When They Were The Top

There's a review in a right-wing magazine of a new book on American musicals that makes a couple of interesting factual assertions.  I believe the first one: the last song from a musical to become "an enduring popular hit" was "Send in the Clowns," written in 1973.

I believe it because I remember when songs from musicals were a much more important part of popular culture, and were regularly among the hit songs of a given year.  This phenomenon even survived the early years of rock & roll, into the early 1960s.  "Send in the Clowns" might well have been the last of these, especially to be recorded by artists not associated with the musical itself.  Judy Collins for example famously recorded this Sondheim song.  And it became such a part of the culture that nearly 20 years later a Star Trek Next Generation episode could have a 24th century character quip, "send in the clones."

The second assertion however is this: "But big-budget musical comedy has been in increasingly steep decline since the 1970s, and 10 long years have gone by since The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the last homegrown musical to be wholeheartedly embraced by audiences and critics alike, made it to Broadway."

The writer, Terry Teachout, does mention the trend to what he calls "commodity musicals" based on movies etc. as well as small-scale musicals.  Since many of these are proclaimed "hits" I had assumed they were comparatively successful in an historical sense.  So if that was the most recent big hit, I'm surprised.  On the other hand, if it is true, I'm surprised only that I have a lot of company in preferring some of the older musicals to most of the newer ones.  Then again, I enjoy musical comedy movies most of all--which Teachout suggests persuasively is an entirely different form.

In any case, the book under review sounds interesting: American Musicals is simply a two volume collection of the scripts of 16 musicals between 1927 and 1969--from the beginning through the golden age.

Moreover these are the scripts of shows as audiences saw them on opening night--which in many cases are not the same as the versions seen today on the North Coast and elsewhere.  These unabridged scripts contain, for example, racially charged dialogue by today's standards, but Teachout claims that they also contain writing that suggests why these shows worked so well on stage.

Scripts are sometimes changed to substitute contemporary references for obsolete ones, but also in dumbed down touring versions, for schools and non-urban audiences etc.  It's a reminder that shows hereabouts may not be lacking just the lavish Broadway staging of the originals.

Teachout mentions that the classic American musicals were almost always "sunny in tone" and had happy endings.  That certainly was one of the changes from Sondheim on, an apparent reaction against the artificiality of the musical comedy.  While the form may have been expanded, it may also have become something else.  Maybe there are no musical comedies anymore.  As for their relation to real life,  I think increasingly of what British TV writer Russell T Davies remarked, that only the arts can give us comedy.  If we want tragedy, we've got real life for that.

Salmon Is Everything: Event and Book

I attended the reading at Northtown Books by members of the Klamath Theatre Project on Friday evening.  Marlon Sherman, Suzanne Burcell and Theresa May talked about how the project came about, and Mary Campbell (member of the original cast) and co-director Jean O'Hara read excerpts from the play.

From Marlon Sherman and Suzanne Burcell (Karuk), I was impressed by how open they were to the idea in the beginning, which was suggested by Theresa May, a new member of the HSU theatre faculty at the time, in response to the massive fish kill on the Klamath in 2002.  They were instrumental in recruiting Native students, conspicuously absent (then and much of the time since) from HSU theatre.  These students went back to their Karuk, Yurok and Hupa families and gathered relevant stories.

In reading excerpts from her chapter in the book, Suzanne Burcell described the rebellious shock of Native students to the idea that the point of view of competitors for Klamath water, the farmers and ranchers upriver, had to be represented.  She also noted with humor how Teresa May reacted to her suggestion that they also had to include the point of view of the fish.

The first part of the book describes the process of developing the script.  I also attended the first reading of the script in progress, and confess I didn't see how a theatre piece was going to emerge from it.  But according to the book, this reading inspired more people to come forward with personal and family stories, and these provided the human and cultural dimensions to the political and scientific that made the moment so alive on stage.

I reproduced my immediate response to that first production in the post below.  Since I've had cause recently to reflect on my nine years of writing about North Coast theatre, I would still place the 2006 HSU production of Salmon Is Everything near the top of my theatre experiences here.  For one thing, it was the most alive, especially in the emotional connection between those on stage and those in the audience.  And it meant something.  Certainly it spoke at the time to several areas of my experience here--working for Seventh Generation Fund, writing the script for the environmental video Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact which was cited in at least one forest court case, and writing the grant for the Native Performance Fund, still going now as the Native Art Fund. Even beyond the textures represented by these and other experiences, as a live theatre event it was singular in my experience here.

