Paul Rudnick and Patrick Dennis

For years I have laughed aloud at Paul Rudnick’s short pieces in the “Shouts and Murmurs” department of The New Yorker, and so when I saw a glowing review of his new novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, I ordered myself a copy and jumped right in. To my surprise—and perhaps unfairly to Rudnick, who has made no promises about how funny anything he writes is going to be—the novel was not breathtakingly hilarious. It was clever. It was well written. But almost immediately I started thinking of Tony Kushner’s subtitle for his two-part Angels in America: “a gay fantasia.” Rudnick’s gay fantasia tells the story of Nate Reminger, a schlubby Jewish guy from New Jersey who falls in love with a WASP Adonis who is not only so extraordinarily good looking that he gets offered movie roles even when he doesn’t work in the movies, but is also richer than Daddy Warbucks and Bill Gates combined and has the altruistic impulses of a Mother Teresa (who is a prominent offstage presence). Most fantasy-fulfilling of all, Farrell Covington is as madly in love with our narrator, Nate Reminger, as Nate is with him.

At times this novel reads like a handbook for those who need to be educated about everyday gay life, as if Nate were Arthur Frommer writing a guidebook to Gayville. (“Style has no limits,” our narrator asserts. “Which is such a gay thing to say.” Or, “Scholars argue: Why are certain gay men so mesmerized by outsize female icons, by single names like Cher, Judy, and Bette?  Theories abound….”) Sometimes he over-explains, as when he provides the definition of a portcullis or when he tells us that Joe Allen is a restaurant in the theater district. As we proceed, we sense that we’re reading a memoir disguised as a novel. Nate writes a play about the ghost of a renowned actor who played Hamlet coming back to advise a modern-day actor in the famous role, a play that instantly evokes memories of Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. Nate writes a movie script about a bawdy entertainer who disguises herself as a nun, and readers are going to remember Rudnick’s screenplay for Sister Act. Nate writes an off-Broadway play that nobody wants to produce because it’s a comedy about AIDS, and yet we know that it’s going to be a hit because we know what happened with Rudnick’s Jeffrey. I’m not complaining about Rudnick’s plotting, and the autobiographical novel is hardly unusual. It’s always fun to find Easter eggs, and Rudnick’s dialogue and one-liners are polished and witty. But the greatest strength of this book is that it becomes a grand love story spanning decades. I haven’t read one of those since Wuthering Heights.

Patrick Dennis (real name Edward Everett Tanner III) also wrote a gay fantasia. His appeared in 1955 under the title Auntie Mame, and while Rudnick has written a memoir disguised as a novel, Dennis wrote a novel disguised as a memoir, in which “Patrick Dennis” describes life under the care of his lively, iconoclastic aunt, a woman who, in every sense of that word again, is fabulous. At this point, gentle reader, you may be wondering why I’m calling this novel a gay fantasia when it’s narrated by a straight character and featuring a straight protagonist. Consider, please, that Auntie Mame Dennis represents the iconic gay friend—sassy, flamboyant, unconditionally accepting, loyal, and absolutely free of any sexual interest. When I was still in elementary school, I auditioned with Billy McIlhaney and Buddy Smith for the role of Patrick in the local community theater’s production of the play adapted from the novel (a role that went to my later friend Bristow Hardin, Jr.), and when I didn’t get the part, my parents allowed me as consolation to attend the performance, where my vocabulary improved considerably. (What, I asked, is a lesbian? And a bastard?)

I didn’t want to re-read Auntie Mame, but I could remember reading and enjoying Dennis’s The Joyous Season in the mid-1960’s, when I was in eighth grade. Many of the jokes eluded me, but I could remember it vaguely as a good read. So I ordered a copy from Abe Books and sat down to revisit it, and I was very quickly laughing aloud to a degree that I never reached with the Rudnick novel. Patrick Dennis was a master of social comedy. There were times when his dialogue reminded me of the best of Noel Coward, and The Joyous Season still works beautifully as a comedy-of-manners gem. He’s able to skewer the old money families and their excesses, but he aims his sharpest darts at the climbers, the poseurs, the snobs, the pretentious, the insufferable arrivistes.

Edward Everett Tanner knew well the worlds of which he wrote whether he was using the name Patrick Dennis or Virginia Rowans. He made millions of dollars and lost all of them on impulsive spending and unwise real estate investments. He was a married father of two and was also a bisexual active in the New York gay scene. He quit writing to work as a butler for hyper-wealthy people, including Ray Kroc, the man who gave the world McDonald’s fast food, who said he had no idea that his employee was a famous novelist. He died all too soon in 1976, age 55, of pancreatic cancer. He should have died thereafter, but in those madcap 55 years, he gave the world many joyous seasons. Indeed, The Joyous Season ends in June, the month farthest away from Christmas, and that’s surely a deliberate corrective for those who assume that the title refers to only one time of year.  

SUCCESSION and TED LASSO

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By coincidence, two extremely popular television series concluded their runs within a few days of each other in late May. “Succession,” HBO’s King-Lear-riffing tale of family dysfunction aired its last episode on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and on the following Wednesday, Apple TV+ gave us the conclusion of “Ted Lasso,” a show so warm and lovable that even the characters on “Succession” might have embraced it. Aside from the happenstance convergence of their conclusion dates, the only thing these two series had in common was that Harriet Walter played an eccentrically self-absorbed mother in both. “Succession,” mordant and nasty, derived its dark humor from the unfettered depths to which the characters would sink in order to advance their interests. “Ted Lasso,” by contrast, celebrated redemption and the astonishing contagion of the abundant goodness in human beings.

Spoilers are going to abound in the following paragraphs. I’ve warned you.

The single most pervasive atmospheric quality of “Succession” is gloom. To begin with, its palette for sets and costumes is overwhelmingly gray. Much of the action takes place indoors, with characters in dark suits or neutral clothes. The interior living spaces are grand, of course, as we would expect for those with access to billions of dollars, but the offices and apartments tend to emphasize the gray, the taupe, the greige. When characters travel by car or helicopter or plane, color remains muted. Lighting at parties is dim. If a scene does take place outdoors, the sky is overcast or the scenery drab. Even onboard a yacht surrounded by glittering sea, nobody enjoys the glory of nature or the elegance of their vessel. “Succession” tamps down brightness and color and cheer. The characters are so busy scheming or trying to guess what someone else is scheming that they have no time for beauty or happiness.

So from whence springs the pleasure of watching “Succession”? Primarily from pitch-perfect performances from actors impeccably matched to their roles. (Jesse Armstrong, the creator and chief writer for the show, alternates his dialogue between unfinished, Mamet-esque fragments and eloquently zinging barbs, all of which usually include one or more of the principal parts of the verb to fuck.)  Brian Cox (Logan Roy, the gruff family patriarch), Alan Ruck (Connor Roy, a dimwitted dilettante), Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy, a preening doofus who is forever striving to be cool and important), Kieran Culkin (Roman Roy, a cynical man-child psychologically stuck in early adolescence), Sarah Snook (Siobhan Roy, often called by her appropriate nickname reminiscent of homemade prison weaponry, Shiv), Matthew Macfadyen (Shiv’s fawning husband Tom Wambsgans, constantly scrambling for security within the company and the family), and Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg, a desperate, money-hungry leech whose moral compass spins like a helicopter blade) collaborate with the huge, equally talented supporting cast to provide delicious heaps of schadenfreude for the ravenous audience to feast upon. Sure, they are obscenely wealthy, we muse, but they are also obscene, and obscenely unhappy.

In glorious contrast, “Ted Lasso” arises from and generates joy. The final season begins with a closeup of Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso and ends with another such shot. What happens in between is an ever-increasing delight. As the season progresses, and we viewers become more and more committed to the plot, the writers take more and more risks, all of which pay off. I will guess that the longest argument in the writers’ room involved whether or not to go with “So Long, Farewell” performed by the football club to say farewell to Ted Lasso. But, as the winners of the argument must have known, by then we viewers would accept anything they offered. Special kudos to Sudeikis, of course, but also to his astonishing teammates, nearly all of whom enjoyed dynamic growth over three seasons: Phil Dunster as the ever-maturing Jamie Tartt, Juno Temple as Keeley, Brendan Hunt as Coach Beard, Jeremy Swift as Higgins, Billy Harris as Colin Hughes, James Lance (whose turn as Trent Crimm rivaled the metamorphosis of Jamie Tartt), Toheeb Jimoh as the catalytic Sam Obisanya, and everybody else in the cast.

What I loved about this show, and especially about its final episode, was its consistently fine storytelling. The many superb writers, including Brett Goldstein, who epitomized deadpan as Roy Kent, brilliantly paced the action. We might anticipate where the plot was heading only to be proved wrong again and again. When the writers do set us up for an inevitable plot development, they don’t waste our time by showing us a superfluous scene confirming what we have anticipated. Instead, they jump to the next event in the story, the one that we can’t imagine. For example, at the end of the penultimate episode, we see Ted telling his boss Rebecca (played by the magnificent Hannah Waddingham, who is suddenly and gratifyingly everywhere on television, from Sex Education to Tom Jones), that he has news for her. We know the news: he’s quitting and heading home. Rather than start the next episode with a scene confirming our assumptions, we begin with Rebecca morosely refusing to discuss the prospect of life without Ted in London. Or, to cite another example, we see in one episode Nate (finely played by Nick Mohammed) become disillusioned with Rupert (the only unabashedly nasty character in the show, incarnated superbly by Anthony Head). Then in the next episode Nate has already separated from Rupert’s team. We don’t have to watch the expected; these writers make plenty of room for the unexpected. And the final montage, a community epilogue to show us where everybody lands, fulfills every wish that a viewer could have.

