G, Whiz

In 1966, when a ten-year-old Seattle lad named Kenneth Gorelick first picked up an alto saxophone, he was one of many promising kids with an ear. Talented, sure, but no genius. It took him two tries to make his high school jazz band. But he maintained a steely resolve, he studied and played, studied and played, and kept on playing, and now he’s the best-selling instrumental recording artist of all time. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you’ve heard him.

Penny Lane, who directed one of my all-time-favorite documentaries, HAIL SATAN? (2019), specializes in an ironic detachment that refuses to lead you by the hand to a judgment or conclusion. That potential for deliberate dichotomy surely helped inspire the choice of subject for her new HBO doc, because anybody who pays attention to pop music knows that for more than a quarter century, it’s been hip to hate Kenny G.

That’s how long this squiggly-haired aural crooner (mostly on soprano sax) has been the apotheosis of a genre — and popular Nineties-Oughts radio format — called “smooth jazz.” To many jazz aficionados, the very term is an affront. “Real” jazz is challenging and impatient and built on trailblazing improvisation. Smooth jazz is soothing, trusting, reassuring. Jazz is foreground. Smooth is background. Raw versus buffed. Savage versus safe. Music versus Muzak. 

Quite a few jazz critics tear into that smooth sound on camera in Lane’s LISTENING TO KENNY G. (“A corporate attempt to soothe my nerves,” says Ben Ratliff.) Their distaste is so palpable that we want to hear from the other side, and after 75 million records there’s got to be one. Thus the yin and yang of our film.

Kenny G emerges, deliberately or not (though he had no editorial control over this project), as a cheerful but driven guy who’s secure enough to let this stuff roll off his back. In WAYNE’S WORLD 2 (1993), just the mention of the name forces Dana Carvey’s heavy-metal headbanger Garth Algar into imagining the torture of having his teeth cleaned in the middle of a Kenny G concert. So how did Kenny G respond? “I thought it was somewhat funny,” he told a reporter at the time. “I think it would have been better if they had me in the movie. But they never called me.” After watching Lane’s film, one would expect such a reaction.

He is completely immersed in his roll-up-the-sleeves ethic. He knows that he got where he is through hard work. He says he loves the process of creating music. In the film he goes back to his high school as a local boy made good and a beloved band instructor asks him to sign a hall display. Kenny G ponders for a moment and writes, “Practice, practice, practice!”

Many people who devote themselves to becoming this accomplished at something tend toward a kind of tunnel vision: it can be all they ever think about. Kenny G’s interests are wider-ranging than you might guess. The same year he first honked on a sax, he also picked up a golf club and fell in love with the sport. He became a near-scratch golfer, #1 on Golf Digest’s Top 100 In Music handicap list in 2006 and #2 in 2008. He is an aircraft pilot who flies his own seaplane regularly. While already playing professionally, this whiz kid graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Accounting. Oh, yeah: he was also an early investor in Starbucks. 

Okay, grrr, but seriously: why the heck does Kenny G just annoy some people? Fame and money, maybe, but we don’t begrudge everyone who becomes wildly popular. I think it starts with snobbery, with which jazz purists in particular are blessed in abundance. There’s a canon, there are deities, and arcane knowledge is prized over all. How can this guy appeal to so many while standing in the shadows of far worthier giants? (Sometimes literally, as when he recorded “What A Wonderful World” and overdubbed Louis Armstrong’s classic recording of the same song.) Kenny G must be the lowest common denominator — and the ardor of his fans, clueless about jazz, is nothing more than the kind one might have for a juggler. He’s appropriating and cheapening the jazz idiom. Holding long notes and playing fast runs as needed to tickle an audience is just glitter and shallow showmanship.

Sometimes Kenny G sets himself up for abuse. Take those long notes. Many great wind musicians have mastered the “circular breathing” technique to produce a continuous tone by taking in air through the nose while blowing out. You must have this down to play, for example, the didgeridoo. Circular breathing is vital to the sound of jazz greats like Wynton Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, Maynard Ferguson, even the legendary mouth-harp player Paul Butterfield. Kenny G got really good at it. But good was not enough, so he decided to establish the world record, and one day in 1997 in a New York music store he held an E-flat for 45 minutes and 47 seconds. This feat made the Guinness book; it took three years for somebody to break Kenny’s inaugural record. The stunt also showed that the artist is serious about his work, less so about himself. (“I know for a fact that if I cut my hair my career will go right down the toilet.”) Jazzbos were scandalized, the few G-fans who even cared were only amused.

Instrumentalists don’t depend upon language, so Kenny G’s music sounds the same worldwide. But it also lives in an unique place deep inside the Chinese psyche. In 1989, some businesses started playing his wistful, elegiac “Going Home” over the P.A. just before closing at night, and the practice spread throughout the country. At malls, train stations, markets, food courts, even on tv stations at signoff, “Going Home” has become China’s unofficial national closing song — time to finish your business and end the day — and so ubiquitous that millions recognize the melody even if they have no idea who it is that’s playing. You can look at this phenomenon two ways. On the one hand, a nice soprano sax solo is a softer and kinder way to say scram than blinking the lights or slamming the locks shut. On the other, such a subliminal cue might also be used by Morlocks calling the Eloi down to dinner. Either way, “Going Home” has to be one of the most-listened-to songs on earth.

So, is Kenny G’s stuff any good? I believe your answer will depend not only on who you are but also how you feel at the moment. Branford Marsalis pooh-poohs the smooth-jazz controversy: “He’s not stealing jazz. It’s not like some guy says, ‘You know, I used to listen to Miles, Trane, and Ornette. And then I heard Kenny G, and I never put on another Miles record.’ It’s a completely different audience.”

Let’s face it, some days nothing but Trane will do. Other times I want to go even deeper into ambience, maybe led by Paul Winter, another great soprano saxman, whose “natural” music is utterly different from Kenny G’s. But my choices are as valid as a jazz expert’s. Just because I don’t have a taste for classic opera or its traditions doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the less formal vocal instrument of a Frank Sinatra. Just because I need garage rock one day doesn’t mean I won’t want some atmospheric New Age noodling the next. And yes, even smooth jazz can be just right for a particular time or feeling or gathering or meditation or memory. No listener has a responsibility to anyone but himself. If Kenny G can please an audience that would never be caught dead inside a jazz club, so what?

An interesting guy, Kenny G. I was glad Penny Lane introduced us. I hope he never stops practicing. But right now what I really need most is for Kenny to count off “Going Home,” so we can finally put paid to this maddening hellscape of a year.

