Gielgud’s Letters

Though the great actor Sir John Gielgud (1904-2000) never wrote his autobiography, we get a wonderful sense of the man from his letters.  Gielgud was a regular, and somewhat indefatigable, correspondent, and many of his letters were compiled in Gielgud’s Letters, introduced and edited by Richard Mangan (2004).

Gielgud was active on the stage at a very early age, and continued to appear in films and television until the end of his very long life.  His career is almost unprecedented in its diversity of achievement, its adaptation to many styles of acting, great variety of mediums, and tremendous longevity.  Indeed, it is fair to say that Gielgud is one of the few figures of the Twentieth Century as famous in 1931 as he was in 1981 (or ’91 or 2001, for that matter).  Consequently, his letters cover a remarkable range of topics and people, with figures as diverse as Hugh Walpole and Noel Coward, to Dudley Moore and Debbie Reynolds.  A quick page through Mangan’s collection promises letters to (or letters alluding to friendships with): James Bond author Ian Fleming, Michael York, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, Lauren Bacall, Burt Lancaster, William Walton, Clifton Webb, Ethel Waters … in short, if they were active in the world of theater (using the term very broadly) over a span of nearly 100 years, Gielgud either worked with them or knew them. 

What kind of man was Gielgud?  These letters, never written for publication or posterity, lays bare the soul of a generous and kindly man.  What is fascinating how often he writes to provide comfort or solace to friends, or to thank others for remembrance during his own troubles.  (A homosexual scandal in 1953 nearly ended his career – and his life, as he considered suicide.)  He was by no means deep or intellectual, but Gielgud was a great artist, and he saw almost everything through the prism of his art.  Gielgud was an aesthete of the most pure and devout kind, an acolyte who never sought to see things beyond his (theatrical) aesthetic appreciation.  (World events were largely lost on him … what really mattered was whether the theaters were open and that actors and playwrights were working.)

Gielgud in his letters was also a wonderful gossip, sharing news and scandal with a boyish sense of the naughty.  Here’s a 1962 sample from the party for the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia, while Gielgud was touring with A School For Scandal in Detroit, of all places: “Appalling city this, as I knew.  The theatre is huge and vulgar (but lovely big dressing rooms) and very hard to get the play going in the first act, as will always be the case in America, I’m afraid.  Too much of the women, and too much talk which confuses the audience, and of course, I have so little to do that I’m not much help.  A pity.  The weekend was great fun – huge party on the St. Regis roof, masses of people I knew.  I never stopped being kissed by gentlemen!  Peter O’Toole, Jason Robards, Tennessee, Quintero etc. – and a few ladies too!  Maggie [Leighton] was hysterical all the evening – late, no taxies, trouble with her dress, tired, sitting so long at the picture – 4 hours, etc. etc. but she was, as usual, very sweet.  Alec Guinness is not very good, rather like a benevolent old lady.  It is a great pity I didn’t play it – it would have been a marvelous part for me.  Never mind.  O’Toole is wonderful – and dishy too – and the whole picture is superb, except that it is really two films – one the story and the other the spectacle.  But it is dignified, breathtakingly beautiful to look at, moving, exciting and everything.  Only some common pseudo Rachmaninoff music, which is vulgar and the only blot, I thought.  All the other men wonderfully good, even Wolfit!  Mad audience – wigs, rocks, start, the lot.  I did enjoy the evening.”

Here’s another that I find amusing, from 1976: “I finally succumbed to play a small part for a lot of money in the Caligula of Gore Vidal.  Martin [Hensler, his partner of nearly 40 years] is very cross with me for accepting it as I was originally offered Tiberius (now played by Peter O’Toole) and my first scene was to come out of a pool, with a plaster over my nose and eczema all over my face, to reveal two children, boy and girl, emerging from under my tunic where they were dallying with me.  So I loftily refused and had a stinkingly rude letter from Gore saying he supposed I’d never read Suetonius, and how dared I go round saying good actors would be ashamed to appear in such pornography.  Then a week or two came an offer of this other part – an old Senator who cuts his veins in a bath and disapproves of everything, and I thought well, why not?  What Vidal and I will say to each other if and when we meet, I tremble to prophesy…..”

