Things that made me laugh today

I share this list with you at the risk of revealing just how much time I spend screwing around on the Internet when I should be getting work done. Seriously, though, today was a good day for LOL-ing, if that's your kind of thing.

First up: this Wonkette post about Saxby Chambliss's hilariously bad drawing of Georgia. To be fair, I'm no geography star, and I couldn't draw an accurate outline of Georgia either. Nor could I draw New York, come to think of it. But I can definitely do Pennsylvania, should it ever come to that. In fact -- and I was just complaining about this the other day; ask the husband if you don't believe me -- I'm deeply annoyed by how stumpy and jagged Pennsylvania looks on NY1's weather map. It's a little bit like Saxby's Georgia, but not as funny. (Chambliss and all the other senators who agreed to do this for National Geographic got their butts kicked by Al Franken, obviously.)

Here's another winner from Wonkette today -- by far the best thing to come out of "bow-gate." (Don't know what that is? Bless you. Don't ever change.)

If you're headed to The Game this weekend, how about a little Yale-vs.-Harvard humor to get you in the spirit? My friend Mike Sloan wrote a very funny piece on that topic for the Yale Daily News.

In family news: my godson is a married man at the tender age of five. You have to read the Mother Load account of how this went down: part one and part two. (Why didn't I know it could be this easy?!)

You knew there had to be Palin-related stuff in this list, and I won't disappoint. First, at Slate, Christopher Beam's index to Going Rogue has the distinction of being both hilarious and potentially useful. I think my favorite entry is this one:

evolution
________skeptical views of, 217
________________use of word "Neanderthal" despite, 30, 172

And this Daily Show segment, in which John Oliver covers the "Palin-mania" at a NYC bookstore, is pretty good, but it's the last part, where he's reading to the kids, that you really want to watch. I love the little guy with the glasses: "Everyone here thinks that's boring!!"

I'm no Alan Greenspan

"When I bought The Fountainhead, I remember being impressed by how light — literally lightweight — the book was, despite its tremendous thickness. If I were a character in an Ayn Rand novel, that impression would have been symbolic. But since I’m not, I’m forced to admit that the book sucked me in...."

Read all about my not-quite-full-blown Ayn Rand phase at dotCommonweal, along with a roundup of excellent review-essays in response to the two newly published biographies of Ms. Rand.

Brighton Gone Dark

I have mixed feelings about the suprise commercial flop of "The Neil Simon Plays" -- despite the critical success of Brighton Beach Memoirs. On the one hand, it means the words "Neil Simon" -- even coupled with the word "revival" -- are not enough to sell tickets these days. I think that's a good thing, generally, for Broadway. On the other hand: this was an exceptionally good revival, and it's not so great for Broadway when excellent work goes unrewarded.

The major reviews I read got things pretty much right. Michael Feingold was the most insightful, as usual, and came closest to expressing my overall reaction -- this was so well directed that it made Simon's script feel less like an expert collection of one-liners and more like, good heavens, a play. I kept comparing it mentally to The Last Night of Ballyhoo, another play I saw on Broadway about the American Jewish experience on the verge of the Second World War. (The presence in both casts of Jessica Hecht also inspired the comparison.) The production here -- the acting, sets, costumes -- achieved a similar kind of nostalgic realism, comfortable but never treacly. I still have more respect for Alfred Uhry's achievement as a playwright -- he managed to get laughs and tug heartstrings without a single character who talks directly to the audience! -- but, as I said, in this outing Brighton Beach Memoirs really felt like a play.

The hero of all this, and rightly so, is director David Cromer. I'll be looking for the next thing he does. But a lot of credit has to go to the cast. Noah Robbins, who played Eugene, is a born star and will be back again for sure. Laurie Metcalf was a terrific choice for Mama Jerome; she brought a comedian's skill to the part but grounded everything in legitimate character work. And although Feingold faulted Jessica Hecht for "pushing her character to the edge of grotesquerie," I thought she was particularly good. Every actor in the cast landed their punch lines with skill, and without mugging, but Hecht drew laughs in places where there were no jokes, just by bringing Blanche to life.