If you want to read another comparison of these two shows, check out Sophie Gilbert’s analysis in the on-line Atlantic. For the record, I wrote this essay before I read Gilbert’s, and she wrote hers before I posted mine.

The Inscrutable Sam Shepard and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

In the fall of 1989, accompanied by my friends Nat and Wistie Jobe, I drove the 45 minutes from Woodberry Forest School to the no-longer-existing Seminole Square Cinemas in Charlottesville to see Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Like every multiplex in the 1980’s, Seminole Square offered a vast asphalt lot for easy customer parking. I pulled into a convenient spot, exited the car with my two passengers, pushed the automatic door lock, and slammed the door just a nanosecond before I realized that I’d left the keys in the ignition. Nat and Wistie laughed, then shrugged: we could worry about the keys later. We enjoyed the movie (a bargain matinee starting circa 5:00 p.m.), and emerged from the theater around 7:00-ish to rejoin reality. My white Toyota Camry was still locked, and the keys were still inside.

Only here’s where this story, though historically accurate, enters the realm of magic realism, of ineffable grace, of astonishing luck, of Hollywood happy endings. While we stood at my car and tugged fruitlessly on the handles of locked doors, a box truck selling specialty tools drove right past us in the parking lot, and Nat flagged it down. Never before or since in my entire life have I seen such a truck, and I still can’t understand why one would be driving through the parking lot of a movie theater early on a Saturday evening. But there it was, as if we were characters in a poorly plotted television movie, and Nat was able to purchase a slim t-shaped aluminum jimmy apparently designed for the sole purpose of enabling car thieves. But this device required some practice and a fine touch in order to catch exactly the right bar at exactly the right spot to work the mechanism that would unlock the car door. Nat and I took turns trying it. We looked somewhat like preppy craftsmen trying to churn tiny servings of butter inside the doors of my automobile.

During one of Nat’s turns a black sedan pulled up beside us, and a couple emerged. It was getting to be time for the next showing of the movie.

“We’re breaking into cars,” Nat said to the emerging occupants of the sedan without looking up.

“You’re arrested,” said the man, and that’s when I recognized the speaker as Sam Shepard. His companion was Jessica Lange, who said nothing, but who looked right at me with a joltingly thrilling smile that astonished me into speechlessness. For that moment I was no longer in an urban parking lot, but away in a vast green meadow at midnight with other deer hypnotized by high beams. Nat never noticed. Wistie grinned.

I thought of that encounter many times over the past couple of weeks as I was reading Robert Greenfield’s excellent biography True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times. The man I glimpsed in the parking lot was cheerful and quick-witted and clearly enjoying the chance to take his partner Jessica to a movie starring her old buddy Jeff Bridges. However, the man I met in Greenfield’s book left me feeling the way I do at the end of any great tragedy: not pity and fear, exactly, with apologies to Aristotle, but pity and awe. The pity arises from the way so many calamities were the result of the man’s own poor choices; the awe, from the astonishing heights to which this kid out of nowhere rose.  Shepard was just a couple of years older than I, but when I was 19, I was a sheltered little undergraduate taking English courses and pledging a fraternity. When Shepard was 19—and Greenfield describes this moment in a glorious opening chapter—he arrived penniless in New York City, all alone and ready to make his fortune, but so broke that he had to sell a pint of blood in order to get his first meal. I was in the audience for the disastrous production of Shepard’s True West at the Public Theater in 1980. I was also in the audience at the New York Theatre Workshop to see Shepard perform in Caryl Churchill’s A Number in late 2004. That’s a play about a man (Shepard) who has cloned several versions of his son (all played by Dallas Roberts). I can see why anyone would want to perform in a play by Caryl Churchill, but after reading this book, I think Shepard would have been better cast as the multiple clones. In his polymathic life he achieved fame in a number of incarnations: prolific playwright and screenwriter, memoirist, poet, movie star, rock musician, stage actor, father, philanderer, cover model. The man who played Chuck Yeager in the movie The Right Stuff also won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for writing Buried Child. This robust amalgam of Falstaff, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Randall P. McMurphy, this gigantically vibrant dynamo, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age 73. Up to the end he was driving his truck with his knees and elbows when his hands wouldn’t work.

Shepard’s story was a real-life wonder, but I’ve also encountered fictional marvels this month, specifically the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime, and I must say that the title does not lie. Mrs. Maisel, as played so well by Rachel Brosnahan, truly has been marvelous for all the preceding seasons, but in this one, the best of all, the writing in the show has risen to the celestial. Every time I think I know where a plot is going, I turn out to be delightfully wrong. We faithful viewers have been watching Midge Maisel’s career advance, hit setbacks, recover, hit more setbacks, and painstakingly and hilariously thrive. This season, however, in the second episode, the writers make the startling and, as it turns out, brilliant decision to go all Citizen Kane on us. The episode begins not with a newsreel, but with a piece on Sixty Minutes about Midge’s life and career. No spoilers here. I am about to become quite nonspecific. But, just as Herman Mankiewicz did with Charles Foster Kane, we get the complete story of Midge’s career in a few minutes, and then we spend the rest of the season learning how such a turn of events came to be. And the results are entirely satisfying.

The final episode aired today, May 26, and I just finished watching it. Without spoiling a thing, I can declare with gratitude and relief that the finale rises to the challenge of capping a superb season for a superb series. Some may quibble with the epilogue set in 2005, but I’m already getting over my initial misgivings to appreciate all the subtleties and complexities of the final image before the credits roll. Thank you, Mrs. Maisel, for giving us so much color, choler, cleverness, and craft for five extraordinary seasons. Long may you stream.

Marion Turner and Eleanor Catton

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When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1975, I happened upon a book in the stacks of Alderman Library called The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, a product of the Victorian era by Mary Cowden Clark. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t even remove it from the shelf. But I’ve never forgotten the title, which struck me as an astonishingly silly topic to explore and to deserve a place in a section full of serious Shakespearean scholarship. Today we’d call it Fan Fiction and shrug it off as a harmless amusement. But nearly half a century ago and still today, I marvel at its location in the library.

So when I heard that Marion Turner had published The Wife of Bath: A Biography, I thought that a noted biographer of Chaucer had decided to dabble in some fan fiction of her own. Then I read the reviews, and then I read the book. Turner’s “biography” of a fictional character is actually an accessible and enlightening work of scholarship. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer tells us that the Wife of Bath is named Alison—the name that Turner uses throughout her book—and that she has had five husbands, has traveled extensively, and is adept at cloth-making. Turner begins her book by examining the frequency with which medieval women remarried—it was not at all unusual—and by discussing the ways that women could be property holders, operators of businesses, travelers, and possessors of independent wealth. We get to know the literary ancestors of Alison, especially in the character La Vielle in The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and in due time we meet her literary descendants. I thought that Turner was straining when she claimed that Shakespeare created Falstaff as a male version of the Wife of Bath, but I have to admit that in the play where Falstaff first appears, Henry IV, Part 1, there’s a direct reference to pilgrims traveling to Canterbury, a clear sign that Shakespeare knew the works of Chaucer. Turner makes a stronger case for Molly Bloom as a version of Alison in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and there’s no denying the continuing reimagining of Alison by today’s writers, perhaps most famously by Zadie Smith in The Wife of Willesden, a play drawing on and modernizing Chaucer. This biography is the antithesis of fan fiction. It opens a window onto the heritage and the legacy of one of the most significant characters in literary history.

The other most memorable book I read this month was Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood, the title of which ominously recalls one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most unsettling plays. Catton is a New Zealander. She sets the novel in her home country, and yet the villain—the Macbeth-like billionaire whose mastery of technology gives him an almost supernatural ability to manipulate cell phones and other devices—is an American. Taking her time to introduce us to a large cast of characters, Catton jumps from one point of view to another and initially is Jane-Austen-esque in so forthrightly telling us about what the characters are thinking and how they came to their current state. Then gradually and relentlessly Catton gives us more conversation and more action. She heightens the suspense when our exposure to these various points of view have tipped us to the disastrous misinterpretations and assumptions each character is making. By the end of the novel she has delivered an unabashed thriller with an ending that nobody could predict and yet everybody will believe. This is my first encounter with the works of Eleanor Catton, but it won’t be the last. She’s the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize (for The Luminaries in 2013, when she was 28), and in Birnam Wood she has written what turns out to be one hell (pun intended) of a story.

KIMBERLY AKIMBO and SOME LIKE IT HOT

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With the Tony Award nominations coming in early May, I would like to discuss two deserving candidates. You never know what those Tony voters are going to do—almost thirty years later, I’m still reeling over the way they picked local favorite Terrence McNally and his Love! Valor! Compassion! over Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, one of the greatest plays written in English—but I suspect that they will want to acknowledge both of the shows I’m highlighting today. Honestly, I love good theater in every form. I’ll gladly drive a couple of hours to see Taylor Mack’s zany Hir at Woolly Mammoth. I’ll ride the train to the darker reaches of London to watch The Yorkshire Play, one of the so-called Shakespearean apocrypha. I’ll happily buy a ticket to see the Chatham, Massachusetts, community troupe mount No Sex Please, We’re British. I’ll fight the D.C. traffic and parking hassles to see Caryl Churchill’s Far Away at Studio Theatre. And I’ll live-stream Between Riverside and Crazy and Shakespeare’s The Tempest if I can’t make it to the theater. But sometimes what I really crave is the thespian equivalent of a hot-fudge sundae, and when that craving comes, the only way to satisfy it is with a Broadway musical.