During the 1953 scandal, he wrote the following to friend Cecil Beaton: “Thank you very much for writing.  It’s so hard to say what I feel – to have let down the whole side – the theatre, my friends, myself and my family – and all for the most idiotic and momentary impulse.  Of course I’ve been tortured by the thought that I acted stupidly afterwards, insisting on tackling it without advice of any kind – but I expect it would all have come out anyway – and I just couldn’t bear the idea of a case and weeks of obscene publicity – even if I had got off with a clean sheet the slur would still have been there, and everyone would have gossiped and chattered.  As it is – well, I can only feel that I’ve been spoilt and protected all my life and now its something basic and far-reaching that I’ve got to face for many more years to come.  The miracle is that my friends have stood by me so superbly, and even the public looks like letting me go on with my work.  Both things would not have been so twenty years ago (though I don’t think either the press would have been so cruelly open).  There are many other things to be thankful for.  For one, I don’t think my Mother has realized the full significance of it, or else she’s the most wonderful actress in the Terry Family!  For another, I wasn’t actually playing in London at the time, and these four weeks of the tour are a sort of test both as regards the public and my own nerves.  There are some tricky lines in the play, but many are also compassionate and charming, and the character I play has sympathy without seeming to ask for it too much.  That is all to the good.”

We see Gielgud in this volume as we have never seen him on stage or screen: doubtful lover, dutiful son, amusing anecdotist, friend and benefactor, waspish gossip.  He emerges warm, loving and generous – and many readers will close the book regretting only that they had never met him.

Cultural Decay: TONY Edition #6

While still reeling from the unmitigated disaster that is Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, your correspondent was in desperate need of a tonic.  And what could be more bracing than a look at the weekly wallow of cultural decay that is Time Out New York (TONY)?  So, let’s see what America’s most witless publication has on hand this week…

Starting with the end of it, page 98 (in the ever-reliable The Off-Off List section) we find notice of the Summerworks Festival.  There “Clubbed Thumb continues its new-works festival, one of the best ways to see which local playwrights have had their digits whacked with the talent hammer.”  Hint – look for tears in their eyes.

Page 76 (in the Music section) includes a notice for Marduk + Aura Noir + Black Anvil + Panzerfaust + HOD + Natur.  At this event “Ultra-blasphemous Swedish black-metal outfit Marduk, which favors breakneck tempos, vomited vocals and darkly atmospheric textures, plays behind a new EP, Iron Dawn.”  What I find fascinating here is how often TONY uses the word “vomit” as a descriptor of available cultural wares.  Scarcely an issue goes by without something being likened to vomit.  Is this, perhaps, a tacit admission of our cultural state?  Or, perhaps, an optimistic view that things are always coming, in not looking, up?  Hum…..

The same page includes a brief chat with Aloe Blacc, who appears to be a musician of some sort.  When asked about the current “soul revival,” the worthy Mr. Blacc said, “I often think that it’s because the oldie demographic – maybe 25-plus – when they’re not in a nightclub, they want to hear music that speaks to their mature sensibility.”  Hold the phone.  The “oldie demographic” is … 25-plus?  And we wonder why our music, or film, and the language of our ongoing cultural discussion seem so adolescent! 

More next week!

The Tree of Life is All Bark and No Bite

The reviews that The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s new film, has received are the kind that directors often dream about but seldom receive.  A. O. Scott, of the New York Times, for instance, calls the film a masterpiece and likens Malick to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Hart Crane.  Even Time Out New York, perhaps our critically least discriminating publication, says The Tree of Life “posits an eternal conflict between nature and grace.”

And it’s not just the newspapers – The Tree of Life won the prestigious Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Hum!  Well, your correspondent can only scratch his head and wonder; perhaps there was more cocaine than usual at Cannes this year?  Perhaps Scott desperately needs a vacation (or received a terrific Christmas present from Malick)?  Perhaps Time Out New York … well, you get the picture.  However, don’t be deceived.  The Tree of Life can be dismissed with a scant four words:  don’t believe the hype.

It is rare that I have had to endure such a self-congratulatory orgy of self indulgence, such a fetid stew of pretention and muddy thinking.  For the two and a half hours of its running time, your correspondent could have spent his time more constructively repeatedly pounding his head against his coffee table.

