Category: New York City

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The Confidante Game: Trading on That Old Acquaintance

Well, here’s an acquaintance worth making. Old Acquaintance, that is, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of which is currently in previews at the American Airlines Theatre. Judging from the walkers and hearing aids on display at last Tuesday’s performance—not to mention the gas passed noisily in the lobby—I suspect that quite a few of the folks in attendance that evening got to see John Van Druten’s comedy during its original run back in 1940-41, while some of the friends of Dorothy’s we passed in the aisle were most likely on intimate terms with the 1943 film adaptation starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, two leading ladies on less than friendly terms.

Whether or not you (think you) are familiar with this story of a longtime rivalry redefined as friendship, the Roundabout production is likely to teach you a lesson or two about the nature of that least clearly defined of social compacts and about Hollywood’s (s)elective affinities with Broadway.

I caught up with Vincent Sherman’s soon-to-be-remade melodrama (and one of its radio versions) only after seeing the play, which made me appreciate the stage version’s maturity all the more. Van Druten, who was involved in the screen adaptation of Old Acquaintance, sure learned how to compromise in order to make it in Tinseltown. That he turned his sparkling comedy into an even larger crowd-pleasing sentimental melodrama is all the more remarkable considering that the English playwright’s first drama, Young Woodley (1925), had initially been banned in Britain for its treatment of sexual awakening. Production code conformity in the case of Old Acquaintance—as in most cases—meant turning mature women with careers as well as sex lives into silly girls or stoic old maids.

The silly girl in the Hollywood version is Miriam Hopkins, whose Millie is so envious of the publicity enjoyed her novelist friend Kit that she, however ill equipped for literary fame, turns to the writing of romances. The old maid is Bette Davis, whose romantically luckless Kit is willing to hand down her much younger lover to Millie’s daughter, Deidre, for which sacrifice she is duly rewarded with a cup of human kindness, shared with a remorseful Millie by the fire that warms them when the heat of passion is no longer in the Hallmark cards.

All this bears little resemblance to Van Druten’s original three-act play, a witty, tightly constructed comedy of manners. As one astute online reviewer of the movie points out, it becomes difficult to understand why Kit and Mollie became such old acquaintances once their careers are pushed into the background. In the stage play, it is Millie who, though a trash novelist herself, enjoys Kit’s respect as a keen and candid editor of Kit’s ponderous, overly analytic storytelling. However different in temperament, Kit and Mollie come across as equals, which explains at once their closeness and their rivalry.

On stage, Old Acquaintance echoes La Rochefoucauld’s maxims that friendship is “nothing but a transaction from which the self always means to gain something” and that in the “misfortunes of our friends we always find something that isn’t displeasing to us.” Concurring with the latter, satirist Jonathan Swift remarked about his relationship with fellow authors:

To all my Foes, dear Fortune, send
Thy Gifts, but never to my Friend:
I tamely can endure the first,
But, this with Envy makes me burst.

In the 2007 Broadway revival, Margaret Colin’s Kit is less pathetic than Davis’s, while Harris’s portrayal of Mollie is more sympathetic than that of Hopkins (who reprised her role, opposite miscast Alexis Smith, in the 29 May 1944 Lux Radio Theatre production). If not nearly as assured and brilliant in her comic timing or line reading as Rosalind Russell, with whom in mind the rights to Old Acquaintance were secured by Warner Brothers, Colin is both real and regal. Davis, who was asked to drop her pajamas to expose her less-than-glamorous legs, is matronly by comparison, suggesting that she sacrificed her juvenile beau to play surrogate mother to her best friend’s daughter.

The marvellous Harriet Harris, in turn, hands Millie back her brains. Whereas Hopkins’s character comes across as an impulsive, overgrown schoolgirl, spiteful and pouting, Harris’s Millie is calculating, smart, and rather dangerous (not unlike her Tony Award winning Mrs. Meers, in Thoroughly Modern Millie and her scheming Felicia Tilman in Desperate Housewives). Not content to see her best friend succeed, Millie intends to succeed her in fame and fortune. Her dramatic outbursts are an expression of her frustration when she realizes that the unmarried and childless Kit is not only a better mother to her daughter, but that she might also have been a better, and more desirable wife to her former husband.