So a month ago I saw Kimberly Akimbo, a musical adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play of the same name. As Broadway musicals go, it’s a small chamber piece with a total of nine performers in the cast. Lindsay-Abaire provided the book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.  If you know Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers, then you know he has a quirky but compassionate sensibility. One of the characters in Fuddy Meers has a speech impediment, and when she tries to describe the “funny mirrors” that warp and distort one’s appearance at carnivals, she calls them “fuddy meers.” That kind of warping and distortion is evident here, but so is Lindsay-Abaire’s delicate willingness to confront heartbreak, just as he does in Rabbit Hole. In Kimberly Akimbo, the eponymous heroine is a 15-year-old girl with a rare disease causing her to age four to five times faster than normal. She’s played by Victoria Clark, who, when I saw the show, was 63 years old.  Kimberly reaches her 16th birthday in the course of the action, and she is aware that most people with her illness do not live much longer than sixteen years. Yet somehow what sounds like a sad, grotesque downer manages to be affirmative, joyful, and very funny. In addition to Victoria Clark, I want to single out Justin Cooley, who plays Kimberly’s exuberant, loving boyfriend, and Bonnie Milligan, playing her Aunt Debra, who is an outrageous criminal and simultaneously the one member of Kimberly’s family who understands what her niece is suffering. But now that I’ve gone this far, I can’t stop with the kudos. Steven Boyer and Alli Mauzey as Kimberly’s bumbling parents find just the right tone, and Olivia Elease Hardy, Fernell Hogan, Nina White, and Michael Iskander play Kimberly’s high school friends flawlessly. It’s not a big show, but it lands with a big splash, and I’m grateful to Jessica Stone for finding the way to direct and stage it so deftly.

Casey Nicholaw likewise brilliantly directed the show I saw the next day, a new musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s movie Some Like It Hot. Here’s an example of what we can only find on Broadway: a great big gigantic musical extravaganza with a cast of 25 (at least), gorgeous sets and lighting, hundreds of costumes, clever songs (music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Scott Whitman and Shaiman), a propulsive plot (book by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin), endearing characters (led by Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee in the Tony Curtis/Jack Lemmon roles from the movie), and enough tap-dancing to satisfy every aspiring Billy Elliot and Reno Sweeney in the crowd. Nicholaw even stages chase scenes with tap dancing, and why not? By that point everything onstage is whirling, and the audience is on board for whatever new delight this exuberant production delivers next. In fact, I enjoyed watching the scene changes, which were seamless and surprising, as much as I enjoyed the scenes themselves. And with big voices like those of NaTasha Yvette Williams (Sweet Sue) and Adrianna Hicks (Sugar, the role originally played by Marilyn Monroe) and the comic perfection of Kevin del Aguila (Osgood, played by Joe E. Brown in the movie), the whole experience presents the perfect antidote to the winter blahs. Also, I might add, to the spring, summer, and fall blahs. I lingered in the theater after the bows to hear the orchestra finish playing off the cast and to cling for just a little longer to the scene of such satisfying entertainment.

Ann Beattie and Lincoln Perry

I gravitate toward pairs in these blog postings, but this is my first time discussing two artists who are already a pair, a married couple—Ann Beattie, the writer of all those short stories for The New Yorker and all those novels and essays, and Lincoln Perry, the painter and sculptor perhaps most famous for his murals. Both have written new books. Beattie’s isn’t scheduled for publication until summer and came to me in the form of galley proofs. Perry’s I found in an art gallery in Lynchburg, and now that I’ve read both, I’m eager to advertise their virtues. Full disclosure: I was Ann Beattie’s student at the University of Virginia in the 1970’s and have kept in touch with her ever since. I met Lincoln through Ann and have known him for years. But don’t read this posting as a puff piece for friends. If I didn’t see the need to highlight the books, I wouldn’t mention them.

Let’s start with Perry’s Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others.  Reading this book is akin to auditing the most interesting art class you’ve ever taken. Prepare to go slowly. I had my iPad on my lap as I read so that I could study the paintings that Perry uses to exemplify his various lessons, and he wastes no time in showing us how to see planes, air, design, and color in paintings. If this book ever gets reprinted as a standard textbook like Janson’s History of Art, then maybe the publishers will be willing to spring for the expensive glossy full-color reproductions that the book demands. Perry does well at including his own sketches of black-and-white renderings of many of the paintings he discusses, but his greatest gift to readers arrives on his website, where he provides fifty different images of the works he’s examining. Because he mentions so many other artists and pieces, however, I found myself constantly pausing in my reading to go to the appropriate internet images. Frescoes by Tiepolo, etchings by Rembrandt, buildings in Venice—the tour is capacious, and I finished this book genuinely enlarged by the experience. I also fought the urges to get on a plane to St. Louis when Perry was discussing particularly his murals there.

And now for Ann Beattie. In his trilogy known as The Norman Conquests, the playwright Alan Ayckbourn presents three full-length plays set during the same weekend at the same country house populated by the same characters. One play takes place in the dining room, one in the living room, and one in the garden. Each show stands alone, and audiences may choose to watch one, two, or all three, but only those who opt to see the full trio can appreciate all the subtleties of what has transpired. Ann Beattie, in Onlookers, gives us a similar experience in six substantial short stories, all set in present-day Charlottesville, all standing alone, all readable in any order. Characters step in and out of each other’s tales, and in the final one, “The Bubble,” the characters converge. As a habitué of Charlottesville, I recognized and loved all the local references, but the stories work whether a reader knows the city or not. These stories are very much of our time; Beattie seems to have written some of them fifteen minutes ago with her references to the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. The “onlookers” of the title are survivors of trauma. In Charlottesville the community still reels in the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally of 2017 that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer and the lingering tension over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. (Traveller, Lee’s horse, even gets some attention.) As we would expect, Charlottesville also endures the trauma of covid-19. But Beattie’s characters cope with other shattering events as well: the deaths of mothers, the effects of the Trump presidency on political discourse, the gathering of obscure protesters in darkness, the loss of a lover or a house, the birth of a child in a public restroom, the arrival of a medical helicopter for an unidentified neighbor. Yet one of the central locations of these stories is an assisted-living facility called Solace House, and solace is what these characters eventually find.

For me Beattie’s most astonishing accomplishment is to create such a vast cast to populate her narratives. Her mind teems with characters. Legend has it that William Faulkner, when asked by students at the University of Virginia about the people in his novels, would talk about events that never appeared in print. Beattie is both Dickensian and Faulknerian in her ability to generate characters by the dozen and to plug each one into a fully realized context. I know that I’m not supposed to quote from galleys, but the example I’m about to offer is harmless. Even if, in the least likely outcome, this passage doesn’t make it into the final version of the book, it demonstrates how one Beattie character’s background can reticulate into infinite associated histories. The narrator of “Alice Ott” mentions a faraway friend who never figures into any of the stories and lives in New York, but Beattie can’t help giving her a history and then exploring another branch of the family tree: “I’d have much preferred being in Brooklyn with Sophie, who had an entry-level job in publishing and was supported by her father, forever guilty for leaving her and her brother when they were only three and five.” I have no doubt that if Beattie were in the Louvre in front of one of her husband’s favorite paintings, Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, she would be able to tell us the personal history of every figure in that vast canvas.  

Feel-Good and Feel-Bad

Back in my drinking days, I would frequently go dry-January, which seems in 2023 to be all the rage. Since I’m now dry-January-to-December, having given up alcohol permanently, I’ve lately been practicing another avoidance so that I might, at least in spirit, join the hordes in the rest of the country who are so chatty about their abstinence. After the grittiness of Slow Horses  (Apple TV+), the decadence of The White Lotus, Season 2 (HBO Max), the 24-wannabe formula of Jack Ryan, Season 3 (Amazon Prime Video), the dark comedy of Glass Onion (Netflix), I have decided to forgo darkness in my viewing habits for the month of January. Surely PBS had me in mind when it scheduled the new season of All Creatures Great and Small to begin broadcasting after the first of the year. But this month I need more than an hour a week of endearing Brits helping large animals and navigating human relations with superhuman kindness.

Norman Cousins famously wrote about curing his depression and illness with laughter. He watched classic film comedies on videotape and, so he claimed, laughed his way to better health. Now I’m not depressed, not wistful, not melancholy, not blue, not even a wee bit triste, if I understand the mild connotation of that French adjective. But I’m not writing fiction at this moment in my life, and I’m at my happiest when I’m writing a story. For now I’m allowing the 40,000 or so words I wrote in the fall to settle into something I can go back to revisit. My imagination is hibernating for now, and while I’ve learned to live with that dormancy, I don’t like it. So on New Year’s Eve I taped all six of the Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The first three, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and directed by W.S. Van Dyke, are the best, but all six are cheerfully entertaining. All the movies make light of Nick Charles’s astonishing addiction to alcohol, but it’s nice to see that Nick and Nora genuinely enjoy and love each other.

But January is a long month. I need a heavy-duty dose of inspiration, and so it came to pass that I subscribed to the ad-free version of Disney+ for the month and went on a feel-good rampage. First stop: the 2017 film version of the Broadway musical Newsies, with superb performances by Jeremy Jordan, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and the entire scenery-chewing cast under the steady direction of Jeff Calhoun and the Olympic-gymnastic-level choreography by Christopher Gattelli. Next up: Iron Will from 1994, with McKenzie Astin deftly carrying the movie about a kid who has to win a 500-mile dog race in order to save—I kid you not—the family farm. It was interesting to see the now-reviled Kevin Spacey performing so well alongside so many other old pros, including Brian Cox, who, unlike his character in Succession, never tells a single person to fuck off during the entire movie. After that: Third Man on the Mountain, with James MacArthur, playing an 18-year-old who, at the outset of the movie, saves the life of Michael Rennie’s character and thus earns a chance to climb the Matterhorn. Then a super-feel-good two-night viewing of The Rookie, the 2002 movie starring Dennis Quaid as Jimmy Morris, the real-life high school baseball coach who in middle age was able to realize his lifelong dream of playing major-league baseball. I’m leaving out a lot. But those movies are so feel-good that they make the stuff on the Hallmark Channel seem like the work of Martin McDonagh.