Penny and Kenny.

The Producers (The Musical)

I’ve been reading (or re-reading) a clump of books about a fascinating sort of artist: the record producer. Three memoirs, from Jerry Wexler, Daniel Lanois and Phil Ramone; and two bios, of John Hammond and Phil Spector. These guys (the overwhelming majority of producers over the years have been guys) are a rainbow of different styles and methods, but they share one key attribute: they all grew up living and breathing music. Nothing else in life was anywhere close.

It’s tough to put your finger on what makes a good producer — or even what it is exactly that a producer does. (As a former book editor, I’m familiar with having an amorphous profession.) At least in the acoustic age, when musicians used to push air around in an expensive soundproof studio, being at a recording session was very much like being on a film set. Most people are surprised to learn that at either place, the thing you do most is wait. 

A record producer is analogous to a film director, too, but they’re creatively inverted. The director is acting as a general, leading an army of specialists and doling out her full attention among every single inch of the photographic frame: she’s thinking outward. The producer is in a claustrophilic environment, intent on the slightest intonations and their relationship to the other sounds at his disposal: his inclination is inward. They will become one and the same when the director gets to the mixing process long after photography has been completed, but in the primal sense a director is still counting on her eyes, a producer on his ears.

Some producers start out as musicians themselves: Phil Ramone was a violin prodigy, and everybody says Phil Spector was good enough to make a living as a session guitarist had he chosen to. But Jerry Wexler and John Hammond were both swing-era superfans, soaking in everything they could learn about jazz and blues and spending every possible minute listening to music. No matter his background, though, any producer must obviously be able to communicate with musicians, either in a musicological sense (e.g., Ramone) or an emotional one (Hammond). As Hammond biographer Dunstan Prial points out, several members of Count Basie’s band couldn’t read music, but Hammond could talk to them just fine. Paul McCartney doesn’t read music either, but does he ever hear it. Imagine the excitement he felt when producer George Martin introduced him to the piccolo trumpet, which wound up leading the charming break on “Penny Lane.” Producer Ron Richards knew you can’t fit a razor blade between the perfectly pitched high harmonies of the Hollies’ Allan Clarke, Graham Nash and Tony Hicks, but on the bubbly hit “Carrie-Anne,” the instrumental solo is taken by — a steel drum. That’s what a producer does.

Recording techniques weren’t as sophisticated when the older guys got their start, and Hammond in particular was famous for plopping down a single microphone in the center of the studio and letting the cats just wail. But since then, arranging mikes and musicians just so has become part of the gig. Phil Ramone is so meticulous that he keeps special microphones for the likes of Judy Collins, Paul Simon and Billy Joel under lock and key, each to be used by no other artist. Daniel Lanois cut his teeth working on ambient music with Brian Eno and filling every atom of the stereo spectrum.

But even a perfectionist like Ramone is helpless before the recording gods when the assignment is a “live” record. (He recorded Simon & Garfunkel’s 1981 Central Park concert.) Gone is the control over performance quality and audio separation which a studio provides. Most “live” albums from the pop era have been “sweetened,” or partially re-recorded in a studio setting after the fact. Even the keepin-it-real Grateful Dead’s EUROPE ’72 sounds better on record than it did in person. The all-time most notorious “sweetening” job was done by Eddie Kramer for ALIVE! (1975) by Kiss; on some tracks the drums were the only unretouched instrument, and even audience noise was altered. Ironically, that was the album that broke the band as a huge concert act.

Some producers, like Ramone and Lanois, started out on the electronic side, as engineers. To again use a movie analogy, that’s the audio equivalent of a cinematographer, translating the producer’s desires (who in turn is trying to capture the artist’s vision) and adjusting the recording process to get it all on tape. Top-flight record engineers like Alan Parsons and Tom Dowd became star producers in their own right. One day in 1975 I interviewed Rod Stewart for his first U.S. recording, ATLANTIC CROSSING, and Dowd was considered crucial enough to be there too. He’s featured heavily in Wexler’s good-natured memoir, which is essentially the history of Atlantic Records. (I already knew “Tommy” from a late-night Wet Willie session in Macon, Georgia, where a chunk of the time was spent calibrating a tom-tom after summoning a drum tuner in the middle of the night. Remember, you sit and wait. That too is what a producer does.) 

Most producers operate in personal obscurity, and you probably wouldn’t have recognized any of the ones I’ve mentioned if you’d passed them on the street, with one possible exception: Phil Spector. The wunderkind of the Brill-Building “girl-group” era, he produced a fountain of Sixties hits (he had his first #1 record at age eighteen) in both New York and Los Angeles, and became more famous than his acts. He is best remembered for what he called the “Wall Of Sound” — redundant instrumentation layered into controlled thunder of Wagnerian intensity. Spector’s signature style influenced countless others: for example, the track “Born To Run” by Bruce Springsteen deliberately sounds like it was cut at a Phil Spector session. On the other hand, Spector is responsible for the unctuous and bullying orchestral and choral “sweetening” that, in my opinion, overpowers “The Long And Winding Road” on the Beatles’ LET IT BE (1970). But Spector is also remembered for his creepy eccentricities, so Mick Brown’s bio is far and away the most dramatic of the quintet I just enjoyed. It ends as Spector is about to go on trial for the 2003 second-degree murder of a B-movie actress named Lana Clarkson — everybody knew he was careless with guns. He was found guilty in 2009, and died in custody at 81 just three months ago.

Besides obsessing over music all their lives, the guys I just read about have one more thing in common: they all worked with Bob Dylan or, in Spector’s case, hoped to. (He said if he ever got the chance he would record Dylan “like an opera.” Hell, Phil recorded everybody like an opera.) But look at the variety. John Hammond signed Dylan and produced his first folk record in 1962, as part of John’s resurgence after jazz had morphed out from under him, from blues and swing to be-bop, during his hitch in the Army. (Hammond also discovered and signed Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin — her career didn’t take off until Wexler and the Ertegun brothers got ahold of her at Atlantic — Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others. Talk about ears!) Phil Ramone engineered the New York sessions for BLOOD ON THE TRACKS (1975), which make up about half the finished album. SLOW TRAIN COMING (1979), from Dylan’s Christian period, was produced by that ol’ nonbeliever Jerry Wexler. And Daniel Lanois, who must be the Phil Spector of the digital era — not as loud but just as tasty — produced OH MERCY (1989) and the sultry TIME OUT OF MIND (1997), one of my favorite Dylan albums of ‘em all. 