Since it's too late to save the show now, let's talk about something I didn't see much discussed in the reviews: all that "sexual content." I'd forgotten how much innuendo Simon squeezes into his plays, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. At first, when Eugene starts describing the forms his adolescent lust takes, it's jarring. Then, once you get past that, it's sort of refreshing -- a good antidote to all the improbably chaste representations of the good old days. It seems to inject an honest edge into our cultural memories of the knickers-and-stickball era of American life: teenagers were sex-obsessed then too. But -- and I wonder, is this just me? -- after a while all the talk about breasts and legs and masturbation and "the golden palace of the Himalayas" just makes me uncomfortable. It's a little creepy, really, especially coming from a character who's so aggressively autobiographical. (Characters who want to be writers is right up there with characters who talk directly to the audience on my list of "writing crutches to be avoided when possible." But I have to admit, Simon really makes it work.)

I'm disappointed I won't get to see Broadway Bound, not because I can't wait to spend another night with the Jeromes, but because this group of artists worked so well together, and I was looking forward to seeing whether they could work their magic twice.

Birthday Book, part four

We have come to the final page of my birthday book -- and, as you can see, Connor saved the best for last.


This makes me laugh each and every time I look at it. Everything about it is awesome -- the gills! The blunt top fin! The way it emerges from the left margin! The upward-slanting caption! But I think the yellow, different-sized eyes are my very favorite part.

Birthday Book, part three

On the third page, Connor broke from the animal theme to do a portrait of me. I don't care to inquire about the not-so-subtle echoes between this page and the PIG drawing on the previous page.


My hair is particularly short (and a little patchy) because this was created just about a year after I finished chemotherapy. "You're wearing one of those shirts with no sleeves that you wear," Connor told me when he presented the book to me. I really don't wear tank tops that often, but obviously my muscular upper arms made an impression. (Part one here. Part two here.)

Recommended reading

The new "Fall Books" issue of Commonweal has my review of Mary Karr's new memoir, Lit. Do check it out.

(Following this interruption we will return to your regularly scheduled posting of pictures from my birthday book.)

Birthday Book, part two

My nephew was, and is, a lover of animals (an "animal expert," as he once put it), so the subject matter of my birthday book was pretty much a given. As you can see, he drew the animals with loving attention to detail. This one is helpfully labeled:


I love the concentric circles that form his crazy eyes. And of course his little blue hooves. And the nose! It's almost cubist. Part three coming soon...

Birthday Book, part one

For my birthday two years ago, my then-almost-five-year-old nephew made me a book. It's been on our coffee table ever since, but the colors are fading rapidly, because he drew it using those "Color Wonder" markers that only work on certain kinds of paper. Good for avoiding messes; bad for archival purposes. Since the book is too precious to lose, we decided to make a digital copy, which means I can now share the book with all of you. The husband scanned it and then I increased the contrast to bring out the many different colors, an important element of the artwork (notice how many times he switched markers!). That's also why the paper looks so blotchy and yellow, by the way.

So, this is the cover -- click to see it bigger.


The artist explained it all to me at the time. I believe that's an octopus up top -- note the suckers on his many legs. There's a very detailed "X-ray fish" in the center, and a jellyfish (with a sideways smile) in the bottom left corner. He also wrote his address here on the first page, so either that's the title or he's combined the title and copyright pages. (I scribbled out the street number to protect his privacy, but I can tell you at least one of the digits is backward.) As for the part in blue, my sister told me he asked her, "Mom, how do you spell 'to'?" And then, before she could answer, he said, "...Oh, 'two'!" And so he wrote "2MOLLIE," Prince-style.

Stay tuned for the next page... And in the meantime, you can visit the Mother Load blog for more of Connor's excellent work.

Ora pro nobis

The Church has five new saints today -- as of about 4:30 a.m. EST -- and one of them, Jeanne Jugan, is an old friend of the family. I wrote about how she and her Little Sisters of the Poor have been part of my family's life over at dotCommonweal. I also happened to be awake (thanks to an upset stomach) to see the canonization rite more or less as it happened. The sisters in Scranton were watching live, too!

Important facts about art

1. Read this essay: a eulogy for Cookie magazine by my very own sister.

2. If you are planning to see the Vermeer show at the Met -- which is organized around the visiting masterpiece "The Milkmaid," and which runs between now and November 29 -- don't go when it's crowded. Do what you have to do to go when nobody else will be there, like on a Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. Because these are small pictures, and if you can't get close to them you might as well just go to the gift shop and look at the larger poster-size reproductions. I went yesterday at noon, thinking I'd beat the weekend crowds, but the place was a zoo. I can't say I was able to peacefully contemplate the play of light and shadow in Vermeer's little canvases while surrounded by people pushing and jostling and spacing out while listening to their audio guides and asking the guards, "Is there glass over top of this?" (And don't get me started on people who take pictures of everything they see in museums, because what is up with THAT.) I got the most out of my visit by retreating to the Medieval galleries and spending most of my time there. But the Vermeer show is small and cramped and really not worth the admission fee if you can't stand right in front of the paintings for as long as you like.