If you prefer expensive theatre seats to cheap Hollywood sentiment, the revival of Old Acquaintance is your ticket.

[At the time of writing this I was as yet unaware that, before becoming a playwright, John Van Druten taught in Aberystwyth, the Welsh town to which I relocated from New York City in 2004.]

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"Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow": A Hint from The Fantasticks

Well, “[i]t’s stupid, of course,” and “immensely undignified”; perhaps, “I’ve gone mad.” That is how lovelorn Matt, pining for Luisa, the girl next door, explains his “situation” in The Fantasticks. Earlier this week, I had the good fortune to catch up with the off-Broadway revival of this Mousetrap among the musicals. The current production is staged at the less than enchanting sounding Snapple Theater Center (soon to be renamed after actor Jerry Orbach), a suitably small venue for this intimate play (music by Harvey Schmidt; book and lyrics by Tom Jones, who, nearly fifty years after its conception, still performs in it, night after night, albeit under an assumed name).

I was particularly receptive to the wit and wisdom and whimsy of this literary charmer about love and make-believe, disillusionment and romantic rekindling, to the gentle reminder expressed in “Try to Remember,” the show’s best known tune:

Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.

I had just made up my mind to cancel my flight back home to Wales in order stay in New York City until such time as my one and only would come and fetch me and spend a few days together in the city where we first met. It seems that you can have your Big Apple and eat it, after all.

My appeal to “follow” has not fallen of deaf ears. Like Matt, who’s gone out into the world and left his Luisa behind, I can now look forward to a cheerful reunion and the confidence of we’ll-take-it-from-here. Never mind that I am no longer as agile as former American Idol contestant Anthony Fedorov (who plays Matt) and that my Luisa sings as loudly as he snores and tends to sprout hairs on his back. Still, anyone with a sense of wonder, a penchant for “Metaphor” and a love “[b]etter far than [it]” will not have to stretch or struggle to relate to their story.

“[T]ry to see it,” the Narrator encourages the audience: “Not with your eyes, for they are wise, / But see it with your ears.” It may look “mad” to the world, but my act of folly sure sounds like something to remember once the chill of December comes round. The rest will “follow.”

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If Momma Was Buried: The Gypsies of Grey Gardens

Well, I did not sit around for the no doubt excruciatingly drawn out season finale of American Idol, especially not after Tuesday night’s less than scintillating showdown. Instead, I snatched up tickets for Grey Gardens, Broadway’s current musical must-see. Relying on the New York City subway system, I very nearly the opening scenes. A signal problem and the uncertainty of its timely solution convinced me to alight on Fifth Avenue and 59th, giving me a mere twelve minutes to make a dash for it—past the throngs of sailors in town for the 20th annual Fleet Week—all the way to the Walter Kerr Theater, not far from which venue former Idol Fantasia Barrino stares at passers-by from a giant display for The Color Purple.

After assuring those uneasy about the implications of the beads of sweat on my shiny forehead, that I had used Dial, I squeezed into my allotted space, fanning myself with the playbill, just as Grey Gardens opened its gates, rusty and unhinged. What awaited me was the perfect antidote to the excesses of late 20th and early 21st-century Broadway, which is alive but far from well with the sound of Andrew Lloyd Webberish bombast, with the flashy, the vapid, and the utterly pointless (Legally Blonde, the musical, anyone?). The melancholy and darkly funny Gardens defies this trend; neither Christine Ebersole nor Mary Louise Wilson enter the stage in a helicopter, belt out generic power ballads, or give big names a bad one.

Now, there is nothing novel about the play, inspired by the lives of the Camelot-and-went-nowhere Bouviers, aunt and niece of Jacqueline Onassis, who became the subject of a 1975 documentary (which, my paper fan informed me, is now being dramatized for the screen). The titular mansion is filled with echoes of past lives, fictional and otherwise, which is not to say that it is Gardens variety.