The heart of the book is the script itself.  Jean O'Hara describes touring it to Hupa, Yurok and Karuk communities.  In 2011 it got a full production at the University of Oregon, where Theresa May now teaches.  Her own chapter details what worked and what didn't in the process of creating the play, for she means this book to be a kind of guide to community-developed theatre.  A foreword by Gordon Bettles provides some historical context, and here and elsewhere in the book there are updates on what has happened since.

The book is Salmon Is Everything: Community-Based Theatre in the Klamath Watershed by Theresa May with Suzanne Burcell, Kathleen McCovey and Jean O'Hara, published by Oregon State University Press in their First Peoples series.  It's at Northtown Books and presumably other booksellers.

A Modest Tutorial

I don't have advanced degrees in any aspect of theatre, and scant experience in productions. But neither does William Goldman, who got his education and experience in writing. I have long admired his book on Hollywood and screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade, but I had never read his book on a year of Broadway theatre (1967-68) called The Season. Until about a month ago.

Like Adventures, it's fun to read, well-crafted and opinionated. And again, I don't agree with all his opinions, but there was one observation that jumped out at me that I agreed with completely--because I had said exactly the same thing in this 2009-10 season on the North Coast.

Goldman was writing about the staging of a musical that failed, directed by a famous name with major credentials. Goldman complained that "he had the bulk of the action taking place on stage at a distance far removed from the audience, making the show, in a musical-comedy sense, all but invisible."

I said something like that, but here's the part that's nearly word-for-word: "Most musicals need to be brightly lit and played as close to the footlights as possible so that the audience can see and hear them."

That just makes sense, it's just extrapolation, as well as (I would guess) veteran lore. When I said it, I was just stared at as if speaking an alien language. Goldman got a different response, or at least he made one up, with the story about an encounter with three theatregoers after the show, that follows the above observation:

"Well, it's not as bad as they say," the first said. The second said, "I liked that patriotic number a lot." A man walking out ahead of them turned and said, "May I tell you why you liked that number?" The ladies nodded.

"Because it was done down by the footlights. You could see it."

"Yes!" all three ladies said, and they all but jumped up in the air on the word.

Since I was the man walking out ahead of them, I can swear to the veracity of the anecdote.

I suspect that part of why such observations seem alien is that they basically come from the experience of being in the audience, a point of view that both academics and professionals can too easily forget.

There are other such simple rules, violated at the peril of everything else that goes into a production. For example, the David Letterman rule: if you want the audience to laugh, keep the theatre temperature cool. People don't laugh when they're too warm and drowsy. (However, after attending an outdoor performance one cold clear night last week I would add the corollary, but not too cold. It's hard for people to laugh when their teeth are clenched.)

People stare at me when I mention this as well. But all the hard work, the actors' sweat, the creative blocking, the expensive scenery, the ads and the opening night buffet--they all depend on people laughing, and ventilation is dangerous to ignore.

Here's another Old School comedy rule: make sure there's a Laugher in the audience. Somebody who laughs out loud. It's not just that laughter is infectious, but that the audience needs permission to laugh. Especially these days, when the appropriate response to plays isn't always clear, and life is complicated--people may worry if they laugh at the wrong stuff, they will either embarass themselves or offend someone. So whenever possible, don't leave it to chance. Get a Laugher.

There was a great Laugher behind me at the preview of Glorious! at Redwood Curtain. In fact she was so loud that she nearly deafened me. That she was an actress, and the vocal coach of the leading lady, doesn't matter. The time to be embarrassed is after the show is a success, because people laughed. Assuming of course that it's funny (something else that was missing at that outdoor show.)

Of course, you don't have to listen to me. Or Bill Goldman. But don't say we didn't warn you.

Books: Theatre Craft

Theatre Craft: A Director's Companion from A to Z
by John Caird
Faber & Faber paperback, 797 pages

Born in Canada and with his first theatrical experience there, John Caird has directed extensively in the UK as well as in Japan and Sweden: classics with the Royal Shakespeare Company, musicals, television, pretty much the gamut. He's done adaptations, fringe theatre, opera, World Wildlife Fund fundraisers. So he knows the territory.