At any rate, on with the show.  The plotline of The Tree of Life is a simple affair.  In the vast cosmos, the world is created.  Then, life evolves on the planet Earth.  Then, dinosaurs wade through streams, seemingly very happy.  Then, in Eisenhower America, Brad Pitt is something of a disappointment as a father.  Then, one of his surviving sons grows up to be Sean Penn, despite the fact that he’s about 10-to-15 years too young for a 1950s boyhood.  Then, the cosmos ages and life on this planet ends.  And then, once everyone is dead, we all walk on the beach and run into each other once again.  Slow curtain, the end.  Oh, I think, because there is a haze of reddish-orange light at the finale, perhaps the whole thing begins again?  I’m not sure.  I only know that the audience at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York’s Upper West Side ran for the exits as if the the place was on fire.  (Side note about Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.  It is one of the few havens left that features films geared towards adults.  However, they are completely incapable of managing large crowds, directing traffic, or adequately training staff.  Add to that, I have seen home theaters with larger screens.  Audiences for such fare as Thor seem to get all the perks.)

At any rate, the problems with The Tree of Life are too numerous and extensive to be completely cataloged here.  Suffice it to say that we never really get a bead on any of these people, so the supposed tragedy (or grace notes, if you will) of their lives never resonate in any profound way.  Add to that, Malick depends on camera trickery and classical music to convey a sense of faux profundity when actually he has little to say and even less to show.  The camera moves more than The Blair Witch Project, and we often leave scenes so rapidly, that we have no escalation of dramatic intent.  We also have no idea of what kind of man Penn has become, other than he seems to be haunted by visions of his late brother.  He seems to have a wife -- a girlfriend?  A gracious waitress?  But his women-problems are only alluded to – we have no idea about his story, or even why he’s telling it.  And all of Malick’s cosmic small-town-America-equals-the cosmos was done before in Wilder’s Our Town, and much better, thank you very much.  There is also a lot of pseudo-Christian hoo-hah thrown into the mix, as well, which may mean something to someone.  At any rate … it’s the old Post Modern dodge of being obscure and hoping the rubes read something into it.

What works?  Well …, the dinosaurs are nice.  It’s almost enough to wish one were watching some truly wretched, but at least honest piece of hokum like When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth.  The space pictures sure are pretty, but Kubrick did it first and better.  Oh, and small-towns in 1950s America sure were nice.  And Brad Pitt sure looks good in a hat.  And … well, I’m sure there’s something else worthwhile if I could only think of it.

The performances are dire, but here I blame Malick more than Pitt, Jessica Chastain (as his wife) or Penn.  They are never on camera long enough to build up a head of steam, and the parts are so thinly written that the poor actors are left adrift.  Only Hunter McCracken as son Jack manages to shine, and that’s simply our complicity and celebration of his youth.  However, with a screenplay and director behind him, the young man may one day fulfill this promise.

If you must go to The Tree of Life because it is a critical darling, don’t say you haven’t been warned.  One final note to A. O. Scott – you owe me $12.

There is No Cure for Dr. Haggard’s Disease

To celebrate Vincent Price’s 100^th birthday, I thought it appropriate to look at my favorite contemporary Gothic novel, Dr. Haggard’s Disease, by Patrick McGrath (1993).  It may be the finest Gothic of the last century and will be long remembered.

Briefly: Dr. Haggard lives in grand romantic seclusion at his sea cliff home. Limping and racked with pain, he takes drugs to forget his hip injury and to bury the tormenting memory of the woman he loved, Fanny, now dead.

Fanny returns to him in a way when her son, Jimmy, comes to his home. The men build a friendship with a highly charged sexual undercurrent. While remembering the dead Fanny’s passion, Haggard sees changes in her son and comes to believe that Jimmy is somehow morphing into her, that Fanny is coming out of the past to return to him. But is Jimmy really changing...?

The title is something of a joke -- passion is Haggard’s disease. We never really know if Jimmy is turning into his mother, or if the change exists only in Haggard’s drug-tormented mind.  The novel’s end is one that you will not forget quickly.

Dr. Haggard’s Disease is a textbook of the form. It captures not only the Gothic sensibility, but its mood, its sense of place, its sexual energy, its emotional tenor and melancholy, its obsession with the past; and, as a story, it is a model of construction. 