The intrigues and conspiracies of eccentric old dears has long been the stuff of dark comedy and melodrama: those Ladies in Retirement come to mind (and was heard on the Lux Radio Theatre, as do Arsenic and Old Lace (adapted for radio’s Screen Guild Theater), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and radio dramas assortment of weird “Sisters” (such as Lurene Tuttle and Rosalind Russell in a Suspense thriller bearing that title). In musical terms, Gardens is Rose missing her turn and turning her socialite daughter into a spinster maid. Edith and daughter Edie are two “Peas” gone to pot.

Above all, Gardens is a character study. To say that it is neither “little old lady land” camp nor Miss Havisham Gothic is not to imply that it misses any opportunity to give us the tour of a house build on ambitions shattered into lost chances, a house out touch with the times even at the best of times, from its Republican heyday during the Roosevelt administration to its decline in the ’60s and ’70s. Gardens is also refreshingly post-Postmodern, which is to say that the show is reflective rather than self-reflexive. So, get out there and smell the faded flowers. Just don’t count on the subway to take you there.

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Transatlantic Call: From Radio Reportage to Video Conferencing

Now, I am not going to get all sentimental and give you the old “tempus fugit” spiel; but I’d like to mention, in passing, that this post (the 355th entry into the journal) marks the beginning of a third year for broadcastellan. Meanwhile, I am resting with a bad back—in the city that never sleeps, of all places. This afternoon, during an inaugural transatlantic video conference with my two faithful companions back home in Wales, my mind excused itself from my heart and took off in reflections about the ways in which technology has assisted in forging a bond between the US and its close ally across the pond, and the degree to which such tele-communal forgings may come across as mere forgeries when compared to the real thing of an actual encounter.

I was reminded of this again when, a few hours after my chat, I sat, as of old, on a bench by the East River, in a park named after Carl Schurz, a fellow German gone west who likened our ideals to the stars that, however far beyond our touch, yet assist those guided by them to “reach their goal.” In my hand was a signed copy of a newly purchased biography of Edward R. Murrow (by Bob Edwards). It opens with Murrow’s report from the blitz on London, Murrow’s residence during the war.

The broadcasts from London (as featured and discussed here by Jim Widner) did much to enhance the American public’s understanding of the plight of a people, who, due to Hollywood’s portrayal of the British, seemed stuck-up, remote, and about as real as the fog in which Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce waded through some of their adventures. Reports from Britain not only brought home a Kingdom but a concept—the notion of brotherhood untainted by the nationalism whose fervor was responsible for the war.

If not as emotional as Herbert Morrison’s report from Lakehurst during the explosion of the Hindenburg, Murrow’s updates from London were delivered by a compassionate journalist who not only listened in but was a part of what he related while on location. On this day, 21 May, in 1950, British novelist Elizabeth Bowen connected wirelessly with her American audience by speaking via transcription on NBC radio’s University Theater. Bowen referred to her novel The House in Paris (1935) as “New York’s child,” the “fruit of the stimulus, the release, the excitement [she] had received here.” Would she have been able to enter into the feelings of a child lost in a strange house, she wondered, if she “had not just returned from another city, equally new and significant to me?”

There are limits to the connections achieved by the wireless, a controlled remoteness that brings home ideas without ever feeling quite like it. Rather than seeing or hearing, being there is believing. I felt far away during my transatlantic call; but I know I will know what home is now once I get back there . . .

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“Yankee Doodle went to town” . . . and That Is Where You’ll Find Him

Well, call me a “dirty rat,” but I’ve never paid much attention to this memorial on East 91 Street (or “James Cagney Place,” to be precise), a mere two blocks from where I used to live. The everyday renders much what surrounds us invisible; so, I’m going to make some noise for the old “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the tribute to whom I now see with eyes accustomed to the green hills of Wales. Say, just how Welsh is the old New Yorker? Taking advantage of the wireless network I am gleefully tapping, I reencountered the aforementioned Cagney in an adaptation of Night Must Fall by Welsh playwright Emlyn Williams (previously discussed here). On American radio, the role of Danny, the charming psychopath, was most frequently played by Robert Montgomery, who also starred in the 1937 screen version. As it turns out, Cagney does not sound unlike Montgomery, which is to say, rather Irish than, as Williams prescribed it, “more Welsh than anything else.”

