Slightly imperfect

I've actually been keeping up with my New Yorker reading lately (the double issues always help me catch up, since they're twice as long but half as interesting as a normal issue, and then I get a week off). Skipping the stuff I know I'll hate is helping me pick up the pace, and not stopping to blog about that or anything else has been helpful as well. But this week I blogged not once but twice at dotCommonweal about various features of the August 2 issue. First, I recommended Atul Gawande's excellent article about death and health care. And today I picked on some aggressively secularist posturing in the "Briefly Noted" section, along with a less disdainful but similarly clueless Bible reference in an earlier issue.

I'm hoping I don't need to explain what's funny about that last one to the audience over at dotComm, but for those who haven't visited a religious bookstore lately, let me clarify: the NRSV Bible is a translation, not a specific print edition. (Wikipedia puts it this way: "The New Revised Standard Version...is a thorough revision of the Revised Standard Version.") It comes in all shapes and sizes, the way Bibles do. So describing something as "about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible" (as Meghan O'Rourke does) sounds knowing and specific, but is actually very vague.

Nox, according to Amazon.com, is 9.1 x 6 x 2.6 inches. So there are some editions of the NRSV that are about the same size. Perhaps it was this imitation leather "award Bible" O'Rourke had in mind? Or, if you wanted to get really specific, you might say it's about the size of a New King James Version Precious Moments ® Small Hands Edition Bible, available "slightly imperfect" from ChristianBook.com. I did not know it was possible to purchase a "slightly imperfect" Bible. The very idea seems slightly blasphemous―and yet, I would say a Precious Moments ® Bible is "slightly imperfect" by definition. Score one for truth in advertising.

Leave Chelsea alooooone

"Why are people so fascinated with this wedding?" the NY1 anchorwoman asked the field reporter on the scene in Rhinebeck, NY. The wedding in question is that of Chelsea Clinton, which I gather is taking place tomorrow. NY1 has created a graphic for the occasion that says "The Clinton-Mezvinsky Wedding." I had to laugh at that one, because seriously, nobody cares about the groom, but nice gesture.

Which brings me to my point, which is that -- so far as I can tell -- nobody really cares much about the bride, either. Why are people so fascinated? Which people? I personally would prefer that news organizations not devote any resources to covering this "story." If I want to read about celebrity weddings, there are glossy tabloids filled with news of same. I do not need updates on NY1, or CNN. This is not a matter of national importance. But the news media is committed to giving the impression that it is, because it's something they can cover without worrying too much about "balance" or "informed commentary." It's entertainment masquerading as news -- but they can hide behind the fact that Chelsea Clinton is the child of important government figures and pretend that makes her wedding a nationally significant affair. Gee, we'd love to report on the war in Afghanistan or the potential for climate-change legislation, but there's this wedding we've got to cover! It's basically a matter of state!

So, NY1 is showing footage shot from helicopters of white tents and green shrubbery and such, like it's the O.J. Simpson highway chase, rather than an event planned by a couple of families striving desperately for a modicum of privacy. And this reporter is on the ground in Rhinebeck, describing what she sees and what she's heard about the wedding. But, she notes, none of the details have been confirmed by the families. Attention "news" organizations: please take the hint. Try covering a red-carpet premiere or something else designed for your consumption. Or, at the very least, quit acting all miffed that the Clintons and Mezvinskys are keeping you in the dark, because it's you and not they (and not "people" in general) who are turning this into a media circus.

Someone on the street in Rhinebeck noted that, unlike Britain, our country has no royal family. True enough. But take heart -- we do have a self-obsessed, aggressively shallow mainstream news media. And they will hound the grown daughter of a former president all the way to the altar, despite her obvious desire to be left alone, and blame it on you and your insatiable appetite for details. I mean, really, why so fascinated, America?

Copyright law, or: the bitch of living

When I was a teenager the Internet was new and limited and slow, and while I did use it to indulge my theatre geekery, that mainly took the form of long and passionate email conversations with my friend Sarah about which cast recording of Company was the best and who deserved to win (or lose) a Tony for shows we mostly had not seen. It's fortunate for me that I had to do most of my geeking out the old-fashioned way, dubbing cassettes and going to the library to scour the Burns Mantle Best Plays anthologies and so on, because if I'd had the means I probably would have started embarrassing myself on the Internet much earlier.