Digital technology changes everything. Most crucially, it’s now possible to make workable recordings without using a studio: modern demos can sound better than some finished records used to. In fact, it’s possible to forgo the clock ticking your money away and make them in your bedroom (your mileage may vary as to relative quality). If you want, you can realize pretty close to full orchestrations that play only into your headphones, even correct the pitch of your singer if you have to. Digital is great in many ways. Peter Asher, who made some beautiful records with the likes of James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, said, “People go, ‘Don’t you really miss tape?’ I say, ‘No, I’m so happy to see the back of it.’ We can do edits now that we could only dream of back then.” No question, technology has made some things easier.

But you cannot make the best record of which you’re capable without a good producer. You just can’t. After enough years spent slogging in the studio, that good producer might be you, but my guess is it isn’t. Here are five people who have really put their marks on music but never really got credit from the general public, only from devotees who paid attention. It was so much fun hanging out with them behind the console — and best of all, I didn’t have to wait one second.

One Magnificent SOB

I’m sure there are many musical performances that you like. Maybe some that you love. But I’ll bet there are very few that actually force you to regard the world differently. One might say “change” one’s life here, but I prefer “affect.” I’ve listened to a ton of recorded music — I was even paid to do it for a few years — but I can count on one hand the instances that actually altered my entire aesthetic aspect. ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN. ARE YOU EXPERIENCED? KIND OF BLUE. SGT. PEPPER. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realize there’s one finger left. That belongs to SWITCHED-ON BACH. 

Whoa: how’d that get in here? “You had to be there” is probably the pat answer, but I want to dig a little deeper. This is about the timbre and tempo of musical notes, and how they can combine to perform microsurgery on your brainpan. Oops, I guess I’m loving it too much.

“The cultural impact that SWITCHED-ON BACH had in the late 1960s and early 1970s cannot be overstated,” writes Amanda Sewell in her new study of the record’s chief creator, WENDY CARLOS: A BIOGRAPHY. (Of course it can, but let’s keep moving.) This isn’t a very “good” book. It is not written artfully and has precious little analysis, opinion, or original research. It reads like a competent term paper which would probably deserve a B, and is rife with sloppy editing and proofreading; “echoes” of words and phrases, redundant statements, kid stuff like referring to “Roy Orbinson.” (Oxford University Press is the culpable publisher.) But Ms. Sewell’s tome is still useful as a single-volume aggregation of everything available in the public sphere about the mysterious, reclusive — for a very good reason — performer of SWITCHED-ON BACH. (I’m going to refer to it henceforth as “SOB,” as the giggling creators hoped many of us future commentators would do when they came up with the title.)

Well, this magnificent SOB rocked my world.

I had always preferred folk or pop music to the classics. I had one of the most terrific moms ever: in retrospect I felt that she wanted to push some home-schooled music appreciation onto me — the family even rented an electric organ when such a thing was fashionable — yet I resisted. But in a church-going household one couldn’t escape the great liturgical melodic lines, so I osmosed some Bach, some Ludwig van, etc. I resolutely did not give a musical damn, yet there they were, encased in my evolving brainpan despite my youthful disdain.

Then I’m a young uber-hip college student flipping through the platters in a record store (ask your parents) and I see this cover that stops me cold. A corpulent bewigged figure dressed in the height of Baroque fashion is standing on a Persian rug in his cozy composing room, cat and all, but above his keyboard is a startling anomaly, a bank of plug-ins connected to a great snaking cable — and to top it off, the maestro is holding not a quill pen but a pair of headphones. 

Whatever this is, I gotta hear it, said hundreds of thousands of people. We all took a copy home and dropped the needle.

Even today, the first attack of “Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29,” the opening piece, is to me as thrilling as Bobby Gregg’s initial smacks on “Like A Rolling Stone.” It’s the aural equivalent of the cover image: a composition that has lasted for literal centuries is now made audible by cutting-edge technology. It was respectful, even reverent, but cheeky at the same time. The rest of the album was beauty after beauty, most of it new to me. I couldn’t quit playing it, then I couldn’t resist seeking out other more traditional performances. I fell in love with the three Bs, Handel, Mozart, but especially Baroque and especially Bach. However, having SOB as an on-ramp had affected my ear. 

The sound of a synthesizer was far more outré in 1968 than it is today, but one feature that was particularly flattering to Bach’s music was its crystal clarity. You could hear every line. The “Sinfonia” was written to be led by a pipe organ, and when you hear it played on that instrument the performer’s dexterity is remarkable, but the sound is murkier, as if you need a hearing aid: Carlos’s longtime collaborator Rachel Elkind referred to 60s-era Bach recordings as “soggy.” SOB spoiled me for acoustic Bach. One night we attended a performance of all six Brandenburg Concertos, one after the other, the instrumentation changing as the individual concertos require. These are among my favorite pieces of music and they were being performed expertly. But as I listened, I still found myself frequently preferring Carlos’s full-bodied electronic realizations.

(It happens in reverse too. I also treasure Handel’s Water Music Suite, especially the famous Allegro Deciso. But I learned to love this piece by listening to acoustic performances. By the time Carlos’s realization appeared on the SOB follow-up THE WELL-TEMPERED SYNTHESIZER — again with the jokes! — I really missed those French horns on the second statement of the theme. The electronic version just didn’t “sound right.”)

SOB was life-affecting for me because it helped me think about music in a different way. There is a mathematical logic to Bach’s work that manages to combine quality with quantity to produce a sacred order, the music of the spheres. Numbers can sing, which is why musicians count. The strange symmetries and paradoxes of the junction of art and science have never been explicated more delightfully and profoundly than in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s 1979 masterpiece GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH. It’s one of the finest books I have ever read. I was familiar with Bach, of course, and with Dutch artist M. C. Escher (I had never heard of mathematician Kurt Gödel or his Incompleteness Theorems). And it was obvious that the author had listened to Bach intently. In 2008 I wrangled a starstruck visit to Professor Hofstadter’s home in Bloomington, Indiana, and at one point in our freewheeling conversation I asked him if he had ever heard SOB. He said no and I detected the slightest wince. I inferred that he approached Bach from that acoustic side that had made me recoil from the switched-on Allegro Deciso. That’s too bad, I remember thinking. You can hear every line.