And indeed, this book is organized as an A to Z guide (though it gives out at W; "there must be dozens of really good Zoroastrian theatre companies but I've never seen their work.") Caird is witty and he may be wise, but I'm not sure how useful this book really can be, organized in this way. I can see a young director looking up "Design and Designers," but when stumped, who is likely to look up the six pages on "Denouement?"

Even the "Design and Designers" pages may have limited value, in that they seem to describe a particular kind of theatrical organization, probably not applicable to every kind everywhere. I suspect a lot of this will be lost on American directors, and certainly on theatres that don't count the proper use of animals on stage as one of their typical problems.

But there are categories of more universal usefulness, from "Rehearsing a Play " and "scrims" to "Verse and Verse Speaking." The usefulness of these depend on what you already know, and what his writing suggests to you. They are in no way definitive. Some entries, like "Pace and Rhythm," are pathetically short and not necessarily to the point. Were I directing, I would not depend on this book, though I might consult it.

The cover begins with a blurb by the great Judi Dench: "This book is written with such humour and common sense that I may have to carry it around with me all the time." Well, Dame Judi may be bossing James Bond around these days, but she probably still would require an assistant to carry this huge volume, even in paperback. It's a badly made book to boot--hard to hold, hard to keep open, but it feels flimsy enough that to really crack it open might break the binding. That makes it physically difficult to simply read this book, for pleasure as well as practical advice. Of course, there is the humour.

The Tainted Muse

A new book by Robert Brustein explores prejudices in Shakespeare, reviewed below.

Shakespeare With Prejudice

The Tainted Muse: Prejudice and Presumption in Shakespeare's Works and Times
by Robert Brustein
280 Pages
Yale University Press

Robert Brustein is one of the most familiar names of authority in American theatre. He is perhaps most widely known as a critic and a public speaker, but within theatre he is recognized as the founding director of the Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale and the American Repertory Theatre near Harvard. He has also written and adapted plays, and is now officially enshrined in the Theatre Hall of Fame.

This book focuses on an uncomfortable area of surmise: the evidence for various gender, racial and ethnic prejudices in the plays of William Shakespeare. Some are obvious and often discussed: the Jewish Shylock, the Blackamoor Othello, the shrew that is tamed. Others that Brustein emphasizes are not so widely held: he considers Hamlet as drenched in misogyny, for example.

Brustein focuses on six prejudices: misogyny (or the hatred women), dislike of womanish men ("effemiphobia"), the correlative prejudice in favor of macho men, a political prejudice against "mobocracy" and for monarchy, racial prejudice and religious prejudice.

Though Brustein recognizes that prejudices and how they are seen to be expressed is a matter of interpretation that changes according to the times, he is using current standards, especially as applied by today's cultural/political theorists. (He is however, mercifully a better writer.) He traces Shakespeare's exploration of these themes through various characters, and finds (at least to his satisfaction) lines of development in the playwright's attitudes.

All in all, the salient effect of this book may be to counteract the too easy enthusiasm for Shakespeare as a mirror of whatever the current attitudes are. On the other hand, since we are such an either/or society, such sweeping charges of prejudices could taint readings and discourage productions--particularly by producers sensitive to political pressure groups and the various loudmouths who can get pretty vicious.

In fact this does seem the book of a scholar but mostly a producer, who has faced such controversies when mounting these plays. Less obvious is the approach of the playwright, who does things for any number of reasons having more to do with the internal dynamics of the play--as well as the players, the playhouse, the public and so on.

So while I can take Brustein's interpretations into account (though I don't agree with them all by any means) I see them as interpretations from a particular point of view, at a particular time. I haven't lived quite as long as Brustein, but even I have seen the meaning imputed to various words and actions change over the years. Still, a contemporary production should face these issues without becoming overwhelmed or especially defined by them. This book can be a useful tool to that end.

But it's only one point of view. Brustein is mostly pretty literal. He doesn't deal with the symbolisms and mechanisms of the Elizabethan theatre in the way that, say, Northrop Frye does. He acknowledges that in his terms, Shakespeare infused characters like Othello and Shylock with a humanity than other authors of his time did not. But my guess is that Shakespeare the playwright also likely had other considerations beyond such statements.