Among the other radio-related finds of the day were fine copies of Earle McGill’s Radio Directing (1940) and Harrison B. Summer’s Thirty-Year History of Radio Programs, 1926-1956 (1971), the latter of which I consulted so frequently while writing my doctoral study on old-time radio. Both volumes sat on the shelves of the Strand bookstore on 828 Broadway, which is well worth a visit for anyone who enjoys browsing for unusual books. A few blocks away, I found a copy of Once Upon a Time (for a mere $4.99); I have long wanted to catch up with this comedy. After all, it is based on Norman Corwin’s radio fantasy (“My Client, Curley” (previously discussed here).

Meanwhile, night is falling on Manhattan. Time to leave the old wireless alone and go out for a drink . . .

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George Gershwin, "Composer of the Week"

Well, I gave up on it years ago. I lost touch, or the desire to catch up with it. With Pop music, I mean. You know, whatever it is that is being presented to you as the latest and therefore presumably the hottest. The “hottest” is rarely what anyone tells you it is; it is something you’ve got to discover for yourself, no matter how odd, old, or remote it may be from current, industry-generated trends. Trends are for those too inert to develop an individual taste, those who listen, wear, read or see whatever sly marketers have styled “stylish.” There’s a lot of this trendsetting by proxy going on in the blogosphere, which has at last turned into an extension of the advertising racket.

I do not feel sorry for web journalists who go in for and are let down by schemes that promise them a few bucks, at the mere mention of which they forsake their integrity and turn hawkers. No, I do not pity them—I despise them for subjecting me to what can only be described as more or less inept infomercials. For once, amateurs and professionals alike, writers and artists with a creative impulse quickened by exhibitionism are given a chance to publish and display whatever they please, whenever they choose, without any interference from patrons or sponsors. Never before has such an opportunity presented itself to so many. Why squander it all to become a mouthpiece for someone else, rather than your own product, idea, or person?

However incompetent in the arts of self-promotion, I am not averse to conjuring the entrepreneurial spirit; nor am I condemning advertising outright. If that were the case, I could hardly endure, let alone enjoy, American radio drama, the first entertainment designed to sell something above and beside itself. It just ain’t for me, this kind of double-dealing. Instead, I relish in the freedom of sharing whatever crosses my path or tickles my still sensitive fancy. And (commercial free) BBC Radio 3 is certainly doing some tickling these days: its “Composer of the Week” is George Gershwin, a song plugger (some kind of human demo tape) who Tin Pan Alley-ooped himself to the top of the perennial pops.

A tuneful if cursory biography of the composer and the many people who shaped his career (Astaire, Max Dreyfuss, Paul Whiteman and Walter Damrosch, impersonated by accomplished if unidentified radio actors, including Kenny Delmar, Frank Readick, Tom Collins, and Agnes Moorehead) was presented on the Cavalcade of America program on 27 February 1939, a year and half after after Gershwin’s death.

I developed a taste for Gershwin’s music some five decades later when a close friend of mine, himself formerly in show business, invited me to see the cheerful pastiche Crazy for You on Broadway (the above poster, signed by the entire cast, being a memento of that memorable event). Now, I have seen plenty of musical theater since then, anything from Show Boat and Gypsy to Sweeney Todd and The Drowsy Chaperone; but no show has left me humming quite as many long familiar yet ever thrilling tunes as Crazy for You, cleverly billed as a “New Gerswhin Musical Comedy.” Now, I don’t know how I might have felt about it had I seen Pia Zadora and Brady Bunch alumna Ann B. Davis in it (the latter getting far more requests for autographs than the former); let’s just say I was lucky to have experienced it being performed by the original cast.