Carlos’s stuff can really penetrate. You know how when you’re hurting after a traumatic breakup, you imagine that every stupid pop song’s lyrics now actually make sense, and they’re all applicable to you? If you’ve never been that heartbroken you’re one lucky individual, but once I was in the midst of such a romantic funk when I decided to spin Carlos’s SWITCHED-ON BACH II. Astonishingly, the first movement of frickin Brandenburg No. 5 — no lyrics, mind — seemed to perfectly track the entire history of our now-rocks-spattered relationship. (Of course, that might have been the Bach plus the weed, but still.)

There’s a reason SOB and its sequels have lasted half a century now. They are not gimmicks, not novelty records. They are the product of great musical virtuosity plus just as prodigious a talent for taming technology to aesthetic pursuits. Carlos’s electronic realizations were an instant sensation. SOB remained at the top of Billboard’s classical chart for more than three years, ending 1969 as the 21st bestselling album of the year in any genre. It won three Grammys and quickly became the highest-selling classical album of all time. And during all this notoriety, the performer was unavailable for appearances or promotional tours. This is because, as only a handful of people knew, the artist was transitioning.

Wendy Carlos.

Wendy Carlos was assigned the male sex at birth and given the name Walter, which was originally the credited performer of SOB. But by the time it was released she had already begun her “transformation,” as she referred to it. She kept this a secret for more than a decade, shunning the limelight, even dressing in drag as “Walter” when forced to pose for publicity photos. She revealed her true gender in a 1979 Playboy interview, which infuriated her because the printed piece dealt just as much with her transformation as with her work. If she ever were to read this entry, which I clearly intend to be interpreted as suffusive praise, she would still be livid because I have just brought up her former name. To her, “Walter Carlos” does not exist and never has; “he” was a fiction. In SOB’s time that realization might have been a career ender. Now we have LGBTQ awareness and are more tolerant of our neighbors in general, but SOB inhabited the era of Stonewall and THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Obviously the gender issue has exactly nothing to do with the music, so I’m going to quit talking about it now. 

Although she created many other terrific realizations over the years, particularly film scores — among her work for the movies are the iconic Purcell-based theme of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and the creepy main title of THE SHINING — Carlos has never matched the meteoric commercial success of SWITCHED-ON BACH. She continued recording classical pieces (no less an authority than Glenn Gould called her Brandenburg No. 4 “the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs—live, canned, or intuited—I’ve ever heard”) and even revisited the SOB repertoire for a 25th anniversary sequel on equipment that was now the state of the art. Now the cover model holds his quill pen, but there are two computer screens above his keyboard and a gold record on the wall. Carlos adds that classic horror-movie organ piece “Toccata & Fugue in D Minor” as a bonus track, but by now, I like the chiller-theatre keyboard version better.

Carlos has become more interested in broadening the horizons of synthesized music with “environmental” works like SONIC SEASONINGS and DIGITAL MOONSCAPES. They are much more in line with her unusual longtime hobby: for decades she has traveled the world to photograph solar eclipses, frequently selling her work for publication. For fun, she even collaborated with “Weird Al” Yankovic on an adaptation of Prokofiev’s “Peter And The Wolf.”

But it’s SOB which bestowed a world of enjoyment on me, one I can never hope to repay. Its recording artist will forever be associated with this groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting work, a metaphor for her own life that dazzles all these years later, and will continue to do so for as long as we are willing to listen.

Richard Penniman, 1932-2020

My boss at the ad agency and I had gone to Dallas to shoot a commercial, early Eighties. We were in the hotel lobby checking in, and he left the line to take a whiz. I overheard the guy in front of me give his name to the check-in lady. “Reverend Penniman.” Even from behind him I could tell. As he turned around, yep, exactly right. 

“Reverend,” I said, “I just want to say thank you for all the good rockin’ you gave me.” His face lit up as if it hadn’t been the five millionth time he’d heard that. “I tell you what, young man, it was MY PLEASURE.” I said, “I’m here with somebody, he’s in the john, could you wait a few seconds? I want to make his year.” He giggled and turned back toward the desk as my boss walked up.

Now came one of the top ten most delightful moments of my entire life. “John Broderick,” I said, “meet Little Richard.” The Reverend swung around, SHRIEKED, and hugged us both. He puffed up with energy. Joy exuded from him. We were just two normal guys, but he was a star. The whole encounter took less than a minute, but I’ve never forgotten it and I never will. 

Bye bye, Rev. I’d say, get them off their booties up there, but I’ll bet you already have.

My 10 Favorite Theatre Pieces Of 2019

THE DUBLIN TRILOGY. Probably the highlight of the (or damn near any) year. On the cozy Irish Repertory Theatre main stage — we’ve been thrilled there so repeatedly that we decided to start supporting them — we were treated to Sean O’Casey’s JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK as well as the lesser-performed THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS and THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN. O’Casey’s rare ability to weave warmth and humor into the direst of circumstances opens up these plays and makes us better able to face horror because we are among recognizable fellow human beings. The Irish Rep acting company is uniformly superb, always has been, even alongside visitors like Matthew Broderick and here, in PLOUGH, the wonderful Maryanne Plunkett of the O’Casey-cousin Richard Nelson plays down at the Public. 

FERAL. Another norm-bending piece from Scotland, not as arresting as last year’s FLIGHT but swimming in a nearby loch. Three puppeteers, a sound effects artist and a video director concoct a story before your eyes: first using line drawings, then with three-D paper, cardboard cutouts and oddly poignant human figures with eyes but no mouths. You watch a live minicam feed on a video screen above their heads as they create an idyllic little town in charming detail and then destroy it as commercialization (in the form of a megastore called “Supercade”) comes in and infects the culture. The moral and physical rot is palpable and heartbreaking. All the fascinating, tightly coordinated “backstage” work takes place in plain view. The audience was stunned into awed silence at the close. 

HADESTOWN. Musical retelling of the Orpheus & Eurydice story by Anais Mitchell. Rachel Chavkin’s inventive staging is dazzling: three independent concentric turntables are just a few of the surprises she has for you. Everybody is great, but two old pros really own the stage: Andre De Shields as Hermes and that human subwoofer Patrick Page as Hades. Most of the songs are really good too, and since there’s a cast album dating back to 2010, plenty of people came prepared. You don’t need a Greek mythology textbook to follow along (the first musical number hands all the relationships to you on a platter), but as a bonus you get a sensational seven-piece band that features two of the hottest trombone solos I’ve heard in quite a while. Although it’s only coincidental, the Act I closer, “Why We Build The Wall,” could have been written yesterday: it’s as if Trump met Hades and said, “Daddy like!” 