So this book goes on my Shakespeare shelf, to be consulted when I'm seeing one of these plays, along with studies that take quite different approaches.

The Man for All Musicals

Generally speaking I'm not a fan of stage musicals, or their movie versions. The music of some of the old and much loved composers just makes me cringe, and I can't stand the excess and mostly phony sentimentality of the stories. The technical bombast and bizarre themes as well as the music of many newer musical don't thrill me either. As a reviewer, I try to avoid the ones I know I loathe, when I can. Why burden readers and be preemptively unfair to the production by clouding things with my own bad mood?

Yet there are some movie musicals I greatly admire, and musical movies that are among my absolute favorite films to watch repeatedly. I love the Beatles movies, and I'm an absolute sucker for The Glenn Miller Story. I caught it on TCM the other night and fell for it again--as phony a biography as it is. The previous night I caught the last half of The Gay Divorcee, one of the first Astaire-Rogers movies. Fred Astaire movie musicals are my Great Exceptions. They always provide delight, and at times they've been enthralling.

Joseph Epstein's new book on Fred Astaire (Yale University Press) suggests why it's possible for me to admire the Astaire musicals so much, while remaining unmoved by most other musicals. It's because these movies are together a singular phenomenon, in that they brought together talents that were each exceptional. "Nobody has ever been able to explain the clustering of talent that shows up at certain points in history," Epstein writes, but it happened with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, especially because of the composers who wrote especially for them (or really, for him): Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin and Jerome Kern. Together they did some of their best work. The list of classic songs that Astaire introduced is astonishingly long--"Night and Day," "The Way You Look Tonight," "They All Laughed," "Top Hat," "Let's Face the Music and Dance," etc as well as lesser songs that are still brilliant, like "I'd Rather Lead a Band." And then it was over--"bang!, pretty much vanishing forever."

Clustering is one thing, synergy is another. Porter and the Gershwins in particular recognized that Astaire's voice and singing style were perfect for their songs, and they wrote--wrote better, in fact--with that in mind. There were other fruitful coincidences: movie technology was finally up to the task of creating sparkling worlds of song and dance; Astaire and Rogers, whatever their difficulties, were a perfect screen pair, and in their best movies, they were surrounded by great comic role players, like Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore.

Much has already been written about the particular magic of Fred Astaire. Epstein calls it his charm, which he defines as "elegance made casual." The challenge for each film was to sustain and spread that charm to the entire movie--the scripts, cinematography, sets and performances--for its entire length. There were several near-total successes--Top Hat being the closest to perfection-- but Astaire's charm and his dancing could overcome weaker elements, even weak songs, to a greater or lesser extent. Some of his signature dances occur in lesser films, mostly without Rogers. While Epstein gives short shrift to these, I happen to like The Sky's the Limit, Blue Skies, etc.

But such is the delicate balance of this magic that it's hard to pin down exactly what went wrong in some of the films that failed even for me, such as the two Astaire did with the actress he considered his best dance partner, Rita Hayworth. Epstein is not much help here. In fact, this book seemed generally badly written to me, and sloppily edited. I prefer the earlier Astaire and Rogers by Edward Gallafent (Columbia University Press), which is more complete, more factual and less interpretive, with lots more evocative photos.

August Wilson Century Cycle

August Wilson's Legacy

August Wilson's legacy lives. In fact it's probably only getting started. Audiences in Washington will have the opportunity to see all of his 10 plays this spring, in the order of the decades of the 20th century in which each is set, and that approach is likely to be repeated elsewhere in the coming years.

Within the theatre world, it's particularly vital. In the new issue of American Theatre, there's an interview with playwright Lucy Thurber, whose play, Scarcity, dealing with an American working class family, is printed in the issue. Thurber recalls a conversation with Wilson at the O'Neill summer playwrights conference. "I write about poor white trash," she told him. "Are you trash?" he asked her. "No," she said, "I'm just using it as a descriptive term to explain that part of the population." But Wilson said, "Again, I ask you, are you trash? Are the people that you grew up with trash? Are the people that you love trash?"

