Archive for the ‘Theater’ Category

Paris chooses

April 8, 2025

[Sex work, naked boys, nude statuary (classical in theme, but, yes, full frontal) — generally not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]

Das wäre Ihr Mädchen, Herr Jakob Schmidt
… Ach, bedenken sie was man für dreißig Dollar kriegt

— Weill & Brecht, Havanna Lied (from the 1930 opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)

How is a man to choose? He could have that one for $30. But then the other one looks eager to please. And the third one looks really hot naked.

That was Jakob Schmidt in the imaginary city of Mahagonny — part America, part Weimar Germany — but then this morning Pinterest brought me another man, call him Alex, picking one of three for sexual services, under the watchful eye of an arranger, the clever and mischievous H, in a painting by Cornelius McCarthy:

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Candidiana

March 30, 2025

Penultimate March, and today’s song from Candide is Cunegonde’s aria “Glitter and be gay” (from Act 1, right before “You were dead, you know”, the title subject of my 3/27 posting on this blog), in which she confronts her, um, suitors with the defiant quatrain:

Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!

(Oh, honey, I am so with you!)

Candide is a remarkable theater piece that provides almost as many quotations suitable for random occasions as the Alice books, but with a sensibility that is some sort of compound of Voltaire’s satirical novella and the New York City intellectual and artistic world of the 1950s. But it works.

Now: the work, my 3/27 posting, and two responses from old friends about the show.

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Death of a character actor

February 2, 2023

A death notice for Angela Lansbury (last October) and appreciation of her achievements: in The New Yorker, “Angela Lansbury Shimmered Through the Decades: The actress, who died this week at ninety-six, revealed every facet of her talents” by Michael Schulman on 10/12/22 — which I reproduce here so that I can refer to it in a separate posting I’m doing on an AL performance from 1973. I would like readers of the other posting to read Schulman’s piece and take it to heart, because it makes such an important point about AL — that AL was one of the great character actors of all time, her genius being her ability to fully inhabit whatever part she was playing, to be that character, with no hint of showing off how wonderfully she was playing that part.

It follows that if she appears to be guying us, wink-nudging her acting ability at us (something that Meryl Streep, for one, is inclined to do), then that’s because that’s the character she’s playing, that’s who she is in the scene we’re watching; she’s showing us that her character is an impersonator.

Schulman’s piece is an extended appreciation of this genius of hers, so I want it in my AL-1973 posting, but it’s much too long to just insert into the middle of that posting, so I’m providing it here as auxiliary material.

From here on, it’s all Schulman.

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Death notices, Movies and tv, Theater | Leave a Comment »

New Girl in Town

December 30, 2022

This follows up on my 12/28/22 posting “Building wealth”, with its section on Princeton in 1959-60 and musical theatre (and Clark Gesner), mentioning New Girl in Town (which I learned about first from my roommate Frank (Franklyn J. Carr III), and then talked about with Clark). My old friend from those days (and still) Bonnie Campbell (Benita Bendon Campbell), also Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s godmother, responded to this in e-mail to me on 12/28 (quoted here with her permission):

Your poignant look back at Princeton years, especially the importance of Broadway musicals as background, carried me back there, too.

At my request, you gave me the cast album of New Girl In Town, for a birthday present in 1961. I had seen the show in New York, including Gwen Verdon and Thelma Ritter, in September of 1957, the night before I sailed to France on the Mauritania. Thus, the night before I met Ann.

The song “It’s Good To Be Alive” became a sort of mantra for me.

The Ann here is Ann Walcutt Daingerfield (later Ann Daingerfield Zwicky), who became Bonnie’s roommate during their junior year in France (1957-58); and a bit later her roommate when they were both working in Princeton. Thereafter, Bonnie was Ann’s best female friend (from among a number of such friends), until Ann’s death in the bleak midwinter, 17 January 1985. Many of the things in (as I put it in that earlier posting) “the giant album of Things I Learned at Princeton” came from Ann and Bonnie, together and separately. So: New Girl in Town, from Frank and Clark and Bonnie and Ann, over 60 years ago.

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Great age

September 8, 2022

A note from my sister-in-law Virginia Transue (my (late) man Jacques’s (late) older brother Bill’s wife — Virginia and I are the survivors) on Facebook yesterday, in the matter of my 9/6 birthday, this year my 82nd:

VT: Funny how every single year you are 5 weeks ahead of me [her birthday is 10/12]. What a great age we have both reached.