Haggard’s obsessive love of Fanny hints strongly of necrophilia and the Doctor, addicted to drugs, is not always a reliable narrator.  Haggard is a man of science destroyed by monomania, a slavish devotion to a feminine ideal.  And, like the vengeful lamias found in Poe’s Liegia and Berenice, Fanny’s strength and passion reaches from beyond the grave to affect the men who live in the shadow of her memory.

Author Patrick McGrath (born 1950 in London) is the author of only a handful of novels.  His grimly comic The Grotesque (1989) is a fascinating hybrid, a comedy of manners with an Edgar Allen Poe sensibility.  Spider (1990), another tale of insanity, is a fine novel, but Asylum (1996) seems curiously bloodless to me.  McGrath may not be prolific, but he is masterful.

With Dr. Haggard’s Disease McGrath rescued the Gothic from its kitschy confines. This richly textured novel transcends what the Gothic has become, and returns this great tradition back to the realm of serious literature.

It may be in time that McGrath is ranked along Poe, Stevenson, Doyle, Stoker and Shelly as one of the great Gothic novelists -- an author whose work transcends genre to become literature. McGrath writes with a passion and intensity worthy of his own Dr. Haggard, and this is a rich book to savor, to be read and re-read.

Cultural Decay: TONY Edition #5

In terms of cultural decay, few institutions can successfully compete with Time Out New York (TONY).  However, a real contender to the title remains The Whitney Museum of American Art, that pulsating junk heap piled high with the discarded detritus of Modernism, Post Modernism, and all the other schools that make up the intellectual garage sale we currently call art.

And so, here is a helping of both the Whitney and TONY, all in one sumptuous paragraph:

Page 42 (in the Art section) details Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools.  To quote fully:  “You might describe Arcangel as an Internet-age existentialist, a sort of “I play Xbox, therefore I am” type who hacks old 8-bit Nintendo game cartridges to showcase his own version of a first-person shooter called I Shot Andy Warhol, and uses basic Photoshop color-gradient moves to create trippy digital abstractions printed as large photos … highlights include a projection-video bowling alley, made with backgrounds from bowling video games, as well as a golf game that invites viewer participation.  No need to bring your own clubs.”  I would, however, recommend a good caddy.

Page 76 (in the Music section) Orange Goblin + The Gates of Slumber + Naam + Kings Destroy, described as: “Hammy fun U.K. stoner-metal heavyweights Orange Goblin head up a bell-bottom friendly affair chez Andrew W.K.  Indianapolis doom diehards sow their deep downer vibes in the penultimate slot, supporting an aptly named new slab, The Wretch.”  I have now both read and typed this, and still have no idea what it means….

Finally, on page 94 (the always fecund Off-Off List), we find news of Standards of Decency 3:  300 Vaginas Before Breakfast.  “Taking inspiration from a quote by bard-we-deserve John Mayer, the Blue Coyote Theater pack … creates an evening of short plays about online porn.”  I think I’ll grab a bagel, instead.

More next week!

The Male Nudes of John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent Drawing of Architecture

for Boston Fine Arts Fresco

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was one of the greatest, and most prolific, of fin de siècle artists.  A gifted portraitist, Sargent was also painter of many magnificent landscapes, a champion draughtsman and watercolorist, and he also painted the mighty frescoes found in the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Art historians and critics have a little trouble with Sargent – his talent is too great to dismiss, but he does not comfortably fit with either with the Academic establishment or with Impressionist movement, both of which were dominant at that time.  What Sargent was, in short, was his own thing, an artist unique to himself who managed also to wonderfully illustrate his own time.

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, to American expatriate parents.  He would study in Florence and Paris, and live in London and Boston.  He was one of most celebrated artists of his time, famous for his “society portraits.”  Near the end of his life, he visited the battlefields in World War I France as an official British War artist.

Two of Sargent’s greatest pictures remain The Portrait of Madame X (see below), first painted in 1884, and the portrait of Graham Robertson (also below).  Madame X created a furor upon his initial exhibition – one of the straps of the lady’s gown was slipped off of her shoulder.  The subject, society-figure Virginie Gautreau (1859-1915), never quite recovered from the scandal, while Sargent’s fortune was made.   The picture now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and it is a remarkable work.  Gautreau’s pale while skin, aristocratic hauteur and dramatic outfit are wonderfully realized by Sargent’s brush.  And don’t look for the dangling strap – after its initial exhibition, he painted it back in place.