Finally, I want to talk about Miracle, the 2004 movie about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s 1980 victory over the team from the Soviet Union. It stars Kurt Russell, who plays Herb Brooks, a prickly, driven, histrionic coach whose methods today would raise eyebrows and probably objections. But Russell, who has been appearing in Disney movies since he was a boy, somehow manages to keep the audience sympathetic to this man even as he drives his team to exhaustion and tests the patience of his wife, nicely played by Patricia Clarkson. After all this Disney dosing, I am feeling fine and am ready to return to the mordant stuff. But you know what would really make me feel good long after this January is over? To know that Kurt Russell is going to win a long-overdue award for his acting. He deserves one.

Barbara Kingsolver and Claire Keegan

Recently I finished reading one long novel and two slender novellas. The long novel is a fine piece of work. The two novellas are perfect.

The long novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, ambitiously aspires to transplant Dickens’s David Copperfield to Southwest Virginia during a stretch of time roughly 20-30 years ago. Some of the transformation involves a simple adjustment of names: Peggotty becomes Peggott, Ham becomes Hammer, Agnes becomes Angus. Many elements of the plot find modern-day parallels. Our narrator Damon, who quickly acquires the nickname Demon, echoes his counterpart David by starting with his own birth. Then, following the Dickensian model, his mother dies early after marrying a cruel stepfather, and the boy has a series of adventures before he grows into a successful artist. Those who have read the earlier novel will undoubtedly get ahead of the plot and anticipate major events before they occur. But Kingsolver is an artist herself, and her set pieces—a drowning at a mountain stream during a nearly supernatural storm, an unsettling conversation full of double entendres that escape young Demon but register chillingly with the reader—depart sufficiently from Dickens to keep pure predictability at bay. I must confess, however, that for me the departures from Dickens went so far afield that I wondered why she needed to rely so much on the 19th Century masterpiece for her framework in the first place. David Copperfield never gets into teen sex and serious drugs in the way that his modern avatar does. Dickens works abundant social commentary about abuse of impoverished children into his novel, and in turn Kingsolver addresses opioid addiction. But having read Beth Macy’s Dopesick, which describes the ravenous hunger for a high that afflicts so many addicts, I think that Kingsolver makes Demon’s drug use too easy for him to shake. (To be fair, that is not the case with his beloved Dori.) In the end Kingsolver delivers an absorbing and ultimately satisfying read even though—for me—her narrative sags in the second half.

Maybe I’m not raving about Kingsolver sufficiently because I just finished Claire Keegan’s flawless fictional gems, “Foster” (95 pages of generously sized words) and “Small Things Like These” (115 pages of equally readable text). I’ve listed them in the order in which they appeared in print, but I read them in reverse order, and when I finished “Small Things Like These,” I felt the same astonishment, awe, and wonder that I experienced at the end of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” another indelible, painfully beautiful novella. Keegan sets these stories in rural Ireland, her home country, and for my money she ranks right up there with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, and the other stars in the huge Irish constellation of brilliant storytellers. Witness her skill and economy in building a world with these opening lines from “Foster”:

Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards.

In a mere 83 words we’re situated not only in time and space, but we have inferred a sinking understanding of what the father is like. Or take the third sentence in “Small Things Like These”: In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke, which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. There is no way to describe this language as other than poetry. Keegan takes ordinary words (hairy, strings, stout) to describe ordinary events (smoke emerging from chimneys, rivers rising with rainfall) and gets us to see those commonplace occurrences as if for the first time. Note that I’m not saying much about the plots of these stories. That’s deliberate. I’d rather urge people to read them and let each story speak to each reader with maximum surprise. As a bonus, “Small Things Like These” is a Christmas story. I was glad to read it when I did, during Advent, but I know that it would have knocked me over just as powerfully if I had read it on the Fourth of July.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and THE MOSQUITO BOWL

Buzz Bissinger is an anthropologist who disguises himself as a sports writer. Way back in 1990, when he was more formally writing as “H.G. Bissinger” rather than “Buzz,” he published Friday Night Lights, which justifiably earned lots of attention and rave reviews, and which has subsequently been overshadowed by the eponymous television series based on it. I am not qualified to discuss the television series, but I know that it’s been popular as a teen drama as it has fictionalized Bissinger’s nonfiction. I’m more interested in the original book and its subtitle: “A Town, a Team, and a Dream.” Note that the town gets top billing. Bissinger temporarily moved his family to Odessa, Texas, so that he could observe up close the Permian High School football team and the status granted it by the citizens of Odessa. He may have begun the work as a study of small-town football mania, but what he delivered was a profile of a community. It has been more than thirty years since I read Friday Night Lights, but I still remember the overwhelming sadness of reading about young men whose lives most likely peaked during their senior year of high school.

Just a few days ago I finished Bissinger’s The Mosquito Bowl, which also comes with a subtitle: “A Game of Life and Death in World War II.” That subtitle, frankly, is the weakest element of this deftly researched history. The Mosquito Bowl was a football game played by bored Marines on Christmas Eve, 1944, in Guadalcanal. Many of those Marines had been college football players, and from Bissinger’s brief account—he spends perhaps a page on the game itself—they seem to have enjoyed playing to a tie in a rough-and-tumble contest. But nobody died. It wasn’t a game of life and death. It was merely an entertainment for the American troops posted in the South Pacific as they waited for orders into combat. Jay Jennings, reviewing the book in The New York Times, calls the title a “feint,” the perfect word.

No, the death comes later at Okinawa, and here’s where Bissinger’s skill as an empathic journalist rises to the level of artistry. Again, as in Friday Night Lights, we see young men whose lives peaked far too early. But at least in Odessa, Texas, there was life after high school, no matter how dreary that life might have been. In The Mosquito Bowl Bissinger profiles one remarkable young Marine after another so that when we reach the true subject of the book—the protracted and ill-planned invasion of Okinawa—we care intensely about their fates. Those of us who admire Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 recall the absurd competitions for power between General Dreedle and General Peckem and the cavalier indifference of officers sending their subordinates out to die. Until I read Bissinger’s history of the war in the South Pacific, I had always assumed Heller was distorting reality for the sake of satire. But Bissinger shows us that such jostling and elbowing for prestige and control were all too real. The result is a brilliant, tart, nonfiction scream of exasperation at the loss of so many good lives that might have been saved under different leadership.

Queen Elizabeth II and Angela Lansbury

My friend Bud Wright put it most succinctly: 2022 has been a bad year for 96-year-old women.

It’s a commonplace cliché by now for us to reveal how touched we were by the recent death of Queen Elizabeth. Nearly everyone has expressed the same sensation of disorientation at the loss of her reassuring continuity, on the way that she was always there as the monarch of England while so many upsetting events roiled the world and so many other prominent figures came and went. And for those of us with an interest in theater, the same could be said for Angela Lansbury. Both Elizabeth II and Lansbury had started their careers when I was born in late 1951, and both seemed immortal in their abilities to remain effective and celebrated in their work well into old age. I saw each of these women only once in person, but each occasion was indelible, and each for me epitomizes why these two people were so beloved.

In 1976 I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and experiencing what I can now confess, all these decades later, to be the unhappiest year of my academic life. I had gravitated toward schools because they were places where I could be successful. I wasn’t good at much, but I was good at getting good grades. I was one of those types I came to recognize so clearly when I became a teacher myself: a student who knew all the answers on the test but hadn’t actually learned anything of value. In the graduate program at Virginia, I had to face the reality of my mediocrity. There were lots of people in that program who were not only smarter than I was (that was nothing new for me), but who were also better at getting good grades. The department operated on a five-step grading scale. From lowest to highest: Fail, Pass, High Pass (Level 2), High Pass (Level 1), and—the highest possible score—Distinction. As I recall, the Pass level translated to a B on the transcript, and all the others were equivalent to A’s. But in order to proceed to the Ph.D. level, one had to earn Distinctions. I just couldn’t do that. I could get those High Pass Level Ones, but I could never quite reach the level of brilliance and dazzle required to get a Distinction, and I never could figure out why. I had gone to UVA as what they rather ominously called a terminal master’s degree candidate, but I hated thinking that the door to the doctorate was closed to me.

In July of 1976, I was finishing the work for my M.A. and living in a basement apartment on Park Street in Charlottesville, where I was the tenant of an unpleasant landlord whose lovely wife could not offset her husband’s arrogance. It had not been a happy rental. It had not been a happy year. Only a few weeks earlier had I acquired a teaching job for the coming school year after months of searching and no offers. (I had started applying to jobs in the New York City area and had gradually worked my way south; I ended up at a small school in Georgia after months of increasing desperation.) I was a few weeks away from concluding an academic year that had left me shaken, uncertain of myself, and eager to leave Charlottesville forever. Such was my malaise as I walked a couple of miles to the grounds of the University and waited with the hordes of other onlookers for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to emerge from their lunch in the Rotunda. Eventually out they came, and while I know that there were thousands of other people there, in my memory I’m the only person standing on the lawn as the queen walks by, her husband a few steps behind. She smiled so genuinely and so graciously, and for just a moment she seemed to be smiling directly at me, and I packed up that memory and have moved it with me, like a lucky silver dollar or a favorite photograph, wherever I have lived ever since. We never exchanged a word, of course. She was never aware of my existence. But the memory of her visiting the university designed by the man who wrote the document declaring the American colonies to be free of British rule, of her tacit declaration that all was forgiven, that old troubles could give way to new and lasting friendship, gave me a little moment of peace in my troubled heart as I limped my way to the end of a sobering (and, in the long run, enormously beneficial) year of uncertainty and fear that I was never going to be good enough at anything.