AZ > VT: Yes, always those five weeks. What a great age we have both reached: I’d like to read that as having great ‘of ability, quality, or eminence considerably above the normal or average’ — at an apogee — but you might well just have meant ‘of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average’ — exceptionally large. Well, whatever, somehow we’ve gotten here.

A little lexicography, some personal history involving my first male lover (also a survivor), and it will end with Elaine Stritch singing.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Holidays, Music, My life, Theater | 1 Comment »

Rewind the music, cover your bones with rainbow

September 20, 2017

Sunday’s (9/17) NYT Magazine poem (p. 22), “Remaking the Music Box” by Geoffrey Hilsabeck, selected and introduced by Terrance Hayes.

Illustration by R.O. Blechman (showing two ways of looking at a rainbow):

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Annals of NomConjObj: Miss Adelaide

August 24, 2017

Yesterday from Ben Zimmer, e-mail saying that he’d recently seen a performance of the musical “Guys and Dolls” and thought I’d appreciate an exchange in the song “Marry the Man Today” (one of the songs that was cut for the movie adaptation), a duet for the characters Adelaide (Miss Adelaide of the Hot Box girls) and Sarah (Sister Sarah Brown in a Salvation Army band):

Adelaide: At Wanamaker’s and Saks and Klein’s
A lesson I’ve been taught
You can’t get alterations on a dress you haven’t bought.
Sarah: At any vegetable market from Borneo to Nome
You mustn’t squeeze a melon till you get the melon home.
Adelaide: You’ve simply got to gamble.
Sarah: You get no guarantee.
Adelaide: Now doesn’t that kind of apply to you and I?
Sarah: You and me.

(referring to Adelaide and Nathan Detroit, who runs a crap game; and Sarah and Sky Masterson, a high-rolling gambler)

You can listen to the song, in the original cast album, here.

A NomConjObj (nominative conjoined object) from Adelaide, corrected by Sarah. The first instance of NomConjObj in my life that I actually noticed — surely not the first that came past me, but the first I was conscious of, and tried to locate in its social world (working-class NYC low-lifes, in the show) — also part of my first experience of a live performance of a musical, in the original Broadway production, which opened in 1950. I was 10, and it was stunning.

(#1) Playbill from the original production

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Posted in Coordination, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Pronoun case, Syntax, Theater, Usage | 3 Comments »

Morning: The Cockettes

October 14, 2015

Another from the backlog of morning names here: back to the outrageous 70s (which we tend to think of as “the 60s”). From Wikipedia:

The Cockettes were a psychedelic theater troupe founded by Hibiscus (George Harris) in the fall of 1969. The troupe was formed out of a group of hippies, men and women, that were living together communally in Haight-Ashbury. Hibiscus came to live with them because of their preference to dressing outrageously and proposed the idea of putting their lifestyle on the stage. Their brand of theater was influenced by The Living Theater, John Vaccaro’s Play House of the Ridiculous, the films of Jack Smith and the LSD ethos of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters. The troupe performed all original material doing mostly musicals with original songs. The first year they parodied American musicals and sang show tunes (or original musical comedies in the same vein). They gained an underground cult following that led to mainstream exposure.

… The Cockettes were the subject of a 2002 documentary, The Cockettes.

The name is a play on the name The Rockettes (the dance company that performs at Rockefeller Center in NYC), portmanteaued with cock ‘penis’.

A set of clips from the documentary:

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Blessed Assurance on Broadway

May 29, 2013

In yesterday’s NYT, on p. 1 of the print edition, “Something Happened on the Way to Bountiful: Everyone Sang Along” by William Grimes:

Not long after the curtain rises on the second act of “The Trip to Bountiful,” the Broadway revival of the Horton Foote play at the Stephen Sondheim Theater, something unusual happens. Cicely Tyson, as Mrs. Carrie Watts, sits on a bus station bench in a small Texas town. She is on the run from her abusive daughter-in-law and henpecked son in Houston, desperate to see the family farm in Bountiful once more before she dies.

Overcome with emotion, she begins singing an old Protestant hymn, “Blessed Assurance.”

From the first note, there’s a palpable stirring among many of the black patrons in the audience, which the play, with its mostly black cast, draws in large numbers. When Ms. Tyson jumps to her feet, spreads her arms and picks up the volume, they start singing along. On some nights it’s a muted accompaniment. On other nights, and especially at Sunday matinees, it’s a full-throated chorus that rocks the theater.

Video here: Blessed Assurance on Broadway

For a big white-gospel production of the hymn (by Bill and Gloria Gaither), see this video:

And for some discussion of the hymn, see this posting of mine.

 

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