Terry Teachout's Blog, page 280

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

• As I've written elsewhere, I no longer find Neil Simon's plays to be very funny. His insert-flap-A-in-slot-B style of joke-driven comedy strikes me as a rusty relic of the increasingly distant past. But there are those who insist that there's more to Simon than his punchlines, and so I took a look at the 1975 film version of The Sunshine Boys the other day in an attempt to see for myself what his critical advocates see in him. I tried to watch The Sunshine Boys a couple of years ago and couldn't get anywhere with it--but this time I saw the film from a different point of view.

What hit me forcibly on a second viewing was that Willie Clark, the character played in the film by Walter Matthau, is not merely an absent-minded old grouch but is all too clearly suffering from dementia. Yes, Simon plays his confusion for laughs--he plays everything for laughs--but anyone who has spent time with a friend or relative afflicted with Alzheimer's disease will immediately spot the symptoms, which are portrayed with next to no comic exaggeration:

BEN It's Monday, not Wednesday...didn't you know it was Monday?

WILLIE I remembered but I forgot.

In 1972, when The Sunshine Boys opened on Broadway, the phrase "Alzheimer's disease" had yet to become part of the national lexicon. I recently shared a platform with Marion Roach , who mentioned in passing that a piece about her mother's battle with Alzheimer's that she wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1983 was, unlikely as it may sound, the first first-person account of the disease ever to be published. A quarter-century later, we all know what Alzheimer's disease is, and damned few of us are inclined to laugh at it.

I still don't think The Sunshine Boys is all that funny, but when you view it not as a comedy but as a drama, the punchlines recede in salience and you find yourself confronted with a portrait of an angry, frightened old man that is fraught with something not far removed from pathos. So given the fact that Neil Simon's plays haven't been doing especially well in revival of late, I find myself wondering: what would The Sunshine Boys be like if it were staged not for laughs but truth, the way that Matthew Warchus staged last year's Broadway revival of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests?

As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of that remarkable production:

Matthew Warchus is well aware of the bleak undertones of "The Norman Conquests." He went so far in a recent interview as to claim that he'd directed the triptych "as if it's Chekhov." I wouldn't go quite as far as that: Mr. Warchus is a master of physical comedy, and each installment is full of the same knockabout antics that can be seen in his production of "God of Carnage," which is currently playing to packed houses on Broadway. But he also understands the delicate art of silence, and "The Norman Conquests" is no less full of moments of stillness when the laughter dies away and all you can hear is the keening sound of sorrow.

Perhaps Simon's play isn't strong enough to stand up to that kind of tough-minded treatment. David Cromer, after all, staged Brighton Beach Memoirs that way, and it closed after just nine performances. But what if some similarly inclined director were to mount The Sunshine Boys not on Broadway but in a small, first-class regional house like, say, Palm Beach Dramaworks or Chicago's Writers' Theatre , where the audience, instead of insisting on being "entertained," would presumably be more willing to go where the production led them?

"If [Simon's] plays continue to be performed," I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Brighton Beach Memoirs, "it will only be because actors and directors have found a new way of performing them, one that cuts through the punch lines to find a deeper, more enduring dramatic truth." Might The Sunshine Boys be the place to start?

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A studio featurette about the making of the film version of The Sunshine Boys:

TT: Almanac

"By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon."

Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured

TT: Not unlike

The past, we're told, was in color, and I don't doubt that the generation after mine will remember it that way. Mrs. T told me the other day that Ian, our thirteen-year-old nephew, has taken to turning up his nose at black-and-white movies, a form of youthful snobbery that I'd heard about but never previously encountered. Not for him the clean, crisp surreality of the monochrome image: he wants color or nothing.

Me, I like black-and-white movies, and I can recall with embarrassing ease a time when color TV was a rarity reserved for the rich. The earliest color TV sets, which went on sale in 1954, cost $1,295 each, a bit more than ten thousand dollars in today's money. My family, which didn't have that kind of cash to throw around, waited to buy a color set until 1966, the year that all three networks (remember the three networks?) changed over to full-color prime-time broadcast schedules. Prior to that time, the world came to our living room in black and white, and even though commercial color TV had been introduced twelve years earlier, I knew it not. That's why it's natural for me to think of the not-so-distant past as a colorless realm inhabited by great men (and a few women) who now exist only in shades of gray.

It is for this reason that I find myself fascinated by the relatively recent explosion of interest in autochrome, the first color-photography process that was practical enough to be marketed commercially and used by serious photographers. It was in autochrome that the earliest color pictures of famous people were taken, and to see them now is a disorienting, even jolting experience. Alvin Langdon Coburn, for instance, took two autochromes of Mark Twain at his home in Connecticut. Who knew that the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn liked to wear a red robe when reading in bed? Who knew, indeed, that there was any color to him but the gleaming white of the linen suits that were his trademark?

Dwight Eisenhower is another of those historical figures who, though he was photographed countless times in color, seems to be locked into the lost world of shadows. Hence I was hugely surprised to discover that the oldest known color videotape, made in 1958, records a public appearance by none other than Ike himself:



It was far less surprising for me to view the color tape of the 1959 "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon, after all, was elected president when I was in junior high school. What startled me most about the tape was not that he was (so to speak) a man of color but that he had once been young:



Most fascinating of all, though, is the fact that the earliest surviving color videotapes of entertainment telecasts should be devoted to the three TV specials featuring Fred Astaire that aired on NBC between 1958 and 1960. Astaire, needless to say, starred in a good many color films, but the movies for which he is best remembered are all in black and white, and to see his dancing preserved via the you-are-there immediacy of videotape is to feel the obscuring veil of the past falling away like a layer of shed skin.