3. If you do go to the Met, especially when it's crowded, try to find your way to the "Visible Storage" area (which, on their not-really-all-that-helpful maps, is labeled "Henry R. Luce Center"). It's up some stairs in the back right corner on the first floor, and it's where they keep the American art they don't have on display. It's lined up in cases in this sort of friendly warehouse atmosphere, so you can walk up and down the rows and try to take it in. Lots of great paintings back there, plus furniture and many rows of fine silver and glassware and such. Spoons, old-timey baseball cards... It's like the world's greatest flea market. Plus it was a quiet spot in a museum otherwise packed with tourists.

Well, it was almost quiet. There was one guy there who was talking VERY LOUDLY to his companions, and intent on showing off his vast knowledge of art history (which, spoiler alert, was not really all that vast). So that was irritating, but it all paid off when he stumbled upon the case of American impressionists. "Mary Cassatt," he read from one of the identifying labels. "I thought that was Mary Cassatt!" Then, in his most professorial tone, he announced: "She was one of the first lesbians." On the other side of the case, I burst out laughing. Yeah, I... really don't think that's true.

We all owe the Piv an apology

Back when the 2008 Broadway revival of Speed-the-Plow was struggling to make money for its producers in the wake of Jeremy Piven's sudden departure, I noted that the New York Times was doing everything it could to help. This is why the Times has such a glowing reputation in the theatre community for using its power responsibly, and for trying to be as fair and generally supportive of high artistic standards as possible. Oh, wait...

Today's report on the details of the arbitration between Piven and the producers of Speed-the-Plow producers does not depart from the pattern when it comes to that show. Headline: "An Inside Look at an Offstage Drama" (or, if you look at your title bar, "Inside Jeremy Piven's Offstage Drama With 'Speed-the-Plow'"). Yes, reading the background details is interesting for theatre gossip buffs, and I suppose those same buffs were all over it when the outcome of said arbitration was decided back in August. The Times did report that back in August in a perhaps-too-even-handed story by Dave Itzkoff... but at the time they didn't have the details of the confidential arbitration to report on, just the statements from both sides. Now they're telling us what the arbitrator actually said, and for the sake of the general public reading this first-page-of-the-arts-section story, you'd think writer Patrick Healy might mention the outcome of the arbitration somewhere near the top, instead of more or less as an afterthought at the end of paragraph four. For the record:

The arbitrator, George Nicolau, ruled in the actor’s favor in late August.

In other words, Piven won. Something to keep in mind when you're reading through the he-said, they-said details in the rest of the piece. One side was ultimately found to be more convincing than the other. Oh, and also: he had mono? That's a new detail, isn't it?

I was as skeptical as anyone back when this happened; I did my share of joking about "mercury poisoning" and such. (I should have suspected, when David Mamet made his wiseass comment about Piven preparing for a role as a thermometer, that Piv was actually sick -- from what I've seen of his essays, when Mamet's being funny, he's not being honest.) It was certainly tempting to believe Piven was a lightweight, especially when he was making statements invoking (I think?) Barack Obama in his defense. Healy did write an article that offered up Piven's side of the story in February -- and I can't say that inspired me to rally to his cause (Martin Luther King, Jr.? Really?). Also, for the record, I quite liked the production (which I reviewed here). But still, all the valentines from the NYT after Piven's departure left me wondering how, exactly, you manage to buy that kind of "bad press." And I guess I'm still wondering.

Wanna count?

The chain of hat-tipping is particularly convoluted and random: Andrew Sullivan linked to an essay published months ago in Commonweal, which he'd found via this blog. I don't know this blog and have never seen it before, but it can't be all bad because it recently posted this video, which I decided I had to share with you right away.



My favorite part is the exasperated sigh Sherlock Hemlock gives John-John when he interrupts. Bert's subtle double-take when John-John takes over the segment is also awesome. Every time I watch Sesame Street now I grieve for the old-time muppeteers.

Deliver us, O God...

...from falling for every stupid smear that plays to our prejudices and distracts us from discussing important political issues like adults. (More at dotComm.)

Update: Since I know you all like a good blog fight, you may also want to read this follow-up.