The five broadcasts of BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week series are a serviceable introduction to Gershwin’s works, featuring the voices of Fred and Adele Astaire (“Fascinating Rhythm,” “So Am I”), Al Jolson (the inevitable “Swanee”), Ukulele Ike (“Lady, Be Good!”), Ella Fitzgerald (“The Man I Love”), Audrey Hepburn (“How Long Has This Been Going On”), excerpts from Of Thee I Sing, Strike Up the Band, Porgy and Bess—and plenty of Gershwin at the piano.

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Delayed Exposure: A Man, a Monument, and a Musical

Well, I don’t know why I took it. This picture, I mean. Over the years, I must have walked past that plaque hundreds of times without paying attention to it. A few months ago, returning for a visit to my old neighborhood in Manhattan, it insisted I take notice at last. I went to an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. Erected in memory of the journalist W. T. Stead, this modest cenotaph stands opposite the museum, on the Central Park side of the avenue. I had no knowledge and little interest in the life of Mr. Stead, which (the plaque tells you as much) ended spectacularly aboard the Titanic. Last weekend, some three months after my return from New York, the man insinuated himself into my life once again, this time in the guise of a character in a Welsh musical.

Amazing Grace, staged at the local Arts Centre, tells the story of Evan Roberts, a Welsh miner turned preacher who, in the words of Mr. Stead, became the “central figure” of the early 20th-century “religious awakening in Wales.” Stead followed the movement, interviewed Roberts, and reported about this so-called Welsh Revival. In Mal Pope’s play, he appropriately serves as narrator and commentator on Roberts’s fabulous rise and his equally sudden disappearance from public view.

Unfortunately, Stead doesn’t get all that much to say or sing about Roberts, and the musical, which, in this particular production, featured the aforementioned Peter Karrie as a fierce reverend envious of the enigmatic upstart, suffers from a serious case of anticlimax: whether daunted by his fame or no longer driven to preach, Roberts simply shuts up—a silencing that doesn’t make for a rousing finale.

Unimpressed by Pope’s 1980s-styled power ballads and his by-the-numbers approach to biography, I was easily and gratefully distracted when I saw Mr. Stead walking across the stage and back into my conscious, as if to demand the leading role denied to him in this production. Now I find myself compelled to follow up on Stead’s life and writings.

As it turns out, Stead was fascinated by the spiritual, by premonition and second sight, by ghostly doubles and “long-distance telepathy.” For instance, he wrote about a case in which a telegram, then presumably the fastest means of telecommunication, was several hours slower in conveying a story than a message alleged to have been transmitted by a “disembodied spirit.” It is the extra-scientific (rather than the supernatural) speculated about by those growing up in the age of Darwin, an age of industrialism and shattered systems of belief.

Researching Etherized Victorians, my study on old-time radio, I came across one such comment on modernity by one of Stead’s contemporaries, Rudyard Kipling, whose 1902 short story “Wireless” marvels at psychic phenomena while questioning scientific progress: telepathy as the ultimate wireless connection.

It seems Mr. Stead is anxious to continue the debate from the beyond. I have unwittingly become a ghost writer for the late journalist; recalling him to life in word and image, I am merely his chosen amanuensis.

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Manhattan Transcript: Why The Drowsy Chaperone Might Have Done Well on the Air

Well, there I was this afternoon, walking Montague, our terrier, and picking sloes along the lane near our house halfway up in the Welsh hills. I was walking him in order to get to the sloes, truth be told. Unlike Montague, though, the sloes won’t be seen again until Christmas, as I learned, much to my dismay, after having spent half an hour pricking them. I had heard of a Sloe Gin some time ago; but I always assumed it to be spelled “slow” and work as fast as the regular kind. Now I know that my ear hadn’t led me altogether astray, considering that it will take so long to appreciate this potent concoction. At any rate, a predilection for booze is something I share with that celebrated Broadway dame known as The Drowsy Chaperone, who may currently be seen failing her charge in the Tony Award-winning “Musical Within a Comedy” of the same name, a show that reminded me of my love not only for stiff drinks but old-fashioned radio drama.