"That was a huge, emotional moment for me," Thurber said. "Where it cracked, this play was born. The language we use about ourselves is important. There is something about having the courage to talk with dignity and trust and faith about these parts of America that are us."

August Wilson wrote about the African American experience in America. But the way he wrote about it has clear lessons for all writers, as Lucy Thurber learned first hand.

Also in that issue, there is a piece by Teresa Eyring, executive director of the Theatre Communications Group that publishes that magazine as well as the August Wilson Century Cycle collection of his plays, described below. She notes that Wilson was involved in preparing for the publication, and that at the publication ceremony his widow, Constanza Romero, talked about what this publication would have meant to August, had he lived to see it. Eyring went on to extoll the process of developing each of Wilson's plays--a process that he and his collaborators essentially invented--as a model for other new plays.

Here is more about the August Wilson Century Cycle, published by Theatre Communications Group, and available for Christmas giving from your favorite booksellers:


T’is the season of the boxed set, but this one has more significance than the usual holiday gift repackaging. This is the first physical embodiment of a singular achievement—ten plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, which together tell a long story of African American survival. It is the first time the plays of August Wilson have been collected to tell that story chronologically.

Since Wilson completed the cycle shortly before his untimely death in 2005, the nature and extent of this achievement is slowly being recognized. No American playwright of any color has come close to a series of ten major plays like this, or participated in the acclaimed productions of all their plays. Many others helped this process in vital ways, but even so it’s fair to say that August Wilson transformed and enriched American theatre as no individual has ever done.

From Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) to Radio Golf (1997) and including Fences, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Jitney and The Piano Lesson--each play is carefully true to its time, yet there are few historic events even mentioned, and the characters are ordinary people—predominately in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood. The most obvious virtue of these plays is their language—a version of black speech that is at once authentic and Wilson’s own poetry-- and this alone makes these plays unusually good to read as well as to see performed.

With this set it’s possible to feel the changes and the continuities in African American culture through the century. The reader is aided in this by recurring and even legendary characters, and by ancestors and descendants in the same family—and perhaps most hauntingly, in the fate of a single house.

In this boxed set, each play has a foreword by such luminaries as Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, playwright Tony Kushner, writer Ishmael Reed, actor Laurence Fishburne and former theatre critic Frank Rich. Kushner writes that Wilson grappled with theological questions: “Eugene O’Neill, the playwright August Wilson most resembles, did that.” Reed writes that Wilson’s “ear was so good that his character’s words could be set to music.” Fishburne quotes favorite lines from “Two Trains Running” (he was in its first production, along with Samuel L. Jackson): “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.”

There couldn’t be a better introduction to Wilson’s work than the intro to the series by New Yorker drama critic John Lahr. The cover for the set has a great photo of the author, taken in the last year or so of his life. The set lists at $200 and can be purchased for $126, so it’s definitely a gift item. And if you don’t have someone to give it to, think about gifting your favorite local library.

If you haven't seen an August Wilson play yet, take the next opportunity (which may be the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Fences next season) or you could even track down a used DVD or video of The Piano Lesson, which is the only Wilson play to be adapted for the screen so far (it was a TV production for the Hallmark Hall of Fame, directed by long-time Wilson collaborator, Loyd Richards. Or follow Toni Morrison's lead and read the plays, possibly the most readable around, even for people who don't usually read plays.

Early Fiddler

Several years ago I happened upon the galley of Ghost Light, a memoir by Frank Rich, in the discard box at Northtown Books. I picked it up, amused to speculate that I was probably one of the few people in Arcata who knew who Frank Rich was, and very probably the only one who had known him personally. Not only that, but the last time I saw him, I'd been lamenting about the lack of publisher interest in my proposed book on the arts in America, and he said he was having trouble finding a publisher for this book. I didn't know it was being published. And now the book found me.

He was still theatre critic for the New York Times then--he's since become a political and cultural columnist (and has published several more books.) He'd taken me to lunch that day at Orso, a great Italian restaurant in Manhattan that was his favorite. But we'd met years earlier, when he was an editor (and the film critic) at a weekly national magazine called New Times. (Completely unrelated to the publication of that name today.) He was my first editor there. I wrote several articles for him while I was living in Cambridge, Mass. and eventually met him when I Amtraked down to Manhattan. A few years later, after Frank moved on to review film for Time Magazine, New Times devoted most of an issue to my piece, "The Malling of America."