THE MOTHER. Isabelle Huppert is as mesmerizing on stage as she is on film. You can’t take your eyes off her, not even in a show that’s deliberately staged in widescreen. It’s a tense, packed, tightly wound ninety minutes, but the best part was being about twenty feet from her the whole time. Chris Noth also did yeoman work, but the show is Ms. Huppert’s possession. It’s the kind of performance critics tend to call “brave,” as in, “I can’t believe what I just saw Isabelle Huppert do!”

OKLAHOMA! I appeared in a production of this show in college; after about six weeks of memorization, rehearsal and performance, you can’t help getting to know a piece pretty well. So it was such a treat to see the thought that went into Daniel Fish’s brilliant restaging, using only twelve cast members and seven musicians. In the famous three-quarter-round room at Circle In The Square, the house lights were full nearly the whole time, drawing the audience into the setting (they’re invited onstage for chili and cornbread at intermish). But “Pore Jud Is Daid” was performed in pitch black dark, so dark that nobody dared to laugh at the song’s dryly comic lyrics (“He looks like he’s asleep / It’s a shame that he won’t keep / But it’s summer and we’re runnin out of ice”) because the “hero” is in fact cruelly urging a suicide. This production is stripped down but somehow even more authentic: we hear pedal steel, mandolin, banjo and accordion along with the bass, cello and violin. Yet they make enough noise that the audience head-bangers on the title song continue their devotion at its end-of-show reprise. Damon Daunno as Curly contests the stage with Ali Stroker, a wheelchair-bound actress who destroys as Ado Annie, but I particularly loved Patrick Vaill as Jud Fry. The staging requires actors to sit out others’ scenes, but Vaill’s spot was just opposite my seat and I never saw him break character unless he was joining a song’s male chorus (e.g., “Kansas City”), in which case he acted to the song instead. He looks like Caleb Landry Jones but sings like Hugh Jackman. Keep your eye on him. 

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES. With such wattage — book by Lynn Nottage (SWEAT), music by Duncan Shiek (SPRING AWAKENING), lyrics by Susan Birkenhead (JELLY’S LAST JAM), and directed by Sam Gold (KING LEAR, FUN HOME, HAMLET) — one can’t possibly stay away. Fortunately, this show delivers. A kinetic thirteen-member ensemble makes great noise in a variety of styles: lots of gospel, show-tune belters, I even heard a samba beat in there. The musical numbers work for the story yet most of them can stand alone as independent songs. This adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd’s novel of personal-level race relations in 1964 South Carolina works the illusion of being effortless, as if it had really been a musical all along. Gold’s bare-bones representational staging (the various appearances of the “bees” are beautiful) reminded me of the crepe-paper ocean waves of PETER AND THE STARCATCHER. The nine-piece orchestra includes a bitchin horn section. The entire production is just wonderful and should conjure plenty of fans, especially those who loved the non-musical film adaptation.

SOFT POWER. The best new musical I’ve seen since HAMILTON (whose DNA shows up a couple of times, if I’m not mistaken). Play and lyrics by David Henry Hwang, which alone is reason enough to be interested. It’s a meta-drama whose crucial subjects are China-America relations, Chinese American (like the author) relations, the 2016 elections and the real-life 2015 stabbing which nearly ended Hwang’s life and appeared to be a random hate crime. One of the characters is “Hillary Clinton,” and another is “DHH” — in other words, the playwright. It’s provocative and funny and serious and playful: the show-within-the-show is THE KING AND I from the Chinese perspective. Oh, yeah: the songs are great and they run the musical gamut, complete with a standing-still eleven-o-clock number. The ditty explaining the nutty U.S. elections system is funny because it’s true. The fourteen-member company can sing, dance and act — they’re all triple-threaters. China may not be getting more like us, this show posits: we may be getting more like China. You get something to think about while you’re simultaneously having a great time.

TOOTSIE. Tons of fun, featuring an exceptionally sharp book by Robert Horn. They’ve traded the movie’s tv soap opera milieu for a Broadway show, an intentionally bad musical sequel to ROMEO AND JULIET. Santino Fontana is sensational in the Dustin Hoffman role: not only does he have to act two parts, he also has to sing two parts, and you really do buy him as a female alto. It’s an old-fashioned razzle-dazzler (complete with overture and entr’acte), only lots funnier than most others. It’s been a long time since there was a big hit at the Marquis, but I guarantee you: one has arrived.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME. We saw the last preview before the Broadway transfer officially opened. At first it seems to be a memory monologue, but it transmutes into a fantasia on feminism (there will eventually be two other performers besides the main one). Powerfully planned and performed (Heidi Schreck is a seasoned playwright and you can tell from the careful construction of the piece), one of the most moving things I saw on a stage all year. It has a lot to do with our current times but approaches from an oblique angle. A theatrical treasure. 

WHITE NOISE. The brilliant Suzan-Lori Parks’s new one is jam-packed with intelligence and outrage. It’s a four-hander (featuring Daveed Diggs and Thomas Sadoski and two excellent ladies who were new to me, Sheria Irving and Zoe Winters) with an outre premise — I’d rather leave it for you to discover — which peels away the layers that cover our posturing and privilege, even when we’re most sanctimoniously proud of ourselves. Plus each actor gets an absolutely stunning monologue. Oskar Eustis’s direction in the Public’s snug Anspacher space is clear as a bell. 

HONORABLE MENTION: ALL MY SONS, COLIN QUINN: RED STATE BLUE STATE, THE ENIGMATIST, INSTRUCTIONS FOR AMERICAN SERVICEMEN IN BRITAIN, THE MICHAELS, SEA WALL/A LIFE 

My Favorite Theatre In:

2017    2018

Slavery, Death, And The Beatles

“Beneath the blue suburban skies” in Penny Lane.

We visited London over the long Thanksgiving weekend and took a “day tripper” pilgrimage to Liverpool, where neither of us had ever been. Of course it was for the Fabs. I was standing in Penny Lane when our tour guide said, “look up.” The weather gods had bestowed “blue suburban skies,” and I took the above photo. Delighted, I later posted it on Facebook, both to travel-brag and because the day happened to illustrate Paul McCartney’s lyric so ridiculously well.

Among the responses was one from my longtime friend Robert Harland, who reminded me that Penny Lane’s namesake, thought to be one James Penny, had been a Liverpool slave trader. And he wasn’t alone, for Liverpool was a major slaving port. Its ships and merchants dominated the transatlantic slave market in the latter half of the 18th century. Probably three-quarters of all European slaving ships in this period left from Liverpool. It was Liverpool ships which transported fully half of the 3 million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers. 