Three years later, in 1979, I was enjoying the life of a boarding school teacher, though God knows I still had plenty to learn. I was so ignorant, in fact, that I was merely lukewarm on the topic of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. I thought that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was his best show, and while I respected his lyrics for West Side Story, I considered his music to be atonal, dissonant, unmelodic, and too cerebral. In short, I was an ignorant little philistine who seriously needed a tutorial in musical theater. My student Steve Murray lent me the double soundtrack album of a new musical, Sweeney Todd, which to my untrained ear sounded terrible—loud factory whistles, dark minor-key ballads, operatic arias, thumping sound effects of recently slain bodies. Then Steve set me straight: “It’s funny,” he said, and that was enough to get me interested in seeing the show. Some months later my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin) to see Angela Lansbury, Len Cariou, and the rest of the original cast perform Sweeney Todd, and that was the day that the scales fell from my ears, so to speak, the day when I began to admire and eventually worship Sondheim. That afternoon I learned that it was possible to create a musical thriller that was darkly comic and gratifyingly gory as I watched two musical professionals perform what I still consider to be the single cleverest song in American musical history, “A Little Priest.”

That was the only time I would see Angela Lansbury in person, but that one encounter was enough to make me a lifetime fan. I’ll admit that after a couple of seasons I tired of “Murder, She Wrote,” but I never tired of Lansbury. She could play a lascivious cockney maid in Gaslight when she was still a teenager. She could play Lawrence Harvey’s coldblooded, amoral mother in The Manchurian Candidate when she was only three years older than he. She could create the character of Mame for Jerry Herman’s eponymous musical. She could play a teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And at age 83 she could win her fifth Tony for playing a kooky clairvoyant in Blithe Spirit. She was a deftly flexible performer who mastered stage, movies, and television, and she shared her gifts with the world until the very end.

In 2022 we celebrate the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses, two modernist works that have bedeviled, challenged, touched, and astonished readers for one hundred years. During all but four of those years the world enjoyed the presence of two extraordinary women who—dare I say it?—may not have been as highbrow as Eliot and Joyce but who engendered greater affection and joy than either one of those male geniuses. I don’t begrudge Eliot and Joyce their literary immortality, but we don’t live in posterity. We live in the here and now, and Elizabeth II and Lansbury’s long presence among us was a blessing.

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING and THE BEAR

Hulu has been on quite a roll lately, at least for me. I just finished watching two utterly different series on the streaming platform and thoroughly enjoyed both. If you haven’t yet heard of Only Murders in the Building yet—and surely there can’t be that many of you—then start watching Season 1 right now. There will be no spoilers in this blog, but if you watch the terrific first season, you will appreciate my claim that Season 2 is even better. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez star as occupants of an elegant New York apartment building. When there’s a homicide on the premises, they decide to investigate and air their findings on a podcast called “Only Murders in the Building.” The title originated with Steve Martin, who a decade or so ago imagined three old men who wanted to solve crimes but were too lazy to get out for extended legwork, so they committed to solving only murders in the building where they lived. One of those old men became Selena Gomez, who is neither old nor male, thank God, and whose deadpan delivery perfectly balances Short’s mania and Martin’s dry exasperation.

Lots of stars show up for cameos. Tina Fey and Nathan Lane play crucial supporting roles, as does Jayne Houdyshell (most recently on Broadway as Eulalie Shinn in The Music Man) as the president of the managing board of the building. Paul Rudd has just joined the fun for Season 3, which hasn’t dropped yet. You’ll see Sting, Amy Schumer, Michael Rappaport, Shirley MacLaine, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Ali Stroker, Amy Ryan, and Jackie Hoffman, among many others. (I could have sworn that I also spotted Josh Gad for a one-liner, but I can’t find any corroboration of that.) Perhaps the biggest breakout role comes for James Caverly, who is deaf and who plays Nathan Lane’s deaf son in the series. Caverly recently headlined as Harold Hill in a production of The Music Man featuring both hearing and deaf actors at Olney Theatre in Maryland. But perhaps the biggest scene-stealer is Michael Cyril Creighton, who plays a cat-loving neighbor and who, like everyone else in this show, has flawless comic timing. Honestly, I started laughing just when Nathan Lane stepped into the elevator with Martin Short. It was that rare anticipatory laughter that comes when you are certain that something surprising and hilarious is about to follow, and you are correct.

The Bear, by contrast, takes place in a very gritty Chicago. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy, a renowned young chef who returns home to take over a failing dive left to him by his brother, who died of suicide. The performances in this show are so realistic that I had to remind myself not to hate Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Carmy’s cousin Richie, who is so despicable and obnoxious, at least at first, that I was hoping to see him lapse into a permanent coma. Liza Colón-Zayas is another actor who so thoroughly inhabits her role as a jaded line chef that I found myself forgetting that I was watching fiction, not a documentary. Among the more sympathetic characters, Ayo Edibiri brilliantly plays Sydney, an African-American chef almost straight out of cooking school who is deeply in debt but wants to learn and wants to help Carmy restore and improve his sad little eating establishment. My personal favorite was Abby Elliott as Carmy’s sister, who is grieving a dead brother and worried sick about her living one and his obsessive desire to make the restaurant work. Carmy’s last name, by the way, is Berzatto, from which his nickname, The Bear, is derived. 

You’ll see cameos in The Bear, too. Molly Ringwald pops up briefly as the leader of an Al-Anon meeting. Oliver Platt comes and goes. Joel McHale and Jon Bernthal make the most of their brief appearances. But honestly, the story is so gripping and the acting so good that I never registered these actors until later. I don’t want to say too much. But if you’re tired of the antiseptic kitchens inhabited on network television by Gordon Ramsey and his ilk, then watch The Bear for another look at how professional restaurants operate. You will also find yourself bonding tightly with this struggling group of complex characters. Is there a happy ending for the last episode? I’m not telling, but I will say that there’s going to be a Season 2, and I am pulling hard for the creative team to avoid a sophomore slump.

THE DISPLACEMENTS and THIRTEEN LIVES

This month I’m excited to recommend two brand new works of art that explore the ways human beings respond when cataclysmic weather events threaten to break them. One, Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements, takes place perhaps an hour into the future. The other, Ron Howard’s movie Thirteen Lives, reflects on headlines from a couple of years ago. But whether we’re looking slightly ahead or slightly behind, we’re riveted by what we’re experiencing, and we can’t look away.

Ron Howard has been making very good movies for a very long time, and while he’s certainly respected in Hollywood as a competent crafter of popular entertainment and enjoys the cachet of winning the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for A Beautiful Mind, I still sense that the film world is reluctant to rank him where he belongs, with the very best. I would argue that he deserves a promotion in public perception from Craftsman to Artist. We’ve all grown up with the guy we considered Little Ronnie as Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, and we’re biased. How could a former child actor (don’t forget his turn as Winthrop Paroo in the movie version of The Music Man) who achieved adulthood without any scandals, traumas, dirty secrets, infidelities or enemies possibly qualify as a genius? He has no angst. He has no psychic pain to tap. He’s about to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary with his high school sweetheart. Surely he’s too damn square to qualify as an artist. But he’s a hell of a lot more than a journeyman. Watch Thirteen Lives and then try to name a flaw in that movie.

It was only four years ago that twelve Thai soccer players and their coach were trapped by flash flooding in the Tham Luong Nang Non cave. All of us followed the story. All of us shared the astonishment when a team of divers rescued all thirteen after 18 days.  The story of that rescue, like the story of Apollo 13, which Ron Howard also told in a stirring movie, is one in which history has provided the ultimate spoiler: we know they get back safely. But knowing the outcome actually helps the effect. We’re watching the story unfold, and we can’t help wondering repeatedly How? How did they ever pull this off? Howard takes great big movie stars--to be exact, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen--and manages to make them seem like regular blokes. (That’s a tribute to the actors’ talent as well.) He choreographs hundreds of extras for crowd scenes to give us a sense of the scale and the frenzy of the rescue operation. He elicits beautifully natural performances from the amateur Thai kids playing the soccer team. He employs subtitles to translate Thai dialogue to increase the sense that we’re watching a documentary. And he keeps the pacing just right by not rushing any sequences but not dawdling over days when the action repeats something we’ve already seen. He takes us back to the recent past and appalls us with how much we didn’t know about the impossible odds against this coup of human ingenuity.

Bruce Holsinger, by contrast, takes us into the near future. Holsinger is a professor of English at the University of Virginia who specializes in Medieval literature, the author of such works as Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer and The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. He’s also a real-life literary Indiana Jones as a writer of popular novels, and his latest, The Displacements, suggests that he’s not only an expert in Medieval literature but also in federal government rescue operations, mortgage and banking regulations, the insurance industry, modern American culture, and meteorology. In this marvelous and terrifying novel Holsinger betrays his Medieval expertise only a couple of times, including a swift, brief reference to the tradition of the florilegium, a collection of extracts from other writings, and the novel itself, with its shifting points of view and occasional interruptions from a report filed long after the plot of the book is resolved, could perhaps be a wink at the florilegium tradition. But perhaps the most significant nod to earlier eras in storytelling comes from the name of his protagonist, Daphne, who undergoes a metamorphosis every bit as profound as the one experienced by her namesake in Ovid. I really loved this book. It’s so utterly anchored in our time, and its employment of climate as the catalyst to set the plot in motion feels so creepily at one with the daily news, that I felt none of the distance we tend to provide ourselves when we’re reading about the old wars between humanity and nature. (“To Build a Fire”? I’d never be stupid enough to go out in that weather. Jaws? Don’t go into the water. The Andromeda Strain? Wear a mask.) Holsinger gives us a cast of characters ranging from small children to grandparents and gives to each a rich, distinct inner life. He shows us that there’s such a thing as a character-driven page-turner. Lately I’ve been complaining that every time I settle down to read a book, I fall asleep within twenty minutes. Holsinger has reassured me that there’s nothing wrong with my attention span or my energy. He kept me up late and got me up early so that I could follow the plights of these endearing, exasperating characters.