With that said, I want you all to read Jason Robert Brown's latest blog post, "Fighting with Teenagers: A Copyright Story." It is first of all useful, in that he explains in great detail why copyright laws matter, and why certain violations made possible by the Internet are not as harmless as their convenience makes them seem to be. But it is also highly entertaining, because it takes the form of an email exchange with a teenager who, in arguing for her right to distribute illegally copied sheet music, raises self-absorbed impertinence to an art form. She's wrong on the merits, and yet you kind of have to love her. And feel sorry for her, too, not just because she's probably embarrassed by this (I hope so, anyway), but also because, as JRB himself puts it at one point, "It really sucks to be a teenager." The self-righteousness, the self-pity, the total lack of perspective. "I'm just not lucky enough to have someone as famous as Jason Robert Brown email me." How hilarious and sad is that.

Part of the fun of reading this exchange (which is long!) is trying to figure out when, if ever, this young person realized she was talking to the real JRB. It's odd that she gets more confrontational, not less, as it goes on, but maybe by the time she caught on it was too late to dial back the attitude? I think this may be my favorite part:

If you're really who you claim to be, then I assume you know that Parade, Last Five Years, 13 The Musical, etc. are all genius pieces of work and that a lot of people who would love to have that sheet music can't afford it. Thus the term "starving artist."

This is also wonderful:

You're a genius and your stuff is amazing to perform, but apparently, you're a jerk. We in theatre should support one another and that's not what you're doing.

"We in theatre." Teenagers! Hug one today.

I think this kid will grow out of it. That's what college is for. On the other hand, she'd fit in fine on a lot of blogs today just as she is -- there's a lot of this "I'm articulate enough to have strong opinions without also needing to be informed" commentary going around, and much of it is penned by ostensible grownups. That empty rationalizing to justify a lapse in morality? You'll find a lot of that out there, too. I hope she looked up "sophistry" (as in, "Your answer is sophistry, Brenna") when this was over, because she'd be doing herself a favor if she learned to recognize what that is and resolved to hold herself to a higher standard. You can get by on sophistry and attitude alone, especially online, but you shouldn't.

P.S. Who's Jason Robert Brown, you ask? See here.

P.P.S. As you can see, I've redesigned. To be more accurate, I've just updated my "template" to one of Blogger's newer offerings. I wish it were more customizable than it is, but I think this is generally an improvement on what came before. Comments?

Was that a farce?

I've accepted that the Tony Awards broadcast is primarily an advertisement for Broadway -- it's not really about honoring excellence in theatre, although that may happen, if there's time. I don't like it, and I still complain about it, but I understand that's how it works. But can't it at least be a good advertisement for theatre?

When you're putting on a big, live show in a world-famous theatre and, right off the bat, you have major microphone issues, that's a turn-off. I can't remember a Tony broadcast that wasn't marred by sound issues, but this year was a particularly bad one, especially since they were coupled with obvious lip-synching. I can remember many painful instances of off-key singing in the past (I guess it's hard to hear the band?), but prerecorded vocals are not an ideal fix when you are trying to convince people that live theatre in New York City is worth their time and money.

I did like Sean Hayes at the piano. Fun, and much less obnoxious than the song-and-dance numbers Hugh Jackman used to do. But when the opening number turned into a full-on Green Day concert, I wanted to say, You know, you don't actually get to see Green Day when you buy a ticket for American Idiot. The show does not have Green Day the band in it. Ostensibly it is still worth paying lots of money for. I have my doubts, of course, but that's the idea. And yet here we are, hoping an appearance from Green Day will give Broadway some television cred. It's that old, familiar note of desperation: Please give theatre a chance! Some famous people like it! So the whole thing feels like fundraising time on PBS. Here is some guy from the football Jets, generously agreeing to say that he likes musicals! Won't you please give?

I just don't think the motto of the Tonys should be "Broadway: It's Not So Bad!"

More on Fences and August Wilson

I passed on my recommendation of the current Broadway revival of Fences a few weeks ago. A much longer review is in the June 4 issue of Commonweal, and subscribers can read it online here. (An online-only subscription is just $29, by the way.)

Before getting to the play under review, I devote a lot of space to explaining who August Wilson was and why he's important. Here's a sample of what I had to say about Kenny Leon's "splendid" production:

As Troy, film star Denzel Washington puts his considerable Hollywood charm to use in bringing out the character’s endearing qualities along with his flaws. He expertly locates the vulnerability beneath Troy’s bravado. Viola Davis (Oscar-nominated for the 2008 film Doubt, and a veteran of several cycle plays) is a restrained but powerful presence as Rose. The fence around the yard that Troy is building throughout the play is Rose’s idea—an expression of her desire to define and protect what she values. She is a reconciler, determined to hold her family together; she stays on the margins of the men’s conversation in the yard and changes the subject whenever she senses danger or discord. She looks out for the son from a previous marriage whom Troy neglects, and for Gabe, Troy’s brother, brain-damaged in the war. Rose knows Troy’s faults better than he does, and when she finally explodes in anger, the scene is heartrending: “You take,” she tells him, “and don’t even know nobody’s giving!”