But it was only earlier this year that I actually read Ghost Light, and learned all kinds of things I didn't know about Frank. I knew he grew up in Washington, but I didn't realize how much theatre had been a part of his childhood and adolescence. Both of his parents, and later his stepfather, encouraged this devotion. As a teenager he even got a job at the National Theatre.

We are close to the same age, so I recognized a lot about the cultural context of his experiences. But I couldn't match his experiences with theatre. At that lunch he flattered me by referring to my "obvious love of the theatre." But I had nothing like his background in seeing Broadway shows, especially in the era of Washington as a tryout town.

This memoir is about more than shows or even growing up in the 50s and 60s. He writes about his mother and father as individuals, and about the complexities of his step-father, who helped him in many ways, but who also was physically violent. It's an absorbing, very readable book.

But the point of bringing it up here is Fiddler on the Roof. As an adolescent, Frank spent summers at an arts camp in Stockbridge, Mass. His closest friend there was named Harry Stein. That was another big surprise for me. I also knew Harry Stein--he was an editor at New Times after Frank left, and then at Esquire. I visited him at the Esquire offices once and he introduced me to Nora Ephron. (Harry later wrote a column on ethics for Esquire and became known as the "ethics guy.") But I didn't know that Harry and Frank knew each other, and certainly not that Frank and Harry were boyhood friends.

Nor did I know that Harry Stein's father was Joseph Stein, the man who wrote the play, Fiddler on the Roof, as well as many others. According to
Wikipedia, his show biz career began with a chance encounter with Zero Mostel, leading him to write for various radio stars and then as part of the legendary writing team for the Sid Caesar television show (along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Carl Reiner.) He is apparently still writing, by the way--this article mentions a 2007 musical based on Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, that had its first production at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut--a storied theatre where in recent years Westporters Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward have been heavily involved.

It turns out that Frank and Harry were present for a lot of the early history of Fiddler, and Frank writes about it in Ghost Light. Joe Stein was going through a bad patch in his career. His last few musicals hadn't gone well, and his TV series was being regularly ridiculed on That Was the Week That Was, a wonderful early 60s satirical TV show that I completely loved at the time. So Harry--and then Frank--were worried from time to time that his new show was going to be another flop.

Joe had permitted Frank and Harry to witness the very earliest manifestation of the musical he based on stories by Sholom Aleichem: a backer's audition. It happened one night after dinner at the Stein's apartment, while Joe read from the script while the composer played the songs on the piano and the lyricist sang them. This was the first pre-production, mimeographed script Frank had ever read. At that point, the show was entitled The Old Country.

But it was several years before the show got to an actual stage. It had changed producers, its title and its star--now it was Joe Stein's first inspirer, Zero Mostel. The first thing that worried Harry and Frank was the title. They thought Fiddler on the Roof was silly, and might doom the show. "Harry and I admitted to each other that it sounded like a children's show, not a real Broadway musical. What was wrong with The Old Country?"

After a tryout in Detroit (where it got unenthusiastic critical notices), Fiddler came to Washington in the summer of 1964. Neither Frank nor Harry had seen it when they were allowed to attend what they thought was a dress rehearsal. They were shocked by the lackadaisical behavior of Zero Mostel. He sang a song that sounded like gibberish to them, which he interspersed with obscene gestures directed at director Jerome Robbins, who he despised. Harry and Frank pleaded with Joe Stein to cut that terrible song, called "If I Were a Rich Man."

After the rehearsal, Harry was especially upset. "I can't believe it," he said. "I can't believe my father has another bomb."

But despite their trepidations, when they saw the first performance they were entranced from the opening number, "Tradition." "...as soon as the orchestra played its last note, I looked at Harry," Frank writes. "His face was plastered with a smile, and I saw him share it with his father..." The audience loved the show.

It turned out that they had seen not a dress rehearsal but a technical rehearsal, which is all about getting light cues correct and so on. The actors were just walking through parts of scenes. And of course, "If I Were A Rich Man" is probably the best remembered song from the show.