It's true what they say about Dan Brown

He really is a terrible writer, in the most basic sense of the word. That's what I've learned from the Telegraph's list of 20 awful sentences from the collected works of Dan Brown. (I blogged about it at dotCommonweal too.) It doesn't get much worse than this:

Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

Tom Chivers is correct in noting, "It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here." And that's just the beginning of the reasons that sentence is laugh-out-loud bad. In fact, in most cases the commentary from Chivers is unnecessary -- and given the apparent richness of the material, the list is probably not as good as it could have been. (The bit at the end about how "Da Vinci wasn't Leonardo's last name" is particularly weak. There's no need to get pedantic about that when we're dealing with a writer who thinks "precarious" can modify "body.") But there's still enough to make lovers of the language grind their teeth. And to encourage me to stick to my practice of not reading anything by Dan Brown ever.

You'd think a theatre critic would have seen more musicals

I don't read Terry Teachout regularly, because he's in the Wall Street Journal, which is behind a firewall online and not something I regularly come across in person. But when I got on an Amtrak train to Boston last week I found that day's WSJ in the seat-back pocket in front of me, so I flipped through it, which is how I happened to read Teachout's review of a Boston production of Kiss Me, Kate. And I have to ask: when he says things like this, do you think he's being serious?

If there's a better musical than "Kiss Me, Kate," I haven't seen it.

Wow. I don't like to be the one to break it to you, Terry, but -- there is.

This is why kids should have to diagram sentences

This has been bothering me for a while, and it seems to be getting worse. So listen up, people: Your favorite expression of moral responsibility and noblesse oblige has more words in it than you think.

You hear it during graduation season -- it's popular in commencement addresses and yearbook quotations. Vicki Kennedy botched it at Senator Ted's memorial service. And I came across it recently in the New York Times Business Section, of all places. Here's what people usually say:

"To whom much is given, much is expected."

Don't get me wrong: I'm not criticizing the sentiment people think they're endorsing when they say this. I'm always trying to live up to it, in fact, since it's from the Bible and everything. But look again, because what I just wrote above doesn't make any sense. Here's what you have to say in order to be communicating a coherent thought:

"FROM THOSE [or OF THOSE] to whom much is given, much is expected."

See? You can't start with the "to," because then you've got word salad. Well, unless you do it RSV-style: "Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more." (Luke 12:48)

Bonus fun fact: not that anyone was paying attention to her speech, but this year's Notre Dame valedictorian got the quotation right. In fact, she built her whole speech around it. However, she attributed it to Bill Gates's mom, rather than Jesus. Whoops?

Katrinaversary

I reviewed the 2008 documentary Trouble the Water (now on DVD) at dotCommonweal. It's a moving, disturbing, inspiring view of the storm and the aftermath from inside the Ninth Ward. Not easy to watch, and impossible to forget.

"We could use griffins, but we don't use griffins"

As satire this is only middling. But as comedy, it's gold. And it must be healthy to take a break from moral outrage, however righteous, once in a while...


Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

A secretary is not a toy

Today's NYT has an op-ed by Chiara Volpato (professor of social psychology at the University of Milan) complaining about the outrageously sexist behavior of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. I know what you're thinking: if Italian women didn't like being sexually harrassed, why were they born in Italy? For real, though, this woman has a point. She has also won the award for the most wonderful sentence in today's Times -- part of a list of Berlusconi's recent exploits:

He designated a former model with whom he had publicly flirted to be Minister of Equal Opportunities.

Isn't that just too perfect? It's almost hard to be mad at the guy. It reminds me of how the upper management on Are You Being Served? always surrounded themselves with comically busty young ladies who serviced them as "secretaries" and "nurses." Minister of Equal Opportunities. I love it. (If you want an even more obscure British comedy reference, it's like in Yellowbeard when they're introducing the officers on the ship, and one of them is a shapely young woman with a very unconvincing false mustache whom they call "Mr. Prostitute". This is both hilarious and historically accurate.)

The other thing that makes it hard for Volpato to get her point across is the stiff English -- it's perfectly fluent, but it has that unmistakable nonnative feel. I'm actually rather fascinated by it, because when I try to pick out a particularly awkward sentence, I have trouble explaining just exactly why it doesn't work. It's all grammatical, but it just doesn't sound right.

At the same time, the sexism portrayed on TV reinforces chauvinistic ideas among the culturally weakest parts of the population. Researchers who study female body objectification need only look to Italy to witness the sad consequences of this phenomenon.