THE MINUTES and FUN HOME

Those of us who love theater love it for reasons best articulated by Shakespeare in his description of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” Recently I sampled that infinite variety in two vastly different theatrical experiences, a pair of performances that pretty much span the extremes of staged entertainments. In New York at Studio 54, once a famous (notorious?) nightclub and now a Broadway theater, I saw Tracy Letts’s new play, The Minutes, in a sold-out house. A couple of weeks later at the Mill Mountain Theater in Roanoke, Virginia, I saw the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home performed in the small confines of a black box with fewer than half the seats occupied. Oddly enough, perhaps, I enjoyed the local musical more than I did the twisty satire in New York.

At this point allow me to distinguish between going to see a show and going to see a cast. The people flocking to The Music Man at the Winter Garden Theater in New York are going to see a cast. Well over ninety percent of them have seen The Music Man already. Many of them have no doubt participated in a production of The Music Man. But they’re going back to see Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, Jayne Houdyshell and Jefferson Mayes, Shuler Hensley and all those young Broadway stars in the making. For these people the “show” elements are important, of course, and they’re rightfully expecting to enjoy great big Broadway production values, but the costumes and the size of the orchestra are secondary to them. They want to see the stars. They want to see this familiar script performed on the largest scale possible. By contrast, people who are still buying tickets to Hamilton are primarily interested in seeing the show. They don’t care who’s playing Hamilton or Burr on the night when they attend. They want to see the famous musical play called Hamilton, and while they’d be delighted if Leslie Odom and Lin-Manuel Miranda showed up for the performance, they aren’t expecting to see those who originated the roles.

When I went to see The Minutes, I was going to see the cast. And that was a poor reason to go in this season of lingering covid-19. Understudies have never been busier during this pandemic, and I should have known that the odds were long against my seeing the original set of eleven actors on my chosen Tuesday night. Still, I was dismayed when I opened my playbill and saw six of those little inserts they provide to let you know that an understudy would be appearing. Six out of eleven replacements! I did get to see excellent performances from Jessie Mueller and Noah Reid, but there was no Tracy Letts, no Blair Brown, and, perhaps worst of all, no Austin Pendleton, of whom I’ve been a fan ever since he played Moodus in the 1970 movie version of Catch-22. Did I enjoy the play? Absolutely. The realistic set missed no details in recreating the municipal chamber where the council of a small town would meet. The lighting and sound were flawless. And the script itself made me impressively uncomfortable. As Robert Scholes said of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the play starts in realism and ends in allegory, and it turns out to be a deftly devastating indictment of current American culture. Still, despite the fine acting chops of the understudies, I couldn’t help thinking that the originals would have been better. The unexpected cast changes hampered my willing suspension of disbelief.

Now let’s go to the other end of the theatrical universe for a minimalist chamber musical set in a series of locales, most of them evoked by a scant prop or two and some shifts in lighting. Lisa Kron took Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, teamed up with composer Jeanine Tesori, and turned a graphic novel into a graphic musical. At the outset we learn that the Bechdel family lives in a funeral home (the “fun home,” get it?), that both Alison and her father are gay, and that the father is going to die of suicide. It’s not a show for those who go to The Music Man guaranteed of a happy ending. But it’s a hell of a show, and the cast at Mill Mountain was brilliant in rendering it. Nobody in that cast was famous (yet?), but everybody superbly inhabited each role. Without the burden of expecting to see a specific actor in a particular part, I could enjoy the story, the music, the surprises, the delights, the chance to live an experience with endearing characters. There will always be star vehicles, and seeing stars is always going to be fun. But I hope I’ll have enough sense in the future to buy my tickets and take my odysseys for the play, not for the names of the actors in it.

Peter Swanson, Chris Pavone, Douglas Day, and William Faulkner

Summertime, according to Porgy and Bess, is when the livin’ is easy. But that claim sprang from a Manhattan-born White man whose experience with African-American culture in Charleston, South Carolina, was non-existent. As we so well know, the living was anything but easy for Black people living in the South during the summer or any other season. And how—dear reader, please forgive this abrupt, jarring, and utterly forced transition—did summer get associated with easy reading? I’m not the first person to note that summer is a great time to read something long and challenging and old. The next book I read is going to be Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust (aka Sartoris). But reading a good mystery or thriller is essentially like reading an action movie, and I’m happy to indulge during any season of the year. I’ve just finished a couple of good examples.

I first got to know the work of Peter Swanson when a friend gave me his Eight Perfect Murders, an entertainment that Swanson might have written with me in mind: bookstore-owning protagonist, a series of murders based on those found in eight famous Golden-Age mysteries, and deft, controlled writing. Thus when Swanson newest novel, Nine Lives, arrived to good reviews, I bought a copy. Here Swanson limits his Golden Age tribute to one novel, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, in which a group of houseguests gets picked off one at a time by a killer in their midst, but Swanson’s novel sprawls over a broad geographic area unlike Christie’s claustrophobic one-set experiment in whodunit misdirection. As is often the case with books of this genre, including Agatha Christie’s, the greatest fun comes in the beginning and the middle, when we readers learn the terms of the mystery at hand. We keep turning pages in order to learn the solution, of course, but the great revelation for me isn’t nearly as entertaining as the journey to reach it. But Swanson is clever enough to provide one satisfying surprise as denouement.

I had never read anything by Chris Pavone until I opened Two Nights in Lisbon, a thriller enthusiastically recommended by a friend in my chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. Here’s another successful entertainment, even if the title is forgivably misleading. (The bulk of the novel covers three days and two nights in Portugal, but the entire tale takes place over a much longer period.)  A woman wakes up in a hotel in Lisbon and sees that her husband is missing, and I really can’t say much more without spoiling the fun. My favorite parts of this novel were Pavone’s occasional digressive comments about the state of modern culture. He’s an excellent writer, as we would expect from an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and he’s not afraid to drop a shrewd social observation into his pell-mell plot. His eye for detail is dazzling, and he’s able to skewer the privileged and the super-rich as skillfully as Tom Wolfe or, for that matter, Alexander Pope. This man knows the English language and controls it beautifully; so why and how could he and his editors repeatedly allow eyebrows to “raise” rather than rise? I don’t want to be the quibbling pedant here, but anybody who can write this well ought to know the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.

My copy of Flags in the Dust contains an introduction by its editor, Douglas Day, whom I used to see around the English Department at the University of Virginia when I was in graduate school in the mid-1970’s. Day was one of the legends, a Parnassian figure who had just won the National Book Award for his biography of Malcolm Lowry, a handsome, manly man who walked with a limp because of an automobile accident, and a person I regarded with awe from afar. My God, I would think, what an enviable life that man lives. He was Hemingwayesque in his manner and appearance, and it turned out that the parallels were terribly consistent in his multiple marriages and suicide. But I didn’t suspect any of those traumas were in the works when I saw him on the grounds of the university. And now I have begun reading his edition of Faulkner’s third novel, the first to be set in Yoknapatawpha County, the first in which Faulkner found his milieu and his voice.  So far it’s knotty, disorienting, and, by today’s standards, unbelievably racist. But before you write Faulkner off as another Southern bigot, read Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Faulkner lived among people who perpetuated the Lost Cause myth, but he could never bring himself buy into it. Absalom, Absalom appeared in 1936, the same year as Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell sold millions of more books than Faulkner did, but today it’s the Faulkner novel that most wrenchingly presents the toxic culture of racism in the American South. Faulkner would not pretend that the living was ever easy for Black people in his part of the world.

HISTORICAL Fiction and Historical FICTION

Many years ago I was lucky to meet the late Nigel Tranter, a beloved and prolific Scottish author whose work remains known to relatively few readers in the United States. That’s a pity, because the man knew how to hook a reader and keep that reader turning the pages. It was Nigel who made me aware of the two types of historical fiction. His type was to write about actual historical figures and actual historical events. He invented dialogue and incidental details of daily life, but the casts of his books really lived, even if not with the precise thoughts and words that Nigel attributed to them. We might call Nigel’s form historical fiction, with the emphasis on the adjective; his characters and plots were true to history.  The second type was of the sort practiced by his friend Dorothy Dunnett, who created fictional protagonists and dropped them into selected historical eras. Let’s call her type historical fiction, with the emphasis on the noun. She imagined characters and used literary photoshopping to place them into actual events. I’m not planning to engage in a debate over which type is better artistically or more difficult to pull off successfully. I’m simply amazed that so many people manage to deliver so many superb novels set in eras before they were born. I don’t know how they do it.