During its Washington run, Fiddler was Frank Rich's first theatrical adventure as a kind of insider. He and Harry went to every show, made some friends, had a crush on one of the actresses. This is one of the fun parts of the book, which is definitely worth finding and reading, even if it doesn't present itself to you in a free box.

Books on Stage

Hot Towns, Cool Theatres

This is a review from a companion blog (Books In Heat) of a book I mention in my upcoming column...

An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse
by Richard Somerset-Ward
Yale University Press

Cities were hot, the country was cooler. This condition before air-conditioning led to summer theatre in America, beginning early in the twentieth century. Later on there would be other incentives for the tonier summer theatres, especially near enough to New York City: summer reruns meant television stars could headline on the summer stage. It was part Straw Hat Circuit, and part tryout venue for Broadway.

But the Westport Playhouse in the affluent Connecticut town also began with high artistic purpose. Its fascinating founder, Lawrence Langner, had already begun elevating the quality of New York theatre by the example of his Theatre Guild productions. He divided his time between theatre and a very successful patent business, scrupulously keeping them separate, but he did transfer at least one idea from one to the other. "All my [patent] clients have research departments to develop new products," he said. "The summer theatre must serve the same function for new plays and for playwrights, for actors and technicians, for directors and stage designers."

Though this large format book is liberally illustrated and generously sprinkled with celebrity names, the text is substantial. With this informal, almost conversational history of some 75 years of this unique theatre inevitably says a lot about American theatre in general.Readers may absorb insights into the business of theatre, its dependence through changing economics on remarkable individuals (many briefly profiled) and other lovers of theatre, who create shared experiences that include the risk that audiences share with everyone in the production every night.

There are the famous names---early productions and world premieres by Eugene O'Neill, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward, appearances by theatrical legends from Eva Le Gallienne, Laurette Taylor, Ethel Barrymore and Paul Robeson to film stars like Dorothy Gish, Gene Kelly, Jean Arthur, Henry Fonda and Joan Fontaine, and famous entertainers like Sid Caesar and Groucho Marx. But what may surprise some readers is the importance of theatre to the actors, directors and others they may know only from the movies and television. At the height of his Hollywood stardom Tyrone Power insisted on a three week run in a now forgotten play, which required some high stakes legal bluffing to keep 20th Century Fox from suddenly recalling him to Hollywood. This phenomenon remains true today.

Westport experimented with various formats and seasons, hit its stride in the 30s and 40s, had great years and not so great through the 50s, 60s and 70s (and the author doesn't pretend the misses were hits), nearly closed in 1989 and stumbled through the 90s, until its latest rebirth began in 2000 when Joanne Woodward became Artistic Director. Westport's 2002 production of "Our Town" with Paul Newman was seen by additional millions on television. Newly renovated, Westport continues to nourish theatre in its many forms with a mix of classics and new plays. Even out there in the country it fulfills a basic element of civilization: to bring live productions together with live audiences in as ancient and as human an experience as we have.

Booking the Stage: Shakespeare the Thinker

What makes this book especially valuable is that Nuttall brings not only a lifetime of reading and discussion of the plays, but a lifetime of seeing them performed. Shakespeare the Thinker instantly becomes one of my favorites, along with such titles as Shakespeare: A Life in Drama by Stanley Wells, the discussion of the comedies in Michael Gelven's Truth and the Comedic Art, and William Gibson's unjustifiably neglected masterpiece, Shakespeare's Game.

From my review of Nuttall's Shakespeare the Thinker, published today by Yale U. Press, here at Books in Heat.

Michael Frayn

Booking the Stage

The Human Touch

Here in America, land of geographically and socially separated enclaves of experts where only one "brand" per person is permitted, British writer Michael Frayn would be not only an anomaly but a suspicious character. As a playwright, he wrote "Noises Off," the international hit that critic Frank Rich called "the funniest play written in my lifetime," and "Copenhagen," a drama about quantum physicists, another international hit. Frayn is also an accomplished journalist, novelist, translator, screenwriter and writer of nonfiction, including philosophy, of which "The Human Touch" is the latest example. Moreover, it is not the "how to win friends" or just "how to win" sort of philosophy, but serious analysis of what we know and how we know it, particularly concerning the nature of scientific knowledge, as well as the nature of reality.

For more on Michael Frayn's new book, click here for my review in today's San Francisco Chronicle Book Review.