See? It's just... not right. Also not-quite right: the graphic that accompanies this piece. The clawlike lady's hand reaching up out of -- a plate of spaghetti? Aren't we trying to defeat Italian-culture stereotypes here? And why does that hand look like something from a horror movie? When I was a kid I read an illustrated version of the R.D. Blackamore novel Lorna Doone just because it had an illustration much like that one near the end. It looked really gruesome and cool. (Someone dies in a marshy fen, I think, suffocated by mud.) It makes me curious about this opinion piece, too, but in a different way. I think it may be an op-ed-art misfire.

P.S. Jason Linkins at Eat the Press had a similar reaction.

It ain't just a question of misunderstood

I know I never got around to elaborating on my review of the new Broadway revival of West Side Story earlier this year. In fact, it seems I didn't even link to it when I reviewed it for Commonweal, probably because it was available only to subscribers. By now I'm sure you've subscribed, in which case you can read the whole thing (I paired it with In the Heights, since -- as I noted back when I reviewed the latter on Restricted View -- there are many points of comparison). But if your Commonweal subscription hasn't kicked in yet, here's a paragraph I wrote about West Side Story that will give you the gist:

The current revival of West Side Story at the Palace Theatre was preceded by intriguing buzz: this version promised to revitalize the show by putting the Puerto Rican characters -- the Sharks -- on equal footing with the “American” Jets. In the Heights’s Miranda was recruited to translate some dialogue and lyrics into Spanish, and the Sharks would be played by Latino actors (not a priority in the ’50s). Unfortunately, the revival doesn’t live up to its hype. In fact, under the direction of ninety-one-year-old Laurents, West Side Story feels creakier than ever. The dancers simply go through the motions of Robbins’s choreography, and most of the musical numbers miss their mark. The costumes look improvised. The sets look cheap. The much-vaunted revisions turn out to be inconsequential -- the staging and acting are so limp that it makes little difference when, for example, Josefina Scaglione delivers Maria’s over-familiar final speech (“How many bullets, Chino?!”) in Spanish rather than English. Meanwhile, the score -- surely the best reason to revisit West Side Story -- is ill-served by the technological changes that have come to Broadway. The orchestra, stuffed beneath the stage, is muted and muffled, and the singers -- especially Matt Cavenaugh as Tony -- are too dependent on their mikes. Karen Olivo (a standout in the original cast of In the Heights) easily steals the show as Anita, but she is the lone bright spot in a disappointing evening.

I've been meaning to go into more detail here, but reliving the experience was simply not high enough on my priority list. Today, though, a new article in the New York Times has inspired me to return to the subject and comment on just one of the bad decisions that went into this production. The headline alone made me laugh ruefully: "Some 'West Side' Lyrics Are Returned to English." Took them long enough!

As I mentioned, the advance publicity for this production of West Side Story was focused on the fact that some of the dialogue and lyrics would be in Spanish -- as translated by Lin-Manuel Miranda, lending his flair for authenticity to the now-dated work of conspicuously non-Hispanic dramatists Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim. And as Patrick Healy relates in the NYT, the result was not as affecting as had been promised. It turns out it's actually a problem when the show reaches an emotional climax -- as when Anita sings "A Boy Like That" -- and the audience can't understand a word of it! Who knew!

Director and bookwriter Arthur Laurents certainly should have known, considering he had the entire out-of-town tryout period, plus the last five months (!) on Broadway, to figure it out. The weird thing is, they did figure it out, at least to some extent, before I saw the show (just after opening night). I know because by that time they'd put a lot of the English back. So the show didn't live up to its "bilingual" hype, and the Espanol that was left was more obviously gimmicky. Hearing the Sharks speak or sing in Spanish now and then just made you wonder why they weren't speaking Spanish the rest of the time.

Of course, as is the rule in these NYT arts-section pieces, the story is mainly a PR vehicle. And if you've seen the production you'll probably find this as hilarious as I do:

Mr. Laurents and one of the show’s lead producers, Jeffrey Seller, said the decision was not made lightly. “Through this entire production, Arthur and I have had a terrific dialogue that’s motivated by a singular question: Can we do better?” said Mr. Seller, who produced the show with Kevin McCollum and James L. Nederlander.

“Arthur and I went back to the show in midsummer to see how it was playing,” he continued, “and we reached the conclusion that we could provide a bigger dramatic wallop if we incorporated more English back into ‘A Boy Like That,’ without gutting the integrity of the Spanish that carries the Sharks through the show.”

