Terry Teachout's Blog, page 271

TT: The Cowardly Lion's bravest night

I rejoice to report that the 1956 recording of the first Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, starting Bert Lahr, is finally back in print. Since no one else in the world seems to be aware of this wonderful fact, I decided to announce it to the world in my "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Every critic who covered the show heaped praise on Lahr, and the most perceptive ones saw that his performance was profoundly true to the spirit of the play. Though Lahr was no kind of intellectual, he had instinctively understood what Beckett was up to. "I know it's supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags," he told his agent after reading the script. So there are, for "Godot" is a Laurel-and-Hardyesque farce about the meaninglessness of life. Even those critics who, like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, found it hard to stomach the play's dark vision were staggered by the crazed beauty of Lahr's acting: "His long experience as a bawling mountebank has equipped Mr. Lahr to represent eloquently the tragic comedy of one of the lost souls of the earth."

Alas, "Godot" closed after just 10 weeks, and Lahr never appeared in it again. But Goddard Lieberson, who produced original-cast albums for Columbia Records, had the brilliant idea to record a complete performance of the play. The existence of the resulting album, which has been out of print for the past quarter-century, is no secret, but its long-standing unavailability has caused it to be overlooked by most people who write about "Godot." Even John Lahr, the comedian's younger son, fails to mention it in "Notes on a Cowardly Lion," the uniquely perceptive biography of his father that he wrote in 1969.

It is, therefore, stop-press news for anybody who loves great theater that the 1956 recording of "Godot" is available once again, not as a CD but as an mp3-only sound file that you can download from Amazon for $3.56 or from iTunes for $5.99. (You can find it on either site by searching for "Bert Lahr.") Culturally speaking, I'd call that the deal of the decade....

The 1956 production of "Godot" was Lahr's show all the way, and to hear it now is to boggle at his seemingly infinite comic resourcefulness. He whines, he whimpers, he chortles, he grunts, giving each line precisely the right flavor. Yet never for a moment does his clowning conceal the play's underlying pathos, and whenever he opens his mouth, it's always Beckett, not Bert Lahr, that you hear....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely."

H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, Feb. 12, 1923

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

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

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

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

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

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

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• The Pitmen Painters (serious comedy, G, too demanding for children, closes Dec. 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, 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 SUNDAY IN PHOENIX, ARIZ.:

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and violence, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• A Life in the Theatre (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"I believe in Michael Angelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed."

George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma

TT: Snapshot

Dame Margot Fonteyn dances Frederick Ashton's Salut d'amour, set to the music of Edward Elgar:



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

TT: Almanac

"My dear, it would be a terrible poverty of life if music were political. I cannot imagine it because what does this mean--'political music'? That is why I ignore questions about political music because music is music. Painting is painting."

Henryk Górecki, interview with Bruce Duffie (April 1994)

TT: Almanac

"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line."

H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun (Aug. 9, 1926)

TT: Almanac

If thou dislik'st the Piece thou light'st on first;

Thinke that of All, that I have writ, the worst:

But if thou read'st my Book unto the end,

And still do'st this, and that verse, reprehend:

O Perverse man! If All disgustfull be,

The Extreame Scabbe take thee, and thine, for me.

Robert Herrick, "To the Soure Reader" (courtesy of Hannah Farber)

TT: Funny like a straitjacket

Brendan Fraser has just made his Broadway debut in the American premiere of Elling , an occasion that attracted the attention of the editors of the Greater New York section of The Wall Street Journal, who asked me to review the opening for today's paper. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

My preliminary expectations about Simon Bent's "Elling" can be summed up as follows: Why would any American producer in his right mind choose to put money into a British stage play adapted from a Norwegian film based on a series of allegedly comic novels about two mentally ill men, one prim and fussy and the other loud and sloppy? What good could come of so patently misguided an investment? None whatsoever, I regret to say: "Elling" is relentlessly sentimental and comprehensively unfunny, so much so that I had to struggle to stay awake all the way to the bitter end.

I may well be underestimating the potency of Norwegian humor, for which I humbly apologize in advance. That said, the premise of "Elling," in which the title character (Denis O'Hare) and his roommate Kjell Bjarne (Brendan Fraser) are transferred from an insane asylum to a halfway house in order to adjust to life in the outside world, strikes me as...well, not very funny. Not knowing the novels by Ingvar Ambjornsen on which "Elling" is based, I can't say anything about their theatrical potential, but it strikes me that Mr. Bent has turned them into a rigidly commercial comedy that plays like a cross between "The Odd Couple" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," with a bit of "Waiting for Godot" thrown in to confuse the issue....

Mr. Fraser is, or can be, an accomplished film actor--he was quite good as Ian McKellen's innocent foil in "Gods and Monsters"--but his one-dimensional performance is both unvaried and unmemorable....

* * *

The print version of the Journal's Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review of Elling by going here .

TT: Music for a couch day

Kenny Burrell, Bob Magnusson, and Sherman Ferguson play "All Blues":