinkers, Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem and the stage version of Sister Act , in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

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"Jerusalem" is pretentious almost without limit, a three-hour save-our-England tract in which the uplift is slathered with a thick brown sauce composed of two parts coarse humor and one part pseudo-poetry. In addition, "Jerusalem" features a performance by Mark Rylance ("La Bête," "Boeing-Boeing") that is every bit as good as the critical buzz that accompanied it to Broadway from London's West End. Connoisseurs of great acting won't want to miss him--but those with normal attention spans will be hard pressed to make it all the way to the finish line.

Mr. Rylance plays Johnny "Rooster" Byron, a booze-sodden drug dealer and teller of tall tales who would be known in England as "Falstaffian" or "Rabelaisian" and in America as "trailer trash." He lives in a moldering Airstream parked in a forest on the edge of a real-estate development whose occupants, not at all surprisingly, are trying to have him evicted. Rooster is the unofficial godfather of a merry band of working-class louts whom he lovingly describes, in one of his more printable turns of phrase, as "educationally subnormal outcasts." They flock to the enchanted forest to drink his drink, snort his coke, have casual sex and forget their Lives of Loud Desperation, about which they are inclined to give lengthy speeches when sober.

What we have here is, in short, the theatrical counterpart of what is known to literary scholars as a "condition-of-England novel," a genre long beloved of those who prefer politics to art. Mr. Butterworth has upped the ante still further by adding a stiff dose of middle-class self-loathing à la George Orwell, who famously declared in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" that "if there is hope, it lies in the proles!" That deluded sentence could well stand as the epigraph of "Jerusalem." Like Orwell's "proles," Rooster Byron (get it?) is in touch with the instinctual life of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. This, of course, makes him infinitely more authentic than the prim homeowners who want to give him the push....

The season isn't over yet, but I'm already guessing that "Sister Act" will walk away with the Bottom of the Barrel Prize for 2011. While the original 1992 screen version of "Sister Act" wasn't the worst movie ever made, the musical-comedy version that arrived on Broadway after successful runs in Pasadena and London is a wretched piece of rhinestone-spangled junk....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Just because (I)

Pierre Boulez conducts Stravinsky's Rite of Spring:

TT: Just because (II)

Michael Colgrass talks about recording The Rite of Spring with Igor Stravinsky on the podium:

TT: Almanac

"Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously."

Wyndham Lewis, "Inferior Religions"

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)

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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 Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter,
• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 26, reviewed here)
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, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LOS ANGELES:

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, Los Angeles remounting of Broadway production with original cast, adult subject matter, closes May 15, Broadway run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes May 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it."

George Saintsbury, A Last Vintage

TT: Just because

Michael Colgrass talks about recording The Rite of Spring with Igor Stravinsky on the podium:

TT: Is it real, or is it Kathleen Turner?

I've hit a bad patch on Broadway. In today's Wall Street Journal I pan High and Wonderland . Here's an excerpt.

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Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she's not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade. To say that Ms. Turner plays an alcoholic nun in Matthew Lombardo's "High" comes close to giving away the whole game. Yes, Sister Jamison Connelly is a foul-mouthed, tough-talking dame with a heart of brass-plated gold, and yes, Ms. Turner's Janie-One-Note performance is so thickly mannered as to suggest that the producers of "High" have engaged a Kathleen Turner robot instead of the real thing. She rattles off her lines in a hoarse, staccato baritone voice that sounds as if it had been brought into being through daily doses of Drano administered by mouth, and she never does anything that you can't see coming several hundred miles away.

Neither does Mr. Lombardo, a specialist in coarsely wrought small-cast vehicles for Hollywood refugees of a certain age. Last year it was "Looped," in which Valerie Harper played Tallulah Bankhead. This year it's "High," a three-hander in which Ms. Turner attempts to save the body and soul of Cody (Evan Jonigkeit), a dope-addled street hustler whose self-destructive behavior is enabled by the solicitude of a well-meaning but foolish priest (Stephen Kunken). "High" is the sort of play in which a character (Ms. Turner, naturally) utters sentences like "Okay, God, here's the deal," then expects the audience not to giggle contemptuously in response....

The problem with Frank Wildhorn musicals is that they contain Frank Wildhorn songs. "Wonderland," an updated stage version of Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," is stuffed full of easy-listening pop ditties written in the out-the-other-ear style to which Mr. Wildhorn long ago accustomed his fans. As for Jack Murphy's lyrics, suffice it to say that he lays his creative cards on the table in the very first number: "Larger smaller--keep it real/Change just happens, learn to deal."

If you've spent any time at all watching the dreck dished up on contemporary children's TV, you'll have a pretty good idea of what Mr. Wildhorn and his collaborators have done to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." The time is right this second and the place is Queens. Alice (Janet Dacal) is a well-dressed, temporarily single working mom whose unemployed, temporarily unenlightened husband (Darren Ritchie) has left her because he's embarrassed not to be the family breadwinner. Chloe (Carly Rose Sonenclar), their daughter, is an unnaturally mature-sounding 11-year-old Broadway diva who is incapable of uttering an unsarcastic word. Alice bumps her head in the elevator, lies down to take a nap and finds herself in Wonderland, a country whose inhabitants all speak the same tired argot, half smart-assery and half meta-humor...

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."

Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics