Post by jo on Feb 10, 2017 8:11:52 GMT -5
A review of the book of John Lahr, an observer of both theatre and film who writes mainly about what he thought of the theatre and his many theatrical experiences --
www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/joy-ride-lives-of-the-theatricals-john-lahrs-true-romance/news-story/7675aaa8156a49f73ea17337747d015a
Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals: John Lahr’s true romance
Peter Craven
The Australian
12:00AM February 11, 2017
For 20 years John Lahr wrote about theatre for The New Yorker. This book, Joy Ride, represents some sort of greatest hits from the long features he published in the marbled, memorialising pages of that greatest weekly on earth. It’s a privilege to read. Indeed the reader is left wishing it were longer and that Lahr’s publishers had not prevented him from touching on ground he had turned over before.
It’s a pity, for example, there’s nothing about Barry Humphries, one of Lahr’s greatest enthusiasms, though he does sneak in a reference to Dame Edna sending him paralytic with her lack of piety. Nor the portrait of Ian McKellen at the time of the international Lear tour which came here and included a cryptic double entendre on the actor’s part (“Often licked, never beaten’’).
Lahr’s writing about the theatre means something of grandeur receives its appropriate memorial. Not least when you wanted to see the legendary 2003 Long Day’s Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy.
A friend said it was the highlight of his New York holiday, but the rapture had been underwritten by Lahr. The back of this book quotes Arthur Miller: “By far the best thing about my stuff I’ve ever read.” When you look inside there is this extract from Lahr’s review of Miller’s A View from the Bridge:
The revival of Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge … is … a kind of theatrical lightning bolt that sizzles and startles … illuminating the poetry in the play’s prose and the subtlety in its streamlined construction … this is one of the best productions of his work that I’ve ever seen … [Liev] Schreiber brings to the role … a sense of his own unresolved nature, an inchoate longing that makes him a perfect emotional fit for Eddie. As Catherine, [Scarlett] Johansson is a superb object for Schreiber’s ambivalent desire ... in a Robin’s-egg-blue sweater and a form-fitting grey skirt, she glows with ripeness and an alertness to life … her face is a detailed map of Catherine’s internal climate — her loyalty, her gratitude, her eagerness, her rebelliousness against Eddie’s petty tyrannies, and her insistence on her own desires …
This is preceded by a grand profile of Miller written to coincide with a 1999 production of Death of a Salesman with Dennehy, which is one of the finest things I’ve seen on stage.
The profile is palpably the work of the Lahr, who went on to write Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2015), a biography of the playwright that is never liable to be equalled let alone surpassed.
On Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), he writes: “In the economic upheavals of the thirties … plays held a mirror up to the external world, not an internal one. But in the post-war boom, Tennessee Williams ... suddenly found an audience and struck a deep new chord in American life. The plays were subjective, poetic, symbolic, they made a myth of the self, not of social remedies.’’
This is Lahr’s chosen ground and it works with the magnificence that prevails in the Williams biography. You do wonder, however, if the existential emphasis is overplayed a bit. Lahr happens to be married to that one-time comic legend Connie Booth (Polly in Fawlty Towers), who gave up comedy to become a psychotherapist. And sometimes Lahr sounds just a bit heavy in his emphasis on the interior life.
Here he is on Ingmar Bergman:
… through this mist of unhappiness another kind of joy is discernible — in the audacity of Bergman’s camera, in the vigour of his argument against evasion of all kinds, and in the ruthless (and sometimes humorous) penetration into the contradictory drives of human nature. Before Bergman, film was mostly about what could be seen and depicted in the external world. Very little of important cinema was psychological: it was wars, chases, situation comedy. Bergman was the first filmmaker to build a whole oeuvre through the elaboration of the internal world — to make visible the invisible drama of the self.
This doesn’t make much sense. Wars, chases, situation comedy hardly fits the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu or Max Ophuls or Carl Theodor Dreyer or Luchino Visconti or anyone else. Even in his own backyard it hardly fits A Streetcar Named Desire or Citizen Kane or very much of merit. Did Shakespeare find that war or action inhibited the representation of the heart or mind? Did John Ford? Did Leo Tolstoy?
Lahr needs to think more in terms of degrees and intensities and modulations rather than exclusive categories. What’s wonderfully cheering, though, is his evaluation of Bergman as a theatre-maker. He provides a superb account of Bergman’s production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope (as well as its companion pieces The Winter’s Tale and Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade.) Bergman’s Misanthrope, he writes, “is both a wonderful comedy of manners and a subtle dissection of the nature of manners themselves. ... Taken together these are the finest displays of stagecraft I have ever seen.”
Interesting too that his judgment of Mike Nichols’s 2012 production of Death of a Salesman, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, accords with Peter Corrigan, the Australian architect and stage designer, who told me it was the greatest theatre he had seen.
Joy Ride is full of wonderful things people have said to Lahr. There’s a fine essay about that strange, luminous writer-actor Wallace Shawn, whose father, William, was the most legendary of New Yorker editors. “Shawn has had access to nearly everyone. He could get the script of My Dinner with Andre to Louis Malle within days of its completion and have Malle accept it immediately; he could invoke Henry Kissinger in Aunt Dan and Lemon and then lunch with him at the Four Seasons to discuss it.’’
Sometimes you wish Lahr was less intent on ideas and would let himself go in the description of acting, like Kenneth Tynan, whom he wrote a book about. He says of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello that he “brings to the character a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation. He parses the Shakespearean verse with an African lilt, which, while it retains the familiarity of the music, continually reminds the audience that a foreigner is speaking.”
Yes, the Kofi Annan voice certainly does that, but going on the Naxos spoken word recording of the production the effect is a bit unhelpful, as Shakespeare built Othello’s exotic character into his language, and although it’s marvellous when the actor playing him has a voice with the depth of a Paul Robeson or James Earl Jones, he shouldn’t sound like someone who is not a native speaker. The character who says “Put up your bright swords for the dew will rust them” sounds like one of the lords of language. And the phony “Africarn” accent didn’t help, fine actor though Ejiofor is.
Lahr, son of American actor Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, is intoxicated by every level of theatre, the commercial as much as the classical, and is imaginatively alive to the sheer extent of the worlds encompassed.
There’s an interesting essay about Trevor Nunn’s production Oklahoma! in which Lahr argues that Rodgers and Hammerstein invented a kind of musical theatre in which “big names were no longer needed to carry the show; the show itself was the star ... They had created the musical equivalent of the interchangeable part which ensured a sort of quality control.”
This needs a bit of unpacking. Where your leads are mainly personable singers — sub-operatic but vocally high-powered — this will have an element of truth. But as the Rogers and Hammerstein musical developed, it used the biggest stars. The original Emile De Becque in South Pacific was Ezio Pinza, who was Bruno Walters’s Don Giovanni, and Mary Martin, who was no characterless warbler but an actress-singer, played Nellie Forbrush. Lerner and Lowe followed this tradition and used to great effect the huge star who couldn’t sing (Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, Richard Burton as King Arthur in Camelot) in combination with that unique singer Julie Andrews.
The anonymity principle has its funny sidelights, however. The CD of the Nunn revival of Oklahoma! didn’t even have the performers’ names on the cover of the album. And who sang Curly? Some fellow called Hugh Jackman.
But Lahr has the great advantage of living in London while writing about New York shows. “To the English … the American mutant breed of optimism is a sure sign of emotional aberration … American optimism has its root in abundance and in the vastness of the land that Oklahoma! celebrates. Britain, on the other hand, is an island the size of Utah. Its culture is one of scarcity; its preferred idiom is irony — a language of limits. In the retranslation of an English version of an American musical to its natural Broadway habitat, an emotional lopsidedness has become evident particularly in the casting.” Well, maybe. But everybody has been saying that Imelda Staunton in Gypsy a couple of years ago was better than the collective memory of anybody, including Ethel Merman. Mad, lethal and real.
And isn’t it really that tension between the classical and the romantic, the exquisitely cooked and the vibrantly raw, that has dominated the Anglo-American theatre we inherit?
At the end of the day, though, it’s Lahr’s theatre-sketch phrasemaking that enchants the reader. He talks about a production of Sam Shepherd’s True West with the “craggy, brilliant John C. Reilly” but then says the other brother is “played by the incomparable interpreter of introverted fury, Philip Seymour Hoffman”.
The phrase captures memories that are ineradicable and make us weep for the loss of a great actor. A critic can hardly hope to do more.
Peter Craven is a cultural critic.
Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals
By John Lahr
Bloomsbury, 569pp, $19.99
www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/joy-ride-lives-of-the-theatricals-john-lahrs-true-romance/news-story/7675aaa8156a49f73ea17337747d015a
Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals: John Lahr’s true romance
Peter Craven
The Australian
12:00AM February 11, 2017
For 20 years John Lahr wrote about theatre for The New Yorker. This book, Joy Ride, represents some sort of greatest hits from the long features he published in the marbled, memorialising pages of that greatest weekly on earth. It’s a privilege to read. Indeed the reader is left wishing it were longer and that Lahr’s publishers had not prevented him from touching on ground he had turned over before.
It’s a pity, for example, there’s nothing about Barry Humphries, one of Lahr’s greatest enthusiasms, though he does sneak in a reference to Dame Edna sending him paralytic with her lack of piety. Nor the portrait of Ian McKellen at the time of the international Lear tour which came here and included a cryptic double entendre on the actor’s part (“Often licked, never beaten’’).
Lahr’s writing about the theatre means something of grandeur receives its appropriate memorial. Not least when you wanted to see the legendary 2003 Long Day’s Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy.
A friend said it was the highlight of his New York holiday, but the rapture had been underwritten by Lahr. The back of this book quotes Arthur Miller: “By far the best thing about my stuff I’ve ever read.” When you look inside there is this extract from Lahr’s review of Miller’s A View from the Bridge:
The revival of Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge … is … a kind of theatrical lightning bolt that sizzles and startles … illuminating the poetry in the play’s prose and the subtlety in its streamlined construction … this is one of the best productions of his work that I’ve ever seen … [Liev] Schreiber brings to the role … a sense of his own unresolved nature, an inchoate longing that makes him a perfect emotional fit for Eddie. As Catherine, [Scarlett] Johansson is a superb object for Schreiber’s ambivalent desire ... in a Robin’s-egg-blue sweater and a form-fitting grey skirt, she glows with ripeness and an alertness to life … her face is a detailed map of Catherine’s internal climate — her loyalty, her gratitude, her eagerness, her rebelliousness against Eddie’s petty tyrannies, and her insistence on her own desires …
This is preceded by a grand profile of Miller written to coincide with a 1999 production of Death of a Salesman with Dennehy, which is one of the finest things I’ve seen on stage.
The profile is palpably the work of the Lahr, who went on to write Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (2015), a biography of the playwright that is never liable to be equalled let alone surpassed.
On Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), he writes: “In the economic upheavals of the thirties … plays held a mirror up to the external world, not an internal one. But in the post-war boom, Tennessee Williams ... suddenly found an audience and struck a deep new chord in American life. The plays were subjective, poetic, symbolic, they made a myth of the self, not of social remedies.’’
This is Lahr’s chosen ground and it works with the magnificence that prevails in the Williams biography. You do wonder, however, if the existential emphasis is overplayed a bit. Lahr happens to be married to that one-time comic legend Connie Booth (Polly in Fawlty Towers), who gave up comedy to become a psychotherapist. And sometimes Lahr sounds just a bit heavy in his emphasis on the interior life.
Here he is on Ingmar Bergman:
… through this mist of unhappiness another kind of joy is discernible — in the audacity of Bergman’s camera, in the vigour of his argument against evasion of all kinds, and in the ruthless (and sometimes humorous) penetration into the contradictory drives of human nature. Before Bergman, film was mostly about what could be seen and depicted in the external world. Very little of important cinema was psychological: it was wars, chases, situation comedy. Bergman was the first filmmaker to build a whole oeuvre through the elaboration of the internal world — to make visible the invisible drama of the self.
This doesn’t make much sense. Wars, chases, situation comedy hardly fits the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu or Max Ophuls or Carl Theodor Dreyer or Luchino Visconti or anyone else. Even in his own backyard it hardly fits A Streetcar Named Desire or Citizen Kane or very much of merit. Did Shakespeare find that war or action inhibited the representation of the heart or mind? Did John Ford? Did Leo Tolstoy?
Lahr needs to think more in terms of degrees and intensities and modulations rather than exclusive categories. What’s wonderfully cheering, though, is his evaluation of Bergman as a theatre-maker. He provides a superb account of Bergman’s production of Moliere’s The Misanthrope (as well as its companion pieces The Winter’s Tale and Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade.) Bergman’s Misanthrope, he writes, “is both a wonderful comedy of manners and a subtle dissection of the nature of manners themselves. ... Taken together these are the finest displays of stagecraft I have ever seen.”