My other favorite Sargent is the portrait of W. Graham Robertson (866-1948).  Robertson was a well-known dandy and patron of the arts, who later made a name for himself as a scenic designer and minor playwright.  With his languid look, elegant walking stick, and the long, stylish line of his coat, Sargent managed to sum up the entire Aesthetic Movement in a single picture.  (Oscar Wilde, High Priest of the Aesthetes, lived across the street from Sargent at the time; it’s not impossible that Wilde himself sat and amused Robertson while the portrait was painted.  At least, your correspondent likes to think so.)

One amusing story about the portrait of Robertson, which now hangs in the Tate Gallery, London – Sargent insisted that “the coat is the picture,” and Robertson posed for hours at a time in the blistering summer heat.  “What a horrid light there is just now,” Sargent said one day.  “A sort of green…. Why, it’s you!”  He then rushed Robertson outside into some much needed fresh air.

But one of Sargent’s most neglected bodies of work remain his drawings and paintings of the male nude.  Sargent had a particular gift for the subject, and worked closely with two models throughout his long life, his valet Nicola D’Inverno, and, later, Thomas E. McKeller, a bell-hop at a Boston hotel that Sargent met and employed as model for many of the figures in the Boston frescoes.

Aside from the supreme virtuosity of these drawings – many of which are merely “working drawings” that served as a basis for the business of fresco painting – is the fact that they still exist.  Society at that time mostly regarded the depiction of the male nude to be pornographic.  However, upon Sargent’s death his sister, Violet, donated many of these works to the Fogg Art Museum. 

Sargent has a special genius for the male form.  At once masculine and sensual, Sargent’s male nudes have an almost angelic grace, as if lithe and lissome gods came down among us.  As many of the surviving drawing were also created for his personal enjoyment, it cannot be doubted that these images were emotionally charged for Sargent, as well.

What was Sargent’s erotic life?  Scholarship seems divided on that issue.  Painter Jacques-Émile Blanche claimed, after Sargent’s death, that he was “a frenzied bugger.”  Others, including biographer Stanley Olson, believe that Sargent’s interior life was a mystery even to the painter himself.  In fact, Sargent was so driven by his art that is it possible that his entire emotional life existed only in his work.

Should we care about an artist’s private life?  His affairs, his politics, his relationships?  Well … yes.  We should not judge an artist’s output on his private life and convictions, but understanding the artist and his times often brings us closer to understanding the work.  For instance, it would be a shame to lose Wagner’s music because he was an insufferable monster of a human being; however, knowing something of his life, views and thoughts on mythology provide insight into creation of his Ring Cycle.  That Sargent may have been homosexual is interesting to speculate, but the evidence is inconclusive.  However, it is impossible to look upon his male nudes without appreciating Sargent’s sense of physical or aesthetic adoration.

Readers who want to see more of Sargent’s male nudes may want to find a copy of John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes by John Esten.  Long out-of-print, it can be found on Ebay and Alibris easily enough, and it is also worth a trip to the local library.  The commentary by Esten, essentially a few pages of double-columned text, is essentially worthless, but the reproductions do justice to Sargent’s genius.  Perhaps the most comprehensive biography is John Singer Sargent: His Portrait by Stanley Olson, which comes highly recommended.

Bells Are Ringing But the Party’s Over

Frank Gorshin and Judy Holliday have fun with Method Acting Pretension

in Bells Are Ringing (1960)

Your correspondent had the pleasure of seeing the Encores production of Bells Are Ringing last November at New York’s City Center.  Encores is dedicated to performing the full book and score of musicals that are under-produced or little-remembered.  Several Encores productions have led to full-fledged Broadway revivals, and the program has done a magnificent job of keeping what has become known as the Great American Songbook vibrant, alive and zesty.

Bells Are Ringing tells the story of Ella, who works for a phone answering service run by her friend Sue, “Susanswerphone.”  (For my more youthful readers, in the days before cell phones and answering machines, an answering service was actually a live switchboard operator who took and relayed messages from missed calls.)  Ella gets caught up in the lives of her clients, including a song-writing dentist, a Brando-esque actor, and playwright Jeff Moss, who is suffering a catastrophic case of writer’s block.

In the subplot, Sue gets involved with a book-maker disguised as a classical music impresario, and all of the Susanswerphone staff are suspected of involvement in a vice ring.