Like so many of Wilson’s characters, Rose finds her strength in religion; she turns to the church when her marriage lets her down. But the prophet of Fences is Troy’s disabled brother, who “believes with every fiber of his being that he is the Archangel Gabriel.” Gabe predicts that Troy’s story will end in glory—“St. Peter got your name in the book,” he insists. “I seen it.” And Gabe’s advocacy bears fruit in the play’s final moments, when—according to the stage directions, beautifully interpreted here—“the gates of heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet.”

Even if you don't subscribe, you can visit dotCommonweal for more thoughts from me on August Wilson.

So many people in the world don't know what they've missed

The program for Sondheim on Sondheim, a revue now playing at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54, includes a "musical chronology" listing all of Stephen Sondheim's shows and the songs from each that the audience is about to hear. As she waited for the show to begin, the woman behind me perused this list. "Wait a minute," she said to her companion, "It says here 'Children Will Listen' is from Into the Woods. Is that right? Because it's also in Ragtime."

If reading that caused you to snort derisively, then you, like me, are probably an insufferable musical-theatre geek and/or snob. If you didn't react that way (and are wondering what the joke is), you must belong to the vast majority of humankind that isn't entirely sure who Stephen Sondheim is, or why you should care. There are two kinds of people in the world, in other words. Some of us are keenly aware that Mr. Stephen Sondheim celebrated his eightieth birthday this year and have been wondering whether we personally are doing enough to mark the occasion. And the rest of you are more like the woman behind me, who at intermission turned to her friend and said, "So, I guess this Stephen Sondheim must still be alive."

Sondheim on Sondheim tries, quixotically, to satisfy both groups at once.

Insert naughty pun here

As someone who always sort of hated Sex and the City, I am really enjoying looking on as the critics trash this new movie. My impression -- and I absolutely will not see the film to confirm this, as I can't even make it through a TV ad without hitting "mute" -- is that the movie does away with any and all of the series' laudable traits and leaves just the stuff I always found so irritating: the shallowness; the superficiality; the dreadful puns; the empty-headed social "commentary"; the total unlikability of the main character; the insistence that I should care about shoes when I so, so don't. So the things the critics pick on in their (hilarious) reviews sound to me like backward-looking critiques of the whole enterprise, even when they're prefaced by lamentations that this once-great franchise is going out on such a low note. Take this, from Boston Globe critic Ty Burr:

A very brief review of the revival of 'Fences' by August Wilson

It's great! Denzel is great! Viola Davis is great! Go see it!

(Longer review forthcoming.)

Go back to Galway

While we're catching up: I reviewed Martin McDonagh's new play, A Behanding in Spokane, for Commonweal last month. It took me this long to mention it here because (a) the review is subscribers-only online, and (b) the play was a big fat disappointment. Most of what I wrote is an introduction to McDonagh, whose Irish plays I love and admire. (Did you know online-only subscriptions to Commonweal are just $29?) Here's a sample of what I had to say about Behanding:

Time to start getting the nets out

I always assumed that Anyone Can Whistle made some kind of sense. I knew it was whimsical and wacky and all that, but I figured, if I saw the whole thing intact, it would have some discernible throughline. Not so much, as it turns out!

This is too bad for me, because I've been staging imaginary productions of Anyone Can Whistle in my head for years, based on the 1994 Carnegie Hall concert version starring Madeline Kahn, Scott Bakula and Bernadette Peters. I was excited when I found out the show was slated for Encores! in this, the Year of Sondheim: at last I would see the whole show, book intact, and at last I would know what goes between the songs to hold the whole nutty thing together. But unless the version I saw at City Center was seriously truncated (and it sure didn't seem edited), the fact is, the book isn't so much quirky or cutting-edge or experimental as it is half-assed and terrible. (The reviews I saw tiptoed around saying that outright: another case of Arthur Laurents getting off the hook?) The show makes even less sense than it did when I had only the recording to work with. Who knew.

So there's no way to make Anyone Can Whistle "work." I was still surprised that Casey Nicholaw -- whose Follies for Encores! I admired very much -- didn't come a little closer.