Interesting too that his judgment of Mike Nichols’s 2012 production of Death of a Salesman, with Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, accords with Peter Corrigan, the Australian architect and stage designer, who told me it was the greatest theatre he had seen.
Joy Ride is full of wonderful things people have said to Lahr. There’s a fine essay about that strange, luminous writer-actor Wallace Shawn, whose father, William, was the most legendary of New Yorker editors. “Shawn has had access to nearly everyone. He could get the script of My Dinner with Andre to Louis Malle within days of its completion and have Malle accept it immediately; he could invoke Henry Kissinger in Aunt Dan and Lemon and then lunch with him at the Four Seasons to discuss it.’’
Sometimes you wish Lahr was less intent on ideas and would let himself go in the description of acting, like Kenneth Tynan, whom he wrote a book about. He says of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Othello that he “brings to the character a natural nobility and a decency that are a kind of poetic revelation. He parses the Shakespearean verse with an African lilt, which, while it retains the familiarity of the music, continually reminds the audience that a foreigner is speaking.”
Yes, the Kofi Annan voice certainly does that, but going on the Naxos spoken word recording of the production the effect is a bit unhelpful, as Shakespeare built Othello’s exotic character into his language, and although it’s marvellous when the actor playing him has a voice with the depth of a Paul Robeson or James Earl Jones, he shouldn’t sound like someone who is not a native speaker. The character who says “Put up your bright swords for the dew will rust them” sounds like one of the lords of language. And the phony “Africarn” accent didn’t help, fine actor though Ejiofor is.
Lahr, son of American actor Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, is intoxicated by every level of theatre, the commercial as much as the classical, and is imaginatively alive to the sheer extent of the worlds encompassed.
There’s an interesting essay about Trevor Nunn’s production Oklahoma! in which Lahr argues that Rodgers and Hammerstein invented a kind of musical theatre in which “big names were no longer needed to carry the show; the show itself was the star ... They had created the musical equivalent of the interchangeable part which ensured a sort of quality control.”
This needs a bit of unpacking. Where your leads are mainly personable singers — sub-operatic but vocally high-powered — this will have an element of truth. But as the Rogers and Hammerstein musical developed, it used the biggest stars. The original Emile De Becque in South Pacific was Ezio Pinza, who was Bruno Walters’s Don Giovanni, and Mary Martin, who was no characterless warbler but an actress-singer, played Nellie Forbrush. Lerner and Lowe followed this tradition and used to great effect the huge star who couldn’t sing (Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, Richard Burton as King Arthur in Camelot) in combination with that unique singer Julie Andrews.
The anonymity principle has its funny sidelights, however. The CD of the Nunn revival of Oklahoma! didn’t even have the performers’ names on the cover of the album. And who sang Curly? Some fellow called Hugh Jackman.
But Lahr has the great advantage of living in London while writing about New York shows. “To the English … the American mutant breed of optimism is a sure sign of emotional aberration … American optimism has its root in abundance and in the vastness of the land that Oklahoma! celebrates. Britain, on the other hand, is an island the size of Utah. Its culture is one of scarcity; its preferred idiom is irony — a language of limits. In the retranslation of an English version of an American musical to its natural Broadway habitat, an emotional lopsidedness has become evident particularly in the casting.” Well, maybe. But everybody has been saying that Imelda Staunton in Gypsy a couple of years ago was better than the collective memory of anybody, including Ethel Merman. Mad, lethal and real.
And isn’t it really that tension between the classical and the romantic, the exquisitely cooked and the vibrantly raw, that has dominated the Anglo-American theatre we inherit?
At the end of the day, though, it’s Lahr’s theatre-sketch phrasemaking that enchants the reader. He talks about a production of Sam Shepherd’s True West with the “craggy, brilliant John C. Reilly” but then says the other brother is “played by the incomparable interpreter of introverted fury, Philip Seymour Hoffman”.
The phrase captures memories that are ineradicable and make us weep for the loss of a great actor. A critic can hardly hope to do more.
Peter Craven is a cultural critic.
Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals
By John Lahr
Bloomsbury, 569pp, $19.99