The recent Encores production featured a stellar performance by Kelli O’Hara as Ella, ably abetted by Will Chase (Jeff) and Judy Kaye (Sue).  How this production did not make it to Broadway is something of a puzzler to your correspondent – it was one of my most memorable evenings of theater in 2010.  The show was played with energy, brio and great good humor. 

This musical was written by Betty Comden (1917-2006) and Adolph Green (1914-2002), the duo behind Singin’ in the Rain and The Band Wagon, among others, with music by Jule Stein (1905-1994), who wrote the scores for Gypsy and Funny Girl.  Comden and Green wrote the show specifically for Judy Holliday (1921-1965), who won the Tony for her performance and who reprised the role in the later film version.  The show opened in 1956 and two of the numbers, “Just in Time” and “The Party’s Over,” have become standards.

The show prompted me to seek out the DVD of the 1960 film.  Holliday was joined by Dean Martin (1917-1995) as Jeff Moss, and the film was directed by Vincente Minnelli (1903-1986) director of Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, and Some Came Running, among other classic films.  It was produced by the legendary Feed Unit at MGM, also responsible for The Wizard of Oz, Good News, Easter Parade, and Gigi and many, many others. 

For all of this firepower, the film version of Bells Are Ringing is something of a misfire.  Director Minnelli was slavishly close to the source material and, as a result, the film never “opened up,” remaining stagey throughout.  Several of the show’s numbers were cut, leaving the first half of the film flaccid while Holliday, usually an explosive presence, seems curiously subdued.  “Hello, Hello There,” sung on the New York subway in the show, was never shot for the film while the show-stopping “Is It a Crime?” was shot, but left on the cutting room floor.  (The latter number is included in outtakes on the DVD version – one of the best numbers on the disk.  Its exclusion at the time of the film’s release is another mystery.)

Happily, things pick up for the film’s second half.  Frank Gorshin does a wonderful turn as the Brando-inspired actor.  There is a moment (see above) where he and Holliday meet in a dive catering to Method Actors and they speak to one-another in monosyllables.  It’s a deft jab at the entire Kitchen Sink School – which, sadly, would have the last laugh in a changing world.    Holliday and company also do a terrific job with “Drop That Name,” a giddy parody of celebrity culture and the empty parties that sustain it.   We also get additional screen time with Jean Stapleton’s Sue (another hold-over from the Broadway production), who is romanced by the snappy Eddie Foy, Jr.

However, the real standout of the film version of Bells Are Ringing is, surprisingly, Dean Martin.  Martin was never a great musician in the same manner as Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra (though he was the first to admit he was a “stylist” more than a singer), but he had an engaging way of selling a song.  He was also a surprisingly good actor, as anyone who has seen Rio Bravo, Some Came Running or The Sons of Katie Elder would attest.  He is very touching as Jeff Moss, once part of a writing team and now adrift on his own. (How much he was able to tap into the career downturn he faced immediately after the breakup of his act with Jerry Lewis is unknown, but the fear and uncertainty seem very real.)  His singing of “Just in Time,” where he credits Holliday with saving his life, has an unusual amount of pathos and is eminently believable.

However, perhaps the most moving number in Bells Are Ringing is Holliday’s rendition of “The Party’s Over,” though, perhaps, not for reasons intended by the film.  Bells Are Ringing is really, in many ways, a last hurrah.  It was the last film made by the legendary Freed Unit at MGM.  It was the last musical directed by Minnelli, and it would be Holliday’s last film as well – she would die of cancer five years later.

But also, it was the end of an era.  Up until 1960 the Great American Songbook would coexist in an uneasy truce with rock-and-roll.  In less than five years, even that coexistence would largely vanish as the vapid rhythms and ridiculous lyrics of rock reached ascendency, and young, vibrant performers like Martin (and Sinatra, Tony Bennett, etc) would suddenly find themselves relegated to “nostalgia acts.”  With Holliday singing to the vanishing New York audience of a closing era, the party was over indeed.



Cultural Decay: TONY Edition #4

Pull up a chair and let’s see the latest bits of foolishness Time Out New York (TONY) serves up this week.  As always, TONY does not disappoint – the magazine remains a perfect bellwether of our cultural decay.