Some clever soul has posted on YouTube an excerpt from Another Evening With Fred Astaire in which the original color video is intercut with a black-and-white film kinescope of the same telecast. If you're too young to know what it felt like to see color TV for the first time, this clip will convey something of that long-lost shock of recognition:



I confess to treasuring the non-entertaining portions of these telecasts as much as, if not more than, the "good" parts. Here, for instance, is what you would have seen if you were one of the few people in Wichita, Kansas, who was sufficiently well-heeled to own a color TV on October 17, 1958:



Isn't it bewitching to see the car commercials? And to know that Lee Marvin's M Squad and Peter Lawford's The Thin Man got bumped that cool fall night by none other than Fred Astaire?

Alas, there will be no future autochrome-like explosion of interest in early color television, for videotape was so expensive in the late Fifties and early Sixties (an hour-long blank reel cost $300) that all three networks routinely erased and reused tapes that had not been specifically earmarked for preservation. Surviving color video from the Golden Age of Television is thus as rare--and as eerily evocative--as sound recordings from the late nineteenth century.

I find it especially touching that one of those recordings should be a tape of the very last episode of The Howdy Doody Show, which went off the air in 1960. Alas, I never saw Howdy Doody as a child, but even so, I can feel a second-hand hug on my heartstrings as I watch this video:



The world was simpler then, simpler and more reassuring and--yes--less honest. Much was being swept under the rug in 1960, far too much for our collective good. And now? We get color or nothing. I suppose I'm glad to know what I know about the world, but I don't think I would have wanted to know very much of it when I was young, and I'm not at all sure it's a good thing that my nephew already knows some of it.

W.H. Auden said it: Some think they're strong, some think they're smart,/Like butterflies they're pulled apart,/America can break your heart./You don't know all, sir, you don't know all.

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To see the complete 1958 telecast of An Evening With Fred Astaire, go here .

TT: Almanac

"'We find the vanishing vicar of Lovers' Leap!' 'Sally Smith is a tea lady in a Blackpool engineering works, but it was the way she filled those C-cups which got our cameraman all stirred up!' It's crap. And it's written by grown men earning maybe ten thousand a year. If I was a printer, I'd look at some of the stuff I'm given to print, and I'd ask myself what is supposed to be so special about the people who write it."

Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

TT: Suspicious minds

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival, where I saw new productions of Othello and An Ideal Husband . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

When a drama company puts on two shows in alternating repertory, it's smart for the artistic director to pick a pair of scripts that can be played off one another--though not necessarily in an obvious way. You wouldn't think, for instance, that Shakespeare's "Othello" and Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" have much of anything in common, but they prove in practice to be mutually illuminating, bearing as they do on the subject of how suspicion can wreak havoc on a marriage. Cleveland's Great Lakes Theater Festival is mounting handsome stagings of both plays in collaboration with the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, where the two productions originated this summer, and as I watched them in close succession earlier this week, I was struck by how smoothly they fit together.

Risa Brainin's "Othello" is a modern-dress staging whose reference points are wholly contemporary, all the way from the clamorous action-flick incidental music of Michael Keck to the central-casting performances of the excellent actors: Othello (David Alan Anderson) plays the regular guy gone wrong, Iago (David Anthony Smith) the brash, sarcastic Bill Murray-ish sidekick with a giant chip on his shoulder, Desdemona (Sara M. Bruner) the chirpy innocent who can't believe what's happening to her until it's too late. The results, though unsubtle in the extreme, are also terrifically effective--and not just on their own populist terms, either. This is a blood-and-thunder "Othello" that roars down the track at several hundred miles an hour...

Nearly every production of an Oscar Wilde play that I've seen in recent years has been performed on a set that sought to reproduce more or less literally the Vicwardian décor of Wilde's own time. Not so the Great Lakes Theater Festival's version of "An Ideal Husband," whose simple unit set, designed by Nayna Ramey, consists of a drape, some columns and a half-dozen stage-wide steps, plus enough period chairs to allow the characters to seat themselves as they please. Between the set and Jason Lee Resler's high-society costumes, nothing more is needed to create a look that is at once stylized and stylish.

Sari Ketter, the director, writes in her program note that she conceives of "An Ideal Husband" as a "fairy tale." To that end she fills her sparsely decorated stage with a ballet-like corps of black-clad butlers at whose seemingly magical behest the other actors come and go, a charming conceit executed with the most delicate of touches....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"I never got used to the way the house Trots fell into the jargon back in Grimsby--I mean, on any other subject, like the death of the novel, or the sex life of the editor's secretary, they spoke ordinary English, but as soon as they started trying to get me to join the strike it was as if their brains had been taken out and replaced by one of those little golf-ball things you get in electric typewriters... 'Betrayal'...'Confrontation'... 'Management'... My God, you'd need a more supple language than that to describe an argument between two amoebas."

Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

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:

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

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

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, 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, original Broadway production 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)

• The Little Foxes (drama, G, unsuitable for children, brilliantly acted but tritely staged, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN CHICAGO:

• Night and Day (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• The Glass Menagerie (drama, G, West Coast remounting of original New Haven/off-Broadway production, too dark for children, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, West Coast remounting of original Chicago/off-Broadway production, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 17, off-Broadway run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• Frost/Nixon (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Junk journalism is the evidence of a society that has got at least one thing right, that there should be nobody with the power to dictate where responsible journalism begins."

Tom Stoppard, Night and Day

TT: Snapshot

A 1966 TV interview with Bill Evans:



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

UNTOUCHABLE

" If a great essayist is one who succeeds in getting his personality onto the page, then H. L. Mencken qualifies in spades. The problem is that his personality grows more predictable with closer acquaintance, just as the tricks of his prose style grow more familiar. Like most journalists, he is best consumed not in the bulk of a twelve-hundred-page boxed set but in small and carefully chosen doses..."