Our tour guide had already told us all this. To its credit, Liverpool seems to be owning its sordid past and coming to terms with its historic role in a cultural atrocity. There’s no effort to whitewash the record; on the contrary, the International Slavery Museum which opened in 2007 provides a frank, visceral look at a time when buyers and sellers of human beings were men of respect, like James Penny — not just in Liverpool, but all over the world. (America is dutifully represented too.)

Robert suggested that were it not for the Beatles song, the street name would probably have been changed by now, but it’s not that simple. “Penny Lane” is a kaleidoscopic trip through McCartney’s memories; they’re “beneath the blue suburban skies,” yet it’s “pouring rain (very strange).” The barber, the banker, the fireman, the “shelter in the middle of the roundabout” — none of these are actually located on Penny Lane the street. Locals refer to the whole area as “Penny Lane.“ So even if the city fathers amended the street name, Liverpudlians would almost certainly continue to use “Penny Lane,” song or no song. After all, nobody calls Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas” except for the postman. 

Inside the International Slavery Museum, some Liverpool place names that found their way to Jamaica.

Once you understand Penny Lane’s etymology, it becomes harder to true up Paul’s joyous, carefree nostalgia, but the song is so redolent with play and innocence (there is one naughty bit) and humanity that it wins. We have the ability to overlook overt racism when it becomes so commonplace that it sounds correct: for example, the Washington Redskins. (Why don’t they just call themselves the Washington Rednecks and be done with it?) Liverpudlian place names — including Penny Lane — traveled across the Atlantic as well, some surviving in Jamaica, one of the trade’s major ports of call, where the sugar business was built on the backs of slaves.

Of course, slavery had long since been abolished when the four lads were traipsing around their hometown, and they were “woke” enough as The Beatles to refuse to play before segregated audiences in America. We visited their childhood homes and imagined them discovering each other, and followed their tracks in places of note all over town. And then we came upon the grave of Eleanor Rigby. 

It was discovered in the Eighties in the small cemetery of St. Peter’s Parish Church, Woolton, Merseyside. Across the street is the church hall where John Lennon’s band the Quarrymen were playing on July 6, 1957, the day Paul McCartney walked in. Paul has often been coy about the origin of Eleanor Rigby’s name, but he and John almost certainly strolled through this graveyard more than once. Paul may even have genuinely forgotten where the name came from, but when shown this headstone, he conceded that the name might have lodged somewhere in “me subconscious.”

The Beatles have probably been overthought more than any other pop music act, but here are some tantalizing details. It was the custom for a deceased wife to take her husband’s name for the memorial stone, and as you can see, Eleanor Rigby was Mrs. Woods. But almost uniquely in this setting, Eleanor was “buried along with her name” — her maiden name of Rigby. Also, a few stones down lies the body of John McKenzie, who died at 73 in 1915. Just under his name is that of his daughter Rachel, listed more traditionally. Could Paul have seen this stone too? Was the real-life inspiration for “Father McKenzie” not a priest at all, but a proud father in the familial sense? At any rate, however these snippets of real death did or did not inform the composer, what emerged was a melancholy McCartney masterpiece.

How much emptier our lives would have been without the series of coincidences that flung these four lads together. That’s also the subtext of Danny Boyle’s very entertaining new movie, YESTERDAY, which I highly recommend. I want to remember them the way sculptor Andy Edwards does. His bronze statues were unveiled in 2015 at Pier Head on the Liverpool waterfront, where they stand surveying the Mersey today. 

10/20/21: Quasi-confirmation from Sir Paul, from a New Yorker article on the writing of “Eleanor Rigby”: It’s like the story of the name Eleanor Rigby on a marker in the graveyard at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, which John and I certainly wandered around, endlessly talking about our future. I don’t remember seeing the grave there, but I suppose I might have registered it subliminally. Now I feel better about my Rigby fantasia in Woolton.

I Saw This In Liverpool (It’s Fab)

Acting Residential

I think I know the secret identities of the (probably only) four original Residents. In fact, I’m so confident that I’ll name them now: Jay Clem, Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox, and John Kennedy. Four monikers you and I have never heard of. So who cares? Well, that’s kind of the whole point.

That reveal is germane because when these (probably all) boys set out from Shreveport, Louisiana (one Resident may be from Texas) for the West Coast, to live the bohemian life among like minds that didn’t much exist in the Bayou State, they settled almost immediately on the Theory Of Obscurity. Only the art matters. Only the work. The cult of celebrity demeans and dilutes the end product by its very nature. Therefore we will forever remain anonymous, and go to great lengths to preserve that state. It’s as if Clark Kent were in reality a black hole: there they are, up there live on stage, but they steadfastly decline to acknowledge identity, and that’s why they always wear disguises in public. Sia is working the same street nowadays, but The Residents paved it a very long time ago. Their road work began about 1970.

Devotees believe the soon-to-be Residents came from the visual arts, oriented toward images intended for the optic nerve. (More on eyeballs later.) Arriving in a Bay Area that had already upchucked the excesses of the Summer of Love, they noticed that popular music was reorienting itself from the anything-goes era of Hendrix and Zappa toward a Laurel Canyon-lite soft sound. Icky! They found some instruments and a place to record them and produced avant-garde (actually more like en garde!) tracks that deconstructed the barriers between the givers and receivers of music, as the Fugs had done in New York years earlier. Legend has it that a major label declining their anonymously submitted demo tape sent it back addressed to “Residents.” Aha. A band name!

The original Residents — I say that because there’s no telling just how many different people of either gender have performed or created with or as The Residents over the years — were conceptual artists; they have never professed to be accomplished musicians. Heavily influenced by such mavericks as Captain Beefheart and the Sun Ra Arkestra, they produced freewheeling audio tracks that were energetic, dissonant, thought-provoking, offputting, funny, freaky, fascinating, difficult, and utterly unique in American culture. But although they have released dozens of albums and performed these compositions in live shows, it’s not quite accurate to think of The Residents as a “band.” Again, they are primarily visual artists, and their media are multi.

