The Nance

Cady Huffman as Sylvie

I saw The Nance a few weeks  ago (being in rehearsal and writing a commission do not lend themselves to much blogging time).  Primarily, I was going to see Cady Huffman, and Nathan Lane and Jack O'Brien couldn't hurt, right?  Lewis J. Stadlen I'd seen play Groucho Marx in Groucho:  A Life in Revue which my late, great friend Rusty Magee had musical directed.  I was not a big Douglas Carter Beane fan; I'd seen Advice from a Caterpillar and The Little Dog Laughed.  Not bad, but really not my cup of tea.  When I read Hilton Als' review in the New Yorker ("The Nance ... is a nearly perfect work of dramatic art"), I thought he's lost his mind.

Well, I was wrong.  I loved it.  I loved the script, and the fact that within the first 20 minutes there are references to both Singer's Midgets and Julian Eltinge, and the Lyceum is the perfect theatre for it.  I'm not sure I would have visualized Cady as a Communist striper, but I believe her every moment.  John Lee Beatty's turntable set is fantastic, Ann Roth's costumes are perfect (she is Ann Roth, I realize, but that baby doll nightgown that Cady wears with the hands on the tits is simply hilarious), the acting is across the board good (best thing I've ever see Stadlen do-  he and Lane even perform the "Niagara Falls" routine), the direction is just right.  Beane and Glen Kelly wrote new period-appropriate songs for the burlesque numbers. So good, in fact, my friend composer John Prestianni and I thought they might have been actual burlesque songs we weren't familiar with.   

Nathan Lane as Chauncey and Lewis J. Stadlen as Efram

 The Nance was extended through August 11th, and I'm going again.

Lincoln Center Theatre photos by Joan Marcus.

Sidewalk Closed - Use Other Side

My boyfriend, Tom Bovo, has a new solo show opening this Friday which runs until Sunday, June 2nd.  It's called Sidewalk Closed - Use Other Side, and features his photographs of Brooklyn landscapes, mostly around Red Hook.  There are some color photos, though most are in black and white.

The show is at a new gallery-  Peninsula Art Space, 352 Van Brunt Street (near Sullivan Street).  The opening reception is Friday, May 10, 6-9.  Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 7. 

For more information, www.tombovo.com.

Above, Canal, by Tom Bovo.  Featured in Sidewalk Closed - Use Other Side.

Parade's End

 

I have just finished reading all four books of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.  The Vintage Classics edition is 906 pages long.  I started losing steam when went off on the tangent of Tietjens' brother and his French mistress in the last book, The Last Post.  But up to then, I simply loved it.  I have read many American and British novels about World War I, even some of the poetry.  In fact, I've read so many I'm not certain how I missed this.   It's better than Siegfried Sassoon's trilogy, or Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That.  Having seen the HBO miniseries, I have renewed respect for Tom Stoppard's adaptation.  Amazingly good, of a totally nonlinear, multiple streams-of-consciousness work.

An Accidental Autobiography

I've spent the last ten days reading Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's autobiography, written in 1996.  I read her book about Italy, Italian Days, a few years ago.  There is a lot of truly terrific writing in it.  A wonderful section on women and their perception of their bodies.  An appreciation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  Another of Red Barber.  Fascinating descriptions of places she'd lived (India, Tripoli).  Her terrifying Brooklyn childhood (her mother was deeply crazy, and her father sexually abused her for years).

But the descriptions of the love of Harrison's life, who she calls "Jazzman," really made me wonder about her own sanity.  I am well aware that a. love makes people do stupid things (and I have done many); and b. I've become  more empathetic as I'm aged.  So to read that this intelligent, experienced, articulate woman, well past 50, is doing things like calling Jazzman's wife and harassing her, really pulled me up short.  I was embarrassed for her.  It made me uncomfortable.  And the rest of my experience of reading the book was not only trying to justify her behavior, but trying to match up that Harrison with the Harrison that the rest of the book implied, the Harrison who could write like this.

Harrison bought a carved monkey with a hole in its center in Bali.  "When I kept my monkey on a table surface, it used occasionally, in the night, to change position, and I would see it in the morning staring in a direction opposite the one I had last seen it in.  I am fully aware of the fact there are no inanimate objects.  Tired of the monkey's willfulness, I hung it on a wall, where now it seems content to be."

Happy Birthday, GCT

It may not be my favorite public space in Manhattan, but it's way up there.  Grand Central has turned 100 years old.  It has its own website:  http://www.grandcentralterminal.com/  There were multiple articles in the New York Times about it. 

There was also a very cool "10 Things You Didn't Know" piece in Time Out New York by Nadia Chaudhury.  My personal favorite trivia bit is that Track 34 (because unlike the other tracks, it doesn't have columns) was the location of Fred Astare's dance up the ramp in The Bandwagon. 

Alec Guinness

I lifted this off of Richard Toscan's recent LinkedIn post: 

Alec Guinness said, "There are three ways, I suggest to deal with critics. The first, most sensational, slightly dangerous but highly successful if carried out with sincerity, is to hit them." 

Sounds just like him.

Brecht in America

I have spent the last few days skimming Bertolt Brecht's FBI file.  Some parts have been redacted, but there is still plenty to read.  It's about 300 pages long, and covers 1941 to 1947.  The FBI was quite exhaustive in their surveillance, both visually and electronically.  

The link to part one is here:  http://vault.fbi.gov/Bertolt%20Brecht%20/Bertolt%20Brecht%20Part%201%20of%204/view

There are plenty of people that you've heard of mentioned in the file:  Brecht; his wife; his mistress; his musical collaborator Hans Eisler; his children, Barbara and Stefan; Peter Lorre; Heinrich Mann; Charles Laughton; Elsa Lancaster; Elisabeth Bergner; etc.  I think the only one of them still alive is Eric Bentley. 

I'm not sure why the FBI chose Brecht's file to highlight.  Most of the informants' names are blacked out-  the only one that I recognized was Mrs. Robert Siodmak (we'd watched "The Killers" a few nights before).