Terry Teachout's Blog, page 247

TT: Life in the old boy yet

I recently made a new friend, an occurrence that is unfailingly gratifying for the middle-aged, since the constant friction of life has an unfortunate way of robbing us of the old ones. People are forever dying or moving away or getting married, having children, and withdrawing into the increasingly private sphere of family life, and if you don't continually replenish your reserve of friends, you're likely to look up one day and find that you haven't any.

In addition, it's useful for all sorts of reciprocal reasons when those no longer young befriend those who still are. My quick-witted young friend (whom I first met, amazingly enough, on Twitter) happens to be exactly half my age, thus providing me with a window into the ever-mysterious world of Things as They Are Right Now, while I in turn give her case-hardened counsel on the ins and outs of the writer's life.

We sealed our friendship yesterday over lunch at a downtown restaurant to which I hadn't gone for years and years. "This is very nostalgic for me," I told her. "I had my first editorial lunch in Manhattan at this place, back when I worked at Harper's. It would have been in...oh, 1985. That was when you were in kindergarten."

"That was when I was in diapers," she retorted instantly, which turned out to be all the more embarrassing because it was true.

Speaking of embarrassment, my friend and I decided that one of the most effective ways to cement a friendship is by swapping embarrassing confidences, which we proceeded to do while waiting for the check to arrive. (I think we came out roughly even.) After I returned home, we exchanged the following messages via Twitter:

SHE The most positive relationships in my life are built on foundations of voluntarily disclosed humiliation.

ME It's like exchanging hostages.

SHE Aaaaaaaaaaaand I just laughed out loud at my desk like a little nimrod. Terry, for the win.

I felt positively sprightly, as though I'd done a figure-eight in my wheelchair.

TT: Almanac

"What nature does generally, is sure to be more or less beautiful; what she does rarely, will either be very beautiful, or absolutely ugly."

John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting

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:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, 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)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 24, reviewed here)

• 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 ON BROADWAY:

• Driving Miss Daisy (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Apr. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, Washington remounting of Chicago production, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 10, Chicago run reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• Ghost-Writer (drama, G, closes Apr. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"The more we study art, the less we care for nature."

Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"

TT: Snapshot

An excerpt from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Michael Elliott and starring Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, and John Gielgud, originally broadcast on the BBC in 1962:



(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might also be said that nature is usually wrong."

James McNeill Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

TT: Choking on sequins

I hated every second of Priscilla Queen of the Desert , which I reviewed in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

If your idea of a good show is one in which the chorus boys are dressed up to look like cupcakes, confetti is dropped at 8:34 and "I Will Survive" is sung twice, read no further. "Priscilla Queen of the Desert" (no comma, please) is the musical for you. If, on the other hand, you have an old-fashioned yen for shows in which touching things happen to believable people and the songs have something to do with the plot, stay as far away as possible from the Palace Theatre. (Wyoming might be far enough.) Not only is "Priscilla" a sequin-encrusted dragfest without a heart, but it's one of the biggest missed opportunities in the recent history of Broadway, a pointless musical version of a sweet little movie out of which something smart--and, yes, touching--might easily have been made. Instead we get human cupcakes.

Let's go back to the movie for a moment. Released in 1994, "The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert" told of how three drag queens, one of them an aging transsexual played, amazingly enough, by Terence Stamp, traveled across the Australian desert in a rundown motor home, looking for love in all the wrong places. Despite a few overly obvious moments, it was a modest and poignant film not unworthy of "La Cage aux Folles," by which it was clearly inspired, and has since become something of a cult classic.

Turning "Priscilla" into a stage musical is so good an idea that one wonders why it took so long. But in doing so, Stephan Elliott (who wrote and directed the movie) and Allan Scott, who collaborated on the book, have leached out every bit of sentiment from the film, replacing it with brass-plated showbiz pseudo-feeling....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: In one fell swoop

I had planned to take the weekend off and putter, but on Thursday I started writing a new play called Brother Al, and by Friday night the words were pouring out of me so fast that I decided to put aside everything else and see what happened. Well, what ended up happening was that I finished writing the first draft of the three-character play on Sunday afternoon, all two acts and fourteen thousand words of it. I spent the rest of the day feeling astonished, as though I'd been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale, and by the time I went to bed, a theater-savvy friend had read the script and told me that she thought it was really good.

Plays, unlike novels, do get written that fast--sometimes. Noël Coward wrote the first draft of Private Lives in four days, though he spent a week and a half sketching out the plot before sitting down to write the dialogue. I'm not Noël Coward, needless to say, but it took me about that long to write the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last winter, and I was so surprised by the quickness with which it took shape that it took quite some time before I could be persuaded that it could possibly be any good. "Don't worry," a very experienced playwright told me a few weeks later. "With a play, that kind of speed can be a really good sign, proof of inspiration."

It's way too soon for me to do anything but spend the next few days sitting on the new play, after which I'll read the first draft again and see what I think of it. I need to cool down before drawing any conclusions, and I've got more than enough to do this week and next to keep me well and truly distracted. But the mere fact that I was able to do such a thing at the age of fifty-five is in and of itself profoundly gratifying.

Not until I started work on The Letter did I imagine myself capable of producing anything more creative than a well-written biography. Today I have two opera libretti under my belt, plus a one-man play about Louis Armstrong that has survived the grueling test of two readings, one private and one public, and is looking stageworthy, not just to me but also to several case-hardened professionals. Now I've written a second play. Go figure, and let me know what you decide.

As for me, I'm not quite sure who I am this morning, but whoever this guy is, I think I like him.

TT: A Saturday afternoon walk in Fort Tryon Park

I love my new neighborhood:

TT: Almanac

"I nauseate walking; 'tis a country diversion; I loathe the country."

William Congreve, The Way of the World