Ha, "integrity." Tee hee, "carries the Sharks through the show." Even when you're flat-out admitting it was a bust, you still can't shake that PR-speak. But what really made me laugh here was the first paragraph, because the best way to describe this production of West Side Story, at least as I experienced it, was that it looked like no one on the creative team had ever asked, "Can we do better?" It was obvious the question "Can we do this cheaper?" had been asked many times, but "better"? I'm skeptical that this is true. Especially because if having "A Boy Like That" be sung in English is better -- which it definitely is, especially since Karen Olivo is hands-down the best thing about this show -- this change should have been made, oh, five months ago. (Why'd they wait so long? I can only assume it was because they'd sold the show on the strength of this "innovation," so they couldn't wipe out all the Spanish right away. The bigger question for me is, why bother at all, five months in?)

This West Side also left me with the impression that the director hadn't actually watched any recent performances, since there were other obvious issues that could have and should have been fixed before it opened. So that made the other stuff in this article about Arthur Laurents's high standards quite risible to me. Now, I know this revival got a few inexplicably glowing reviews (I'm looking at you, John Lahr: was that a joke?!) and many other undeservedly mixed ones. So perhaps you'll say my judgments are all subjective. But here's something that isn't just my opinion: the night I saw the show, a lot of people in the orchestra section stood and started to leave after "Tonight," the musical number near the end of Act One. Note that I said near the end -- there's a scene, a major scene, immediately after it. But people all around me who hadn't memorized the scene breakdown assumed "Tonight" was the Act One finale, because the way it was staged felt like an act-ender. On top of that, there was a lengthy set change immediately after the song -- and this in a show that had few such set changes (and, as I mentioned, a pretty chintzy-looking set overall). And so the action stopped and the stage was blank. I guess it was supposed to be a dramatic pause. But a lot of people in the audience -- including, briefly, me -- thought it was intermission. And the scene change took so long that some of them actually made it to the lobby before it became clear that this was not the case. (They must have been really confused during Act Two.) Other people spent the first minute of the actual final scene of Act One clambering back to their seats, or standing awkwardly at the back of the orchestra to watch. It was, how shall I put it, not an ideal situation... and I'd bet a ton of money it wasn't the first or last time that happened. How, as a director or producer, do you witness that and not do something to fix it? Because I'll tell you, that was one thing they definitely could have "done better."

I won't get myself worked up picking apart John Lahr's review, not after all this time -- suffice it to say, it reads to me as though he wrote it on opposite day. But this I must call out:

Now the ninety-one-year-old Laurents is laying his claim to ownership: in this bold makeover, the story rules. ...By eliminating blackouts between scenes, Laurents also adds to the story’s tension.

I don't have a copy of the West Side Story libretto; I will give Lahr the benefit of the doubt and assume that it says [blackout] after each scene. However, in staging shows on Broadway today, especially musicals, blackouts between scenes are very much the exception and not the rule. Even in a revival of a classic musical, it would be idiosyncratic to actually have blackouts between scenes today -- something like shooting a movie in black-and-white. Mechanical sets have made all that a thing of the past. When the action stops, it's intermission. Which is why, as I've just explained, the audience I saw the show with assumed intermission had arrived when the action stopped. I guess it wasn't a "blackout," exactly, but it was a stage wait, and it fell in exactly the right place to completely kill the story's tension. So, in short, Lahr is not only ignoring a blatant shortcoming of this production, but actually praising the production for the lack of said shortcoming, as if every other musical on Broadway were stopping the action at regular intervals and only Laurents were clever enough to do away with that convention. What the heck, John Lahr.

Finally, here's another for the "don't blame the audience" file. In giving their reasons for making the switch, Seller (the producer) noted that he was surprised how many audience members didn't know West Side Story or Romeo and Juliet very well. "'It means we have to work a little bit harder in making sure people understand the show better,' Mr. Seller said." Listen: people shouldn't have to know the show when they arrive in order to understand it while they're watching it. It helps with Elizabethan comedies and foreign-language operas, sure. But this is a Broadway musical. It's not really hard to follow... unless your production is poorly directed. And if people can't tell that you want them to stay in their seats -- let alone on the edge of their seats, waiting with bated breath for the next scene -- and, instead, get the impression that they are free to go outside for a smoke, that's a sign your show is not quite ready for prime time, no matter how much of it you're prepared to translate back into English.