Take, for example, Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink, which I mentioned in last month’s posting but never discussed. Kadish presents two interlocking tales. The first is of Ester Velasquez, a Portuguese Jew who arrives in London in the mid-17th Century and, through unusual circumstances, becomes a scribe for a blind rabbi. Ester is literate, curious, and ferociously intelligent, and she uses the rabbi’s generosity and blindness to advance her education and literary output. The second plot involves Helen Watt, an aging English scholar also of ferocious intelligence, and Aaron Levy, a cocky young American graduate student who initially dislikes but comes to love Helen as his partner in researching the manuscripts left behind by Ester. Theater fans may sense a parallel with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which for my money is the finest play written in English in the 20th Century—okay, okay, we can argue about that—wherein modern-day scholars try to solve the mystery of events at a stately English home two centuries earlier. We in the audience get to see the actual events in the past, and then we watch the modern-day characters misinterpret the documents left behind. Stoppard’s play is the only one I know that is simultaneously a comedy and a tragedy, the only one daring enough to examine the poetry of Lord Byron next to a discussion of fractal geometry and chaos theory, the only one to invite a debate over the claims of classicism and romanticism. Kadish’s novel, while not as antic or comic as Stoppard’s play in skewering academic politics, nevertheless also successfully and deftly marries intellectual intensity to emotional punch. This book allowed me to eavesdrop on conversations among people much smarter than I, and it turned out to be an enriching experience, one simultaneously intellectual and emotional.

Likewise I also experienced that enlargement of perspective in a very different historical novel, James Kestrel’s Five Decembers, which I chose to read because it recently won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel of 2021. The jacket of this novel evokes tawdry pulp paperbacks from the 1940’s: a naked woman sitting on a bed covers herself with a sheet while a naked man holding a gun looks out the window at a sky full of warplanes. Yikes! Not my kind of thing! Except that the novel inside the jacket grabbed me by my lapels and refused to let go until I eagerly consumed every word. Kestrel’s historical novel, like Kadish’s, is of the Dorothy Dunnett type, with fictional characters dropped among actual historical events. His protagonist, Joe McGrady, is a young detective in Hawaii asked to investigate a homicide in the late fall of 1941, just a few days before December 7. Here Kestrel employs a favorite device of the historical novelist: creating tension by starting a story on the eve of a cataclysmic event unforeseen by the characters but already known to the reader. (Robert Harris uses this trick to great effect in his fine novel Pompeii, which opens two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.) McGrady in many ways checks all the boxes for the hardboiled detective in 1940’s noir. He’s tough, smart, flawed, principled, and dogged. Kestrel writes with the terseness of Hemingway or James M. Cain, but this novel is no pastiche. In Kestrel’s talented hands we readers time-travel to World War II, to Hawaii and to Asia, to a murder mystery and a romance, to a series of violent episodes and interludes of reflection and heartbreak. Mr. Kestrel—whose name is a nom de plume—deserves his award. And I say that as one who also admired one of the other nominees for the prize, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, which I discussed in an earlier posting. (In a different context, I also talk about Five Decembers on the “Something is Going to Happen” blog managed by Janet Hutchings.)

I am no poet, and so I admire the work of poets with awe. I am no historian, nor am I a patient researcher, and so I also admire the work of historical novelists with gratitude for their willingness to spend the time and the energy to bring us the past with such intense emotional pleasure. Am I going to try it myself one day? I’m urging myself to say yes.

Karen Abbott (Abbott Kahler) and Oliver Roeder

This month’s posting is going to be brief. I’ve spent the bulk of the month writing a story for a contest and reading Rachel Kadish’s astonishing novel The Weight of Ink, and I’m not going to discuss either one today. Instead I’m going to focus on a couple of highly entertaining and quite educational works of nonfiction.

The first is The Ghosts of Eden Park, a work of popular history by Karen Abbott, a scrupulous researcher and a teller of tales skillful enough to rival Erik Larsen. I’m calling the author Karen Abbott because that’s the name on her book, but if you Google her, you will learn that she recently changed her name to Abbott Kahler for reasons she explains quite clearly on her website. Ghosts of Eden Park resurrects the once-infamous, now forgotten George Remus, known in his day as the King of the Bootleggers, and clearly a model for Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. (Abbott uses lines from The Great Gatsby as section titles in her book.) In telling this sordid tale and documenting all of it with over 70 pages of notes, Abbott reintroduces the modern reader to Prohibition and its concomitant corruption. George Remus, the central figure around whom so many other zanies orbit, could have been a character out of a noir by James M. Cain: the crafty crook who believes he’s invincible until he’s undone by a femme fatale. In this case, the femme was his wife.  

The second title I want to mention is Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games, which the jacket describes as “a group biography of seven enduring and beloved games,” and which delivers delightfully on that promise. Roeder gives us the history, the rules, the reigning human champions, and the computer programmers who attempt to “solve” each of these games, in this order: Checkers, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Whether you have played these games or not—and I would suspect that most Americans have played Checkers and that few Americans have played Go—you will learn a lot and will enjoy Roeder’s lively reporting. Despite the claim on the jacket that the book is a biography of games, Roeder himself calls it “A Human History,” and while it’s unlikely that this work will end up as the central text in an anthropology class, Roeder finds plenty of highly skilled experts whose love for and obsession with each game gives each chapter its pulse.  

Happy reading.

1972 and 2022

My mother no longer drives, but she still uses her driver’s license as a form of identification. Yesterday the freshly renewed license came in the mail, and I must say that such a potentially banal event produced a lot of awe. The new license is good until July 28, 2024—my mom’s 100th birthday. She seemed genuinely surprised to consider that she was only a couple of years away from that anniversary, and I understood her surprise. The strange quality of aging—of the passage of time in general—is that the numbers don’t match up to the lived experience. Has it been only two years since covid closed down our country? It seems like much longer. Has it been 50 years since I was living in that college fraternity house? It seems so much shorter. As everyone knows, time is accordion-like in its ability to expand and contract. But when I consider that I’ve been an adult for half a century, my memories of fifty years ago seem as strange and foreign as the events of a historical novel.

No one knew it at the time, but 1972 was the last full year of the 1960’s, which began in 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I know, I know. If you look at the calendar, the Sixties stretch from 1960 to 1969. But when we talk about the Sixties, we think of war protests, long hair, bra- or draftcard-burning, race riots, Vietnam, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Woodstock, and the awful deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Before JFK died, we had beatniks, but not hippies; we had Beach Boys singing about a teen rebel who drove to the hamburger stand instead of the library, not the Doors churning up the haunting request to light their fire; we danced to (or mocked) the Twist, not the Jerk. After the Kennedy assassination, the country experienced a decade of turmoil and internal division, very much like the era in which we live now, and the decade didn’t end until 1973, when an OPEC oil embargo triggered inflation and lines at the gasoline pumps, when the Nixon administration signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam (a treaty that both sides ignored, but that still indicated a winding down of the war), when the draft ended, and when the country reached an uneasy internal peace as it reckoned with the shock of learning that petroleum-exporting countries could significantly change our way of life.

Those twelve months of 1972 straddled my sophomore and junior years of college. In 1972 we would drive down the road from Lexington to Hollins or Mary Baldwin or Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) or Sweet Briar—round trips of between 75 and 110 miles—and the three passengers in the car would give the driver a quarter each to cover the cost of the gasoline. In 1972 George Orwell’s 1984 was still about an imagined future, as was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Those of us who lived as young adults in 1972 recall that windows in cars literally had to be rolled up, that telephone receivers were literally hung up to end a call, that typing occurred on manual typewriters, that carbon copies were literally made with carbon paper, that movies were literally on film, and that computers were gigantic machines the size of refrigerators that required hundreds of perforated cards or massive rolls of tape to operate. In 1972 we used flash bulbs for photographs and record players that allowed us to stack several albums on top of one another and pay phones that required dialing 0 for an operator before we could make a long-distance call. In 1972 we had four television networks, though no one paid much attention to the brand-new PBS, and in order to watch a show, we had to be in front of the set at a specific time on a specific day. In 1972 I voted in my first Presidential election, and I’m still embarrassed that my very first vote went to Richard Nixon (though, to be fair, I was not alone). In 1972 the year 2022 was inconceivable to me, and fifty years sounded like an impossibly long time. Now fifty years seems so short. Could so much change really occur in only half a century?

I’m astonished at how lucky I’ve been to live through this brief segment of human history, to witness Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, to overlap lifespans with the likes of William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Lorraine Hansberry, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But then I think about my mother, approaching her centennial, who saw the discovery of penicillin and the polio vaccine, the Great Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the arrival of television. Is it any wonder that she has trouble keeping her chronology straight from day to day? She has so much to remember. William Faulkner, in “A Rose for Emily,” writes of the elderly as those “to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches.” Mom is moving into that meadow now, where the living and the dead mingle and converse, and watching her, I recall her 1972 iteration, the savvy, visionary, self-reliant woman who was gifted in architecture, accounting, and raising a family, among her many skills. As I muse about centuries and half-centuries, I realize that there’s no such thing as a long life. It’s just that some lives are shorter than others.  

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (unabridged novel and 2002 movie)

            My old friend Johnny Anderson, a man of excellent taste, reported recently that he’d just finished reading for his book club the unabridged text of Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. I was impressed by both his accomplishment and the ambition of his book club, and I decided that a long 19th Century classic was just what I needed to pass the winter. When I used to teach in boarding school, the trick to getting happily through the cold months for both students and teachers was to become as busy as possible. I would take on the directing of plays or musicals in addition to my regular winter classes, and thereafter the span between Thanksgiving and spring break would zip along. Now, after some weeks of pleasantly sinking into 1243 pages of Robin Buss’s eloquent translation for Penguin Classics, I have reluctantly emerged, grateful for the reading tip from my friend Johnny, and indebted forever to Alexander Dumas, whose work I had underestimated and dismissed as children’s fare. As Humphrey Bogart said in a different context, I was misinformed.

            In a scholarly but accessible introduction to the edition I was reading, Robin Buss addresses immediately the mistaken assumption that Dumas is for kids. As Buss so deftly notes, “there are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides, an extended scene of torture and execution, drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism, a display of the author’s classical learning and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diet of the Italians, [and] the effects of hashish.” I could add that Dumas manages to sustain a narrative that comprises several distinct genres, including swashbuckling romance, satirical social commentary, slapstick comedy, gothic melodrama, murder mystery, Arabian-nights fantasy, religious conversion, more than one tragic love story, coming-of-age, and psychological realism. 