Page 44 (in the Best by Day section) promises Naked Girls Reading Presents Naked Girls Eating.  There “the in-the-buff bookworms Nasty Canasta, Darlinda Just Darlinda, the Naked Librarian and Legs Malone whet the appetite with selections from their favorite culinary writers.  Grab a Food Porn cocktail ….”  Emily Dickinson fans beware!

Page 57 (in the Books section!) includes a notice for Derangement of the Senses.  At this event “Kevin Carter amps up the standard reading format with multimedia performances from writers, and lit-minded burlesque dancers accompanied by an electronic laser harp.”  Too bad Somerset Maugham is dead … I hear he was a great little dancer.

The Theater section on page 108 lists my favorite of the week: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.  It is described thus: “in his latest solo show, slacker comedian Mike Birbiglia shares stories about love, loss and vomit in a stoner’s drawl.”  I suppose you can’t keep a good man down.

More next week!

Shtick Happens

Sometimes bad shows happen to good people.  Case in point, The People in the Picture, currently performed by the Roundabout Theater Company at Studio 54.  I’m quite sure that Iris Rainer Dart (book and lyrics) and the musical team of Mike Stoller and Artie Butler all thought, “well, this will be the feel-good Holocaust musical of the year.”  Oy.

To be sure, there is much to like in this ultimately flat-footed show.  Donna Murphy is a marvel, flipping back-and-forth between young, vibrant woman and little old lady at (literally) the drop of a hat.  Her Tony nomination is richly deserved.  Chip Zien, Hal Robinson, Lewis J. Stadlen and (a largely wasted) Joyce Van Patten are all capable and pleasing performers.  The staging is inventive, the sets and effects quite impressive and when the jokes work, they are funny enough.

And yet.  And yet, The People in the Picture is a wasted opportunity.  The show is about an elderly woman (Murphy), retelling the harrowing story of her life with a group of travelling players/comedians called the Warsaw Gang in Poland during World War II.  The theme hammered home repeatedly is that life is hard, often horrific, but it can be redeemed to a large degree through art.

This, of course, is a theme tailored to warm the heart of your correspondent, but if only The People in the Picture was accomplished enough in its own artistry to carry off the premise.  The songs are largely forgettable.  A comedic number about demonic possession by a song-and-dance-man dybbuk is almost something like Mel Brooks’ The Exorcist, but never quite that good, and without the manic comedic inventiveness necessary to become a show-stopper.  Hollywood Girls, sung by most of the company that make up The Warsaw Gang, is orchestrated in a real 1930s manner, but never quite sparkles in the way true period songs do.  The only other memorable number worth mentioning among the 22 that make up the show is Saying Goodbye, which has that canned, ossified Broadway sound so prized by Jonathan Schwartz.

The book is no help.  Pity poor Nicole Parker, who plays Murphy’s grown daughter.  Supposedly a comedy writer for television, Parker has not one funny line in the play.  And the mother-daughter conflict that drives most of the second act melodrama is never believable for a moment.  (I will leave the surprise for viewers about to see the show; but be warned – it never really works.)

Dart has set out a formidable task – how to make a moving story about the Holocaust, include intergenerational conflict to keep it contemporary, and stick in as many jokes as possible.  This may be the finest Holocaust musical comedy to date, but that is rather like creating the world’s best sardine-flavored ice cream.  It’s quite an achievement, in its way, but do we really want one?

If all of this sounds harsh, I hasten to add that The People in the Picture is not without its charms.  In addition to Murphy and some other cast members, there are affecting moments of both pathos and humor.  And, unlike many truly terrible shows that have great Broadway success, The People in the Picture does not include fog machines, is not an adaptation of a movie, was not created by Disney, does not have human spiders smashing against walls, and is not based on a record album or retired rock group.  Sure, it’s junk, but it’s original junk.

If you already have a ticket, by all means go.  As the Warsaw Group might say, “so, what’s not to like?” 

Is This The Culture We Deserve?

Yesterday’s piece on Arts Advocates left me thinking about the recent controversy of the Obama White House inviting Chicago ‘rap’ poet, Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. (“Common”) to “perform” at a poetry event.

Politics is not the purview of The Jade Sphinx, and my private political convictions are simply that – private.  However, culture is our main focus and attention must be paid when the President and First Lady point towards a current cultural icon.