They were true pioneers of music video (some of their work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where The Residents have been represented in five exhibitions) and digital media (they did two acclaimed discs for Voyager back when CD-ROM was the Hot New Thing). Yet if you leaf through The Residents’ audio catalog, you will nevertheless find among the outre screeching some interesting slices of Americana: covers of songs by Elvis, Hank Williams (they perform “Kaw-Liga” under a sample of the opening beats from Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”), even John Philip Sousa. And rising from the gleeful cacophony, their remarkable 2002 album DEMONS DANCE ALONE is one of the most sensitive reactions to 9/11 that I’ve ever heard. So their sonic creations are not without meaning. In fact, an indicator I once employed to quickly evaluate the savvy of any newly visited record store, back when there was such a thing, was to head straight to the Rs. (The Virgin Megastore that opened in the Times Square building which also housed my employer, Bantam Books, was outstanding in this regard.)

But The Residents are, above all, provocateurs. Their most famous stage costume features formal top hat and tails, white tie, elegant cane — and a giant veined eyeball mask covering each Resident’s head. They want you to stare back at them just as hard.

The most amazing thing about The Residents is that, without the slightest care for fashion, they have been making a living producing art on their terms for almost fifty years now. How long can one swim upstream? Yet here they still are.

But we may have arrived at an inflection point. Sadly, last November, Hardy Fox, longtime president of The Residents’ business entity, the Cryptic Corporation, passed away at 73. The other three gentlemen named above have also been Cryptic officers. You can see them all interviewed in the wonderful Residents documentary THEORY OF OBSCURITY. They “work for” The Residents, to whom they always refer in the third person. Who knows who’s up on stage these days? (It’s probably not septuagenarians.) And who knows how the collective’s creative output has been derived? Maybe Hardy’s death will finally break up the group, or maybe Obscurity Theory will allow it to continue as long as it wants. I so admire how these stalwarts have carved themselves a place in the culture despite all odds, despite all evens, despite everything. I’d tip my hat, but the eyeballs below it are far too small.

P.S. To hear a curated sample of The Residents’ music, check out the 2017 compilation 80 ACHING ORPHANS, with extensive liner notes by Homer Flynn. To see their amazing and sometimes disturbing music videos, get ahold of the compilation DVD, ICKY FLIX.  

My 10 Favorite Theatre Pieces Of 2018

FLIGHT. One of the damndest things I ever saw in my life. You sit alone in a dark individual cubicle with headphones on. For the next 45 minutes, a series of tiny dioramas passes by inches from your face, illustrating the harrowing years-long journey of two young Afghan refugees as they try to make their way through the Mideast and Europe to London. The scenes are sequentially lit in sync with a pulse-pounding audio track voice-acted to perfection. Twenty-two others ring the giant turntable in their own cubicles. They’re all watching at other points in the story as the mechanism wheels around in its near-hour clockwise circuit. It’s amazing technically: the miniature model work is astonishing, and brilliant lighting effects and forced perspective add to the drama. It’s also amazing theatrically, because nothing — nothing — gets between you and the wrenching story (an adaptation of the novel HINTERLAND). It was produced by Vox Motus, a group of Glaswegian geniuses who killed with this piece at the Edinburgh Festival. Wow.

GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY. Bob Dylan + Conor McPherson = Sublime. It’s set in a boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan’s birthplace, but during the Great Depression, long before the bard was born; we’re in deep Woody Guthrie territory. Dylan’s songs, most but not all chosen from the Seventies and Eighties, are made to sound prettier than ever without sacrificing one ounce of grit. The tunes serve the story rather than vice versa. Sometimes the dramatic arc creates a wrenching change: “Like A Rolling Stone” is here performed as more of an elegy than Dylan’s own acerbic revenge fantasy. Other times you’re just happy to relax into the lilt of a song, as with a gorgeous “Sweetheart Like You.” (INFIDELS, well represented here, is my favorite unsung Dylan album.) It’s hard to describe. I need a cast recording to fully explain it to you. But I knew this was one of my top moments while I was sitting there. 

HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD PARTS I AND II. We couldn’t beg decent tix here in New York, so we decided to go to London over Thanksgiving to see it. (We discovered that Jimi Hendrix and G. F. Handel were next-door neighbors on that same trip!) We read the script when it was first published, but our aging brains had forgotten everything except the BIG REVEAL. (“Keep The Secrets” is the production’s mantra.) All we’d retained was the feeling that if they can reproduce this stuff on stage, we are so there. (They can, and we were.) Either you’ve bought in to Harry Potter or you haven’t. Let’s just say that there’s a generational twist which pretty much tracks the lives of the franchise’s original fans, and finally they are justifiably able to use the word “awesome!” correctly. No more details. It’s the spectacle that SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK wanted to be, and then some.

HELLO, DOLLY! It’s a rare treat to see a live musical artist who can suck the oxygen out of a room just by walking on. For me, Elvis, Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Springsteen. Now I have to add Bette Midler. This is far from my favorite musical, but Midler absolutely controlled the crowd every single second. They worship her not just for her body of work, but because this happens to be the perfect vehicle for her unique brand of showmanship. David Hyde Pierce struggled with a cold the night I saw it and was probably really good when he was at 100%, but face it, you don’t buy a ticket to see Horace Vandergelder. I wouldn’t have gone at all had some friends not goaded me into it (repeat; I’m not a big fan of the show). I would have thus let a huge opportunity get away from me. They’ll be talking about this for a long time. Jiminy crickets: what a Broadway baby.

JOHN LITHGOW: STORIES BY HEART. Sometimes the most powerful moments are the simplest — in fact, that’s precisely what makes them resonate. This is a one-man show in which the accomplished theatrical craftsman talks a little bit about his life, but mainly he tells us two stories: Ring Lardner’s “Haircut” and P. G. Wodehouse’s “Uncle Fred Flits By.” The first is a masterpiece of verbal sound effects and atmosphere; Lithgow makes us hear the barber’s razor against his strop and the snip-snip of his profession as his monologue gradually tells us more about him than we really wanted to know. The second piece is one of the funniest things in the English language, and upper-class British drollery rolls off Lithgow’s tongue delightfully, to what we hope is also the delight of his father. For this is how the senior Lithgow entertained his son early in life — and during his final days the roles were reversed, using the very short-story volume which the actor brandishes on stage. So it’s an entertainment, but also deeply personal. The combination is electric.