Furthermore, I registered how frequently other writers have plundered Dumas’s novel for devices that are now commonplace, how Edmond Dantès blazes the path for so many imitators. He escapes from the Chateau D’If by posing as the corpse of another prisoner. Think of Hannibal Lector’s ruse of replacing himself with the body of a dead policeman to escape confinement, or of Michael Chabon’s Joe Kavalier riding out of Nazi territory inside a coffin.  Dantès, with his immense wealth, mastery of disguise, and ability to defeat any foe with any weapon, surely supplies the template for Bruce Wayne as Batman and all those other superheroes whose secret identities conceal their unlimited reach. Dumas was not the first to depend on revenge as a driver of the plot—his occasional allusions to Hamlet acknowledge as much—but the revenge comes with misgivings, regrets, changes of heart, and accrued wisdom, just as it does in so many modern tales of injustice rectified, from The Sting to the real-life stories of Nelson Mandela and Louis Zamperini, two men who lived a version of Dantès’s prison nightmare, rejected revenge altogether, and moved directly into forgiveness.

It’s easy to understand why so many of us might have thought of this novel as a mere entertainment.  A story this grand would naturally appeal to adaptors for stage and screen, and yet, ironically, all adaptations must omit so much of what makes the novel so rich. According to Wikipedia, so far the world has seen thirteen film adaptations either for movie theaters or television. After I finished the book and gave myself a couple of days for it to settle in my memory, I rented the 2002 screen version written by Jay Wolpert, who in a sad coincidence died just over a month ago, in January of 2022. As demanded by Hollywood, Wolpert gives us a happier ending than Dumas does, but he, too, manages to include a chance for Dantès to grow out of his furious quest for vengeance and to replace rage with love.  I’ll avoid spoilers, but I will salute Wolpert for coming up with an ingenious explanation for why Mercedes is so quick to marry Fernand and for making the inevitable Hollywood ending true to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the novel.

I understand now why James Joyce includes a moment when Stephen Dedalus fancies himself an avatar of Edmond Dantès in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and why James O’Neill, father of the playwright Eugene, spent much of his career playing the Count onstage and even in a silent movie: this character appeals to both the romantic excess of youth and the rueful self-reflection of middle age. Despite a lengthy interlude when he stops being a character and becomes a superhuman incarnation of vengeance, Dantès is, in the end, a sympathetically dynamic figure, and by the end of his story, when he realizes that his urge for revenge was petty and insufficient, he accepts an ending that is not so much happy as it is right and true. He settles for the best he can do, and the mixture of sadness and satisfaction we feel at that conclusion surely traces its source to our own grudging understanding that life does not follow the script we write for ourselves in childhood.

WHISPER HOUSE and THE MUSIC MAN

Recently I attended previews for two musicals in New York, enjoyed both, and appreciated the chance to see two such vastly different productions. One was an intimate chamber piece from Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow, Whisper House, performed by the Civilians at the 59E59 Theaters off-Broadway. The other was the huge, splashy revival of The Music Man, quite literally on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater.  Interestingly enough, the revival of the old standard seemed fresher than the brand spanking new chamber musical.

Whisper House felt like a revival of an older play from the late 1940’s or 50’s. During World War II a boy must live with his prickly, unmarried aunt at a remote lighthouse in Maine after his father dies in combat and his mother requires hospitalization. The aunt employs a Japanese man as her helper, and the local sheriff is determined to comply with recent laws requiring the internment of Japanese citizens. The “whispering” of the title comes from a couple of malevolent ghosts, whose fate, we learn, is related to the lives of the aunt and the boy’s late father. It’s a melodrama with flawless performances from the cast, an effectively evocative set, and—for me, anyway—a satisfying experience of returning to live theater. But as I said to one of my companions, the material was awfully familiar, and the lyrics sounded very much pre-Sondheim: predictable, plodding, and too frequently banal.

Down the street The Music Man also offered some notable lyrics, particularly those that have been tweaked from the originals. Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman wrote new words for “Shipoopi,” and insiders claim that Sutton Foster’s improved “My White Knight” comes out of interpolations originally added by Barbara Cook. Whatever the source, the new “My White Knight” pushes the show along nicely when in the past it brought the action to a dull pause. Hugh Jackman headlines as Harold Hill, and he really is the greatest showman, rarely offstage and always at high energy. But Sutton Foster unsurprisingly proves to be Jackman’s equal as Marian, and the dazzling supporting cast—Jane Houdyshell, Jefferson Mays, Shuler Hensley, and legions of talented singers and dancers—provides continuous delight. The boy playing Winthrop, Benjamin Pajak, is a star on the rise. (Keep this kid healthy, folks. He could be the next Tom Holland.) I attended with the four women who played the “Pick a Little” ladies in the Woodberry Forest School production of the show in 2020, and we were surrounded by others who had some connection with The Music Man. Jerry Zaks, the 75-year-old director, did more than simply dust off a museum piece for the tourist crowd. This production reconsiders every syllable, every note, every dance break, and makes all of them new.

In the end what struck me about both productions was the sustained generosity of everyone involved. With the temperature officially at 18 degrees but with wind chills driving it down to zero, a devoted staff member stood outside the 59E59 Theater to check our vaccination status and our i.d.’s. Ushers gave N95 masks to audience members on the front row. We had the same scrupulous screening before we could enter the Winter Garden. Everyone in both audiences wore masks throughout the shows. And the casts worked their hardest to reward our attendance. Despite having just come off covid infections, both Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman delivered unrestrained star turns at our matinee and then came back that evening to do the same for another audience.  And what did the audience give back? Lively entrance applause, audible signals of delight throughout the action, and roars of approval during a long standing ovation. For too few delirious moments there, I was part of a group that was unanimously, unabashedly happy.  

Stephen Sondheim and Antony Sher

The week between November 26 and December 2, 2021, was catastrophic for the theater community. Stephen Sondheim died just after Thanksgiving, and Antony Sher followed six days later. In many ways these two figures stood at opposite boundaries of the theatrical universe. Sondheim dominated musicals as an innovator and stunning lyricist; Sher was a classical actor renowned for his Shakespearean roles and his occasional appearances in the movies and on television. They both performed at the peak of their profession. They both left hordes of admirers to recall their work. I am one of those admirers.

At first I didn’t get Sondheim. I was one of those people who complained that his tunes weren’t hummable. (Sondheim responded to those of us with tin ears in a song called “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along.) In those early days I thought he should have stuck to writing lyrics and left the music to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, his collaborators on West Side Story and Gypsy, respectively, and I considered his A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to be his best work. Then I started to develop some taste. One day in 1978 my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to what was then the Uris Theater to see Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury perform Sweeney Todd, and I emerged from the theater gobsmacked. The man had written a musical thriller, a piece that was both horrifying and shamefully funny. If he had given us nothing but “A Little Priest,” Sondheim would deserve canonization on Broadway, but of course he bequeathed us much, much more.

I got to the Kennedy Center in 2001 for three of the six shows in the Sondheim Celebration, and it was there, during Company, that I first witnessed what it meant to stop the show. At the end of one number—I can’t recall which—the audience clapped and cheered and wouldn’t cease; the applause just went on and on, and the show perforce had to stop until the house quieted. It was there that I first saw A Little Night Music and its intricate, dazzling series of tours de force, including “Now/Later/Soon,” three intertwining songs sung by three actors simultaneously, and “A Weekend in the Country,” which kept building from solo to duet to trio to quartet to quintet to chorus. Not everything he tried was commercially successful. I got to watch a few rehearsals for Road Show at the Public Theater in 2008, and I was put off by both the pretentiousness of the director and the thinness of the material. But I admired Sondheim for continuing to tinker with material that didn’t work, for always pushing himself, for never resting on those extensive laurels. Fifty years after Richard Wilbur published “The Death of a Toad,” the poet mused on whether he should change the word “steered” to “veered.” One single word, half a century later, was still on the writer’s mind. That was how Sondheim lived as well, forever looking forward, but never forgetting the blemishes that he wanted to correct.

Antony Sher was also a creator. He wrote journals, memoirs, and novels, and he brought the world’s most famous fictional personalities—I’m talking about the characters in Shakespeare’s plays—into startlingly fresh form on the stage.  He was not a conventionally handsome actor; it would be hard to imagine him as Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific. But he was a ferociously intelligent one, and he gave every ounce of energy to every role he created. I saw him first in July of 1982 in Stratford, England, on one of the greatest days I’ve ever spent in a theater. That afternoon I watched Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, a pleasant, conventional rendering of the play that turned out to be a nice warmup act for the headliner that evening: King Lear directed by Adrian Noble with Michael Gambon in the title role and Antony Sher as the Fool. It was an all-star cast in a jaw-dropping production: Jenny Agutter as a beautiful, sadistic Regan; Malcolm Storry as a tall, stoic Kent; Jonathan Hyde as a patrician Edgar; David Bradley as Albany. But Sher stole the show as a manic, raw-egg-eating music-hall clown who ended up dying onstage when a mad Lear accidentally stabbed him. Later, in 1985, I took my parents and sister to see Sher play Richard III at the Barbican in London. That was the role that made him a star, a spidery Richard on crutches with a grotesque prosthetic hump on his back that, at one point, was bare to the audience. Sher wrote his first book about the experience, Year of the King, which he followed with Year of the Fat Knight (about playing Falstaff) and Year of the Mad King, describing his return to Lear to play the king himself. He died too young at age 72, as did Sondheim at 91, But, damn, they left behind a huge pair of comet tails blazing across the boards.