Less than fifty years ago, the White House of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was celebrated for its support of the arts.  The Kennedys focused on culture in all its aspects from the culinary arts to the performing arts. Mrs. Kennedy gave encouragement to budding artists and focused attention on those who had already achieved distinction.

The roster of guests and performers during the Camelot years is a litany of some of the most accomplished, brilliant artists of the 20^th Century.  George Balanchine, Sir John Gielgud, Pablo Casals, the National Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, Robert Frost, Rudolf Serkin, Marian Anderson … well, you get the idea.

Here is a brief excerpt from Entertaining at the White House, by Marie Smith (1967):

At a dinner on April 29, 1962, honoring Nobel Prize winners in the Western Hemisphere, the White House staged a "coup" for the blue-ribbon audience.

It was three readings by actor Frederic March. One was an excerpt from one of the late Ernest Hemingway's unpublished works dug out of the vaults by his widow; the others were the preface to "Main Street," the novel for which Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930; and four paragraphs from the speech in which General George Catlett Marshall launched his plan for helping Western European nations recover from the devastation of World War II, and won his Nobel Prize in 1953.

There were forty-nine Nobel Prize winners among the 175 guests and it was the largest number at a White House dinner in recent years. They overflowed from the fourteen round tables in the State Dining Room to five tables in the Blue Room.

Here is another dinner described by Marie Smith:

The all-American western ballet, "Billy the Kid," was presented on a portable velvet-mounted stage in the East Room by the American Ballet Theater of New York, as the entertaining climax to the dinner in honor of the President of the Republic of the Ivory Coast and Madame Felix Houphouet-Boigny. And when the Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg was entertained at the White House, Mrs. Kennedy added a special reading dedicated to President Kennedy to the program of Elizabethan poetry and music presented by actor Basil Rathbone and the Consort Players, a scholarly group of musicians who played sixteenth and seventeenth century instruments.

The special reading by Rathbone was Henry V's famed "St. Crispin's Day Speech" spoken on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, and was added because President Kennedy was so fond of quoting those lines by Shakespeare himself.

Now, 50 years later, “Common” comes to entertain the American President at the White House.  I confess with all candor and humility that I had never heard of this individual until the story of his White House performance became common currency (no pun intended).  However, a brief Internet search provided the cream of his oeuvre in all its vulgarity.  For example, here is the text of his “poem,” Letter to the Law:

Dem boy wanna talk…

Whatcha gon do if ya got one gun?

I sing a song for the hero unsung

With faces on the mural of the revolution

No looking back cos’ in back is what’s done

Tell the preacher, god got more than one son

Tell the law, my Uzi weighs a ton

I walk like a warrior,

From them I won’t run

On the streets, they try to beat us like a drum

In Cincinnati, another brother hung

A guinea won’t see the sun

With his family stung

They want us to hold justice

But you handed me none

The same they did to Kobe and Michael Jackson

Make them the main attraction

Turn around and attack them

Black gem in the rough

You’re rugged enough

Use your mind and nine-power, get the government touch

Them boys chat-chat on how him pop gun

I got the black strap to make the cops run

They watching me, I’m watching them

Them dick boys got a lock of cock in them

My people on the block got a lot of Pac in them

And when we roll together

We be rocking them to sleep

No time for that, because there’s things to be done

Stay true to what I do so the youth dream come

From project building

Seeing a fiend being hung

With that happening, why they messing with Saddam?

Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button

Killing over oil and grease

No weapons of destruction

How can we follow a leader when this a corrupt one

The government’s a g-unit and they might buck young black people

Black people in the urban area one

I hold up a peace sign, but I carry a gun.

Peace, ya’ll.

This is a staggering, soul-crushing demonstration of America’s overall artistic and cultural decay.  In less than 50 years, the White House has gone from Shakespeare, great American writers and top drawer classical actors to the argot of the gutter.  Again – politics aside, as the sentiments of Letter to the Law are whatever they are – where is the beauty of language, the delicacy of grace, the aspiration of our shared human ideals?  Is this the best we, as Americans, can do?  Is this the culture to be highlighted and celebrated in our nation’s White House?

No artist of any stripe with any conscience whatsoever can find this acceptable.  The American people deserve better, the artistic community deserves better, and the debt to our cultural legacy certainly deserves better.  Shame on everyone involved.