Gone Fishin'

Today my son comes home.

Every word in that sentence carries huge, almost unbearable weight and joy: Today. My. Son. Comes. Home.

That worn-out poster caption, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," has never felt as true for me as now.

Blogging will accordingly be light for a while, as I enjoy an intimate live performance of a different and irreducibly immediate kind. The fourth wall will be broken; the audience will be part of the action; the players will grow into their roles over many rehearsals, which will also all be the performance.

More in a few weeks! Stay frosty, blog-o-theatro-sphere.

What Matt Said x2

Suddenly there are two blog-related posts from the indispensable Matt Yglesias that I can't improve on:

About the compulsive need to write.

About the ways blogs are diversifying what we think of as journalism, and all to the good.

(B)logrolling in Our Time

I'm on the verge of a likely blog hibernation due to the imminent arrival of b-a-b-y to the home. But the blog-o-theatro-sphere is in much more capable hands than mine in any case, based on my recent reading...

George Hunka returns from a trip to Wales with a fascinating and self-revealing post about his heritage and his personal sense of exile. Explains a lot, and yes, he's lost me by the last few graphs (and I can't even begin to scan his final sentence), but a bracing post nonetheless.

The oft-maddening, extraordinarily thin-skinned Leonard Jacobs likewise had an exceptional post recently about his career-building goals via his blog. Helps put some of his pique and snark in perspective, I guess.

Isaac Butler has been promoting his Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist production in D.C. but still blogging furiously. There's still no one the scene with anything close to his energy and passion.

Garrett Eisler has been on something of a roll at Playgoer lately--even without a Rachel Corrie to gnaw on, Garrett is consistently on the beat in a way that feels both journalistically circumspect and yet idiosyncratic, personal.

Speaking of the line between journalism and blogging, along with everyone else I've been following Boston critic Thomas Garvey's exhaustive, tendentious takedown of Emily Glassberg Sands' study of gender bias in re: female playwrights (where is the long-awaited Part III, we wonder?). This strikes me as a kind of test case of blog journalism. It's longform, it's informed, it's passionate...and it also seems to me intemperate and, Garvey's protestations to the contrary, mean-spirited. I know what Matthew Freeman means here, but I also get why Isaac got so riled by the piece.

Which brings me to David Cote's nine wishes for NY theatre on the Time Out Upstaged blog. No. 5 is "Bloggers: Engage/enrage." He doesn't name names, but he cries for "more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries." Ouch, but a fair cop.

For myself, I prefer to take tip #9 to heart: "I wish that composers would dare to write beautiful, complex, slow and orchestrally rich music." That I'm up for, if not in the blog-o-theatro-sphere.

Trade You a Rosencrantz...

Genius marketing idea for a current Ojai production of Hamlet, directed by the estimable Jessica Kubzansky. Leo Marks is an inspired casting choice, by the way. If you're in or near Ojai, Calif., this looks like one to catch.

Baby, It's You

When it rains, it pours, don't it? I'm playing what was supposed to be my last gig before my son was born on Sunday, Aug. 2, at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO. It's going to be a great, chamber-y set, including some songs from the ever-upcoming Ed Wood musical, as well as a bunch of other new stuff.

Well, apparently my son Oliver had other ideas, and decided he'd like see the show, too. He arrived seven weeks early, and he's doing extremely well at the St. Vincent NICU--well enough that he might be taking his first cab ride home soon.

So, do I recommend trying to pull together an ambitious gig while your newborn son is about to move home? No. Do I recommend you buy a ticket now and come to see Oliver's dad in DUMBO? Yes.

River City, Oregon

(Gwendolyn Mulamba as Marian in The Music Man; photo by Jenny Graham)

My wife and I were supposed to go the Oregon Shakespeare Festival last month and see 9 shows in 5 days, but doctor's orders said bed rest was a better idea. Back in the early aughts, I used to make the Ashland pilgrimage a couple of times a year, and this would have been my first time back since, I don't know, 2002, '03?

I was particularly interested, of course, in seeing the ways ex-Cornerstone a.d. Bill Rauch has revitalized what was already, by my lights, a bracingly vital theater company--in part by importing artists I loved from L.A. theater, including his husband, Chris Liam Moore, as well as director Tracy Young and actors Kate Mulligan and Brent Hinkley, among others.

Well, the peripatetic Terry Teachout has a glowing report of at least one show I wish I hadn't missed:

Bill Rauch, the company’s artistic director, has done what I thought impossible: He’s turned his back on tradition and given us a high-concept “Music Man” in which every detail has been rethought and refurbished. Yet Mr. Rauch’s innovations never obstruct our front-row view of Meredith Willson’s sweet salute to turn-of-the-century American life. It’s as though a faded painting had been scrupulously restored and hung in a brand-new gallery. Yes, it’s still the same old show, but you’ll see things in it that you didn’t know were there...

...The point of Mr. Rauch’s endless ingenuity is to remind you of something that you may well have forgotten, which is that “The Music Man,” far from being a fallen corn soufflé, is actually one of the finest musicals of the 20th century. It’s as evocative of small-town America as “Our Town,” and by taking it seriously instead of staging it by rote, Mr. Rauch has brought off a feat of theatrical alchemy similar to that performed by Charles Newell in the equally fresh and personal small-scale revival of “Carousel” that he staged for Chicago’s Court Theatre in 2007. This is the way that Broadway musicals ought to be done.

Teachout closes by hoping the show rides East. For reasons both selfish and un-, I hope so, too.

Critics Off Tony Reservation

I'm not an awards show fan, so the news that critics have been disinvited from the esteemed, honorable, graft-free ranks of Tony voters doesn't bother me as much as it bothers Time Out's Adam Feldman, but I do appreciate his rock-ribbed defense of critical value:

Critics are among the voters least compromised by conflicts of interest, and most likely to vote objectively and fairly for the work they judge to be best. (The others are liable to have greater personal, professional and financial stakes in the outcome.) The excision of this voting block represents a step backward in the seriousness of the awards.

Seriousness is, of course, relative with any awards show. For me, apart from all-out parties like the Obies or the LA Weekly awards, most awards shows hover in a vaguely nauseous zone between trade show and state ceremony, with the attendant mix of glitz, self-importance, and boredom. Then again, we all need our rituals. I'm more behind Adam's closing point, though his last sentence strikes me as a tad hysterical:

It also represents another regrettable step toward the marginalization of critics within the New York theatrical community. It is true that critics do not vote for the Oscar or Emmy Awards; but theater is an inherently more local and personal industry, in which critics have historically played an important role. (Not for nothing are Broadway theaters named after Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson.) But critics, and indeed criticism, are inconvenient to the modern theater marketer: Old-fashioned in our insistence on quality, unreliable in our support for expensive projects and less necessary in light of the diffusion of information in the Internet Age. We can expect to see more such gestures of exclusion in the future, each chipping away, as intended, at the status of critics within the theater world.

Chips ahoy!