ON BECKETT. Bill Irwin, that great actor and clown (he wears the latter description as an honor sash), leads us on a 90-minute tour through the minds of both Samuel Beckett and himself. Quoting liberally from TEXTS FOR NOTHING, WATT, THE UNNAMEABLE, and the “booger” of a masterpiece, WAITING FOR GODOT, Irwin opens his own heart and presents a difficult artist’s genius before us in a way that anyone can understand and appreciate. Plus there is the physical clowning, which in Irwin’s self-directed hands is the throughput of the show. The highly informed earnestness reminded me of how deeply my friend John Maxwell was affected by the work of William Faulkner, so much so that he felt compelled to tell others about it, and so we came to write a theatrical monologue together that wound up changing the course of his life. I sense that same inner gravitas here. I am dying to see the next production of GODOT that comes my way, because Irwin has opened up so much depth to me. He also gave me an inkling into what it’s like to choose acting as a passion and profession, undressing simple technique and then injecting real artistry, with Beckett’s newly fraught words as a backdrop. The prose is sometimes so impenetrable that you just have to zone out and enjoy sheer musicality without parsing for meaning, but your interest never wanes. Tiny theater (the Irish Rep), big concepts. We left stunned, grateful, and happy.

SAKINA’S RESTAURANT. I saw this only two days after the Bill Irwin, so, with Lithgow, I have to say this year one-man shows frickin ruled. Aasif Mandvi (you may recognize him from THE DAILY SHOW) first mounted this beauty twenty years ago, and it hasn’t aged a day. He appears as Azgi, an Indian who has the chance to move to New York and work at a family restaurant. Then, one by one, he morphs into the restaurant’s owner, his wife, the place’s namesake daughter, her fiancé, etc. It’s the immigrant experience from deep inside an “America” (presciently, never “United States”) that most can never apprehend. Like most improv artists, Mandvi is first and foremost an actor, able to clothe a completely new character with nothing more than a scarf and precise body language. This production is part of Audible’s solo theatrical series, so if you dig down deep into the internets, you will find a way to hear it. I wish you could have been there to see it.

THREE TALL WOMEN. Great work by three terrific actors in this revival of a Pulitzer winner, but the revelation is that Glenda Jackson has become a grande dame! She owned this show; she was utterly magnificent as the eldest incarnation of the same person. Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill, as her earlier selves, are aces too. We were in the front row and Ms. Pill expectorated upon us with a plosive P, but we didn’t mind. Joe Mantello’s wonderful staging cleverly collapsed the play’s two acts into one. I took this picture of Paul Gallo’s lovely set afterwards. 

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I knew this was going to be easy for critics to pick apart, and the day after opening the New York Times’s Jesse Green (the raver) and the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout (the grouch) published diametrically opposed reviews, even down to their views of a more slavish 1991 staging that Teachout preferred to this one. Aaron Sorkin has fooled around a bit with Harper Lee’s immortal source novel, going straight to the trial and cutting away periodically, and he’s made some background characters firmer in their resolve. But the heart of the book and its moral tutelage remain pure in his fine adaptation. The three children at the story’s center are played by adults, but the conceit works. Jeff Daniels, who used to spit out Sorkinisms as a broadcaster on HBO’S THE NEWSROOM, brings a James-Stewart everyman quality to Atticus Finch, a Southerner who tries to see the good inside even his tormentors. I think it was time for this play to appear; I heard gasps from audience members who clearly were not familiar with the story. I’ll bet some of them are later moved to pick up the book.

TWELFTH NIGHT. A joyous populist adaptation with clever, tuneful music and lyrics by Shaina Taub (center), who also plays Feste, the clown. There were a dozen or so pros in the main roles, and then an ensemble of about 100 (kids, vets, caregivers, ex-cons, deaf actors, and more) culled from arts & educational organizations all over the five boroughs — split into two groups which played on alternate nights during the show’s five-week run. The 23 songs are original but feel confident and alive. Each Labor Day a similar production is mounted by the Public Theater’s Public Works project, but this year they got the whole theater as the second featured slot in the summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park program. ASL is gorgeously treated as choreography throughout; the feeling of joy and empowerment washes off the stage and into the audience, which has already spent the pre-show minutes up on stage at an “Illyrian street fair” with cast members. There will certainly be snobs who object to the 100-minute brevity and the songs, which help audience members keep up with the plot. But this is a visual demonstration of what the Public is all about, and it’s nothing short of thrilling. Shaina Taub will one day be a household name in the theatre: she’s that good. But these insistent tableaux of affirmation and achievement constantly erupt. They couldn’t possibly happen anywhere else than right before your eyes. And all of this took place outdoors on a fine summer night in Central Park. Magfrickinificent.

ALSO NOTABLE: THE DEAD, 1904 (you go inside James Joyce’s famous dinner party as a guest!); THE FERRYMAN (a stout Irish family drama which will seduce you and then impale you); THE HARD PROBLEM (Tom Stoppard is an international treasure); KING KONG (ape scenes only, but ALL the ape scenes, especially the one in which Kong shambles WAY downstage to violate the audience’s space); NETWORK (for Bryan Cranston and some hip video effects, otherwise I preferred the movie in almost every way); THE WAVERLY GALLERY (I usually avoid “senile dementia“ stories b/c they cut too close to home, but Kenneth Lonergan nailed both the humor and the horror, and that was Elaine Frickin May up there!)

 

My Favorite Theatre In:

2017    2019

H & H UK

My Number One takeaway from my most recent trip to London was an amazing one I’d never known before: George Frideric Handel and Jimi Hendrix were next-door neighbors.

Oh, sure, two centuries separated them. But G. F. Handel spent 36 years at No. 25 Brook St. in Westminster, composing, rehearsing, performing and teaching. When Jimi moved into an adjoining flat at No. 23 in 1968, there was a plaque outside celebrating the famous Handel House. “God’s honest truth,” he said, “I haven’t heard much of the fella’s stuff. But I dig a bit of Bach now and again.” 

Now they’ve joined the two and turned it into a tourable destination called “Handel & Hendrix in London.” The feeling of cosmic confluence was, for me, a source of unending joy. I loved being there.

Mind, the Handel House is far more authentic, with relics which were actually in the maestro’s possession. Jimi’s flat — particularly his bedroom — has been basically restored and replicated from contemporary photo shoots and the memories of his then-girlfriend and de facto hostess, Kathy Etchingham. But seeing them together makes you sense the presence of a real euphonic muse, as when you consider the gifts of Tim Buckley and his son Jeff, who barely knew each other but definitely shared something mysterious and ineffable. 

Jimi went out and bought a couple of Handel albums after he moved in — you can take away a list of his entire record collection — and is it really inconceivable that if the situation had been reversed, G. F. might have done the same? I don’t know, but that’s the kind of idle thought this place provokes. I didn’t expect to be surprised by London. But she has a wealth of tricks up her sleeve, and this one is a real gobsmacker.