The Wicked Stage

Dec 28, 2010

Snow Love

No, my title doesn't refer to the blizzard that just hit my hometown while I sit in sunny California (a neighbor just told me our Brooklyn street hasn't even been plowed), but to this NY Times story from just before Christmas:

It closed a month after it opened Off Broadway. Entertainment Weekly selected it as one of the worst shows of 2006. Most New Yorkers don’t even remember it. Yet John Cariani’s “Almost, Maine,” an earnest 19-character play about the romantic happenings one cold night in northern Maine, has since been produced around the world, including in Australia, Dubai and South Korea. A Spanish-language version will be presented this spring in Mexico City. More than 600 companies, amateur and professional, have put it on in the United States and Canada.

As I recall, I was one of the few critics working at the time who actually liked the show, so count me warmed this holiday season, and not just by the West Coast sun.

Dec 22, 2010

Forever and Ever

Merry merry to you and yours.

Dec 21, 2010

The New York TMZ

To me the surprising news about the latest Spider-man injury isn't that an actor got hurt, but that the Times' coverage includes, to my knowledge, a first: an embedded video of the fall, taken by "a New York Times reader" who apparently ignored the no-recording-at-the-theater rule. This, more than the Times' reporting from the first preview, strikes me as the crossing of a media Rubicon. I guess the widely reposted Hugh Jackman cellphone video from a few years back semi-qualifies. But this video posting, combined with the rubbernecking-at-a-Broadway-train-wreck aspect of the coverage, is a pause-giving moment for arts journalism.

Dec 17, 2010

Showstopper

Not to pile onto the troubled new Spider-man musical, but I can't resist repeating the quote of a waggish colleague who saw a preview last week:

"The show stopped once because of a technical problem, and stopped several other times for songs."

I should add that though my friend didn't much care for the show, he did feel that its combination of pop and spectacle may actually be a box-office winner.

Dec 16, 2010

Safety Nets

The indispensable Matt Yglesias, riffing off David Leonhardt's point about how a welfare state's safety net can actually be a spur to entrepreneurship and innovation (a point I've highlighted before), comes up with this clarifying analogy:

Typically when you see a safety net in place, you’re not really looking at someone who’s trying to be safe. You’re looking at someone who’s trying to do something dangerous. Because it’s dangerous, there’s a safety net in place. But the main point of the net is to facilitate risk-taking behavior not to make you safer than the average person.

Dec 15, 2010

A Lyric You Won't Find in Finishing the Hat

Sorry, can't resist another Sondheim post today. As a huge admirer of both him and Kurt Weill, I've been pained to hear Sondheim, over the years, vehemently dis Brecht and Weill. (The man who wrote Sweeney Todd, really?) So it's nice to see him on the record as preferring Weill's American scores to his German and French ones, though he apparently makes an exception for Threepenny, which he says he loves. Fair enough, there's no accounting for tastes, etc. I was also just tipped off that Sondheim happened to write this parody lyric for Leonard Bernstein's 70th birthday in 1988 to the tune of Weill and Gershwin's "The Saga of Jenny," from the 1940 show The Lady in the Dark. Choice lyric from "The Saga of Lenny":

Lenny made his mind up When he was three, He'd write a show, a ballet, And a symphony. But once the winds were tootled And the first strings plucked, He decided it was terrible-- He'd have to conduct.

It's cutting but loving, and I'm not 100 percent sure, but I think Sondheim slips in a reference to Lenny's bisexuality (if "Schlemozzle" is supposed to be a bottom). In any case, musical theater nerds, enjoy this unlikely marriage of words and music, and just think--if Weill hadn't died in 1950 (at age 50), he might have lived to be among the illustrious slate of composers for whom the Hammerstein-schooled wunderkind from the San Remo wrote lyrics.