I might not have learned about The Drowsy Chaperone had it not been for some of my New York City pals, some of whom work in the theater. Now, Broadway isn’t exactly “My Beat.” As much as I enjoy “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” (a West End Sound of Music audition-turned-TV reality show starring Andrew Lloyd Webber presently unfolding on BBC television), I am rather selective in my choice of musical treats. I would not be caught dead watching Cats, to be sure, and have refused to attend a performance of Phantom even when a close friend of mine was one of its featured actors on Broadway.

A few years ago, I enjoyed Drowsy Chaperone‘s leading lady Sutton Foster in a revival of Thoroughly Modern Millie, and her presence, as long as it does not remind me of Leslie Caron (as indeed it sometimes does), suffices to make me shell out some $75, the highest price I have yet paid for a TKTS ticket, to see a show that is an amusing trifle rather than a certified classic.

Now, on that particular night (the date of which you may glean from the ticket displayed above), Ms. Foster was rather subdued and lackluster. Too bad, considering that her “Show Off” routine is the smartest number in the whole production, which opens with Mary Tyler Moore alumna Gloria Engel going on about her “Fancy Dress,” a tune that is insipid rather than comically inspired. Worse still, the eponymous character (the Drowsy one) was played by an understudy, as that dreaded white slip in my Playbill informed me. Understudy, in this case, meant second best. Luckily, the same was not true for the whole production.

There is a self-reflexivity about The Drowsy Chaperone that is so subtle and commercially slick as to render this musical comedy charming rather than clever. In fact, the play struck me as decidedly dumb—in a manner that ingratiates instead of irritates. The smartest thing about it all is the opening of the play and its concept. After all, The Drowsy Chaperone begins in utter darkness, with the voice of a middle-aged Broadway aficionado (who, traditionally, does not speak in a booming baritone) telling you about the costly experience of going to the theater these days before sharing a record (vinyl, no less) from his collection of show tunes.

One of those forgotten gems is The Drowsy Chaperone, the forgotten (and entirely fictional) 1929 musical our host (the “Man in a Chair”) has never seen but imagined often enough sitting in front of his outmoded home entertainment system and listening to an old and not altogether groove-proof record in his rundown New York City apartment. As he tells the audience about the show, the impressions made by the recording come to life and The Drowsy Chaperone materializes before us as it presumably might come alive in our MC’s mind. Of course, for seventy-five bucks or more, we demand to see our theater. Most of us go to a Broadway show for sheer dazzle, not dialectics. We rely on Off-off Broadway for the subversive and provocative—and the clear demarcation makes it easy for most to avoid such intellectual challenges.

And yet, nothing I saw onstage quite matched the excitement or warranted the enthusiasm of that middle-aged man (wonderfully portrayed by Bob Martin), an unassuming cardigan-clad homebody whose visions, no doubt, were more potent than anything devised by the set designers of this show. I wonder how theatregoers might have reacted had the scene been cast in darkness for the entire eighty-odd minutes (a short enough time for a Broadway play). They might have concurred with the guy.

Aside from “Show Off,” “Accident Waiting to Happen” and the surprising “Message from a Nightingale,” The Drowsy Chaperone wasn’t all that much to look at. Then again, who would pay this much for a single radio play? The eyes had it, as usual—but they did not quite have their fill . . .

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Manhattan Transcript: Why Oliver Stone Left Me Cold

Well, I am back in town. Getting here (from Wales) was a considerably less sentimental journey than Oliver Stone’s journeyman tribute to the city and its indomitable spirit—and a far more telling reminder of the changes resulting not just from the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center but the subsequent efforts in the so-called war on terror. At our airports, unlike a court of law, we all are presumed guilty unless proven innocent. After a sleepless night in Manchester, England, I was being questioned regarding my passport, asked to provide evidence of my stay in the United Kingdom—the country where I now live and from which was about to leave.

Although issued in London and stating my residence as being Wales, my German passport marks me as a visitor, a cosmopolitan spirit, or some such suspicious subject. Airport (in)security has made international traveling considerably more challenging of late, given the current security alerts and precautionary measures at UK and US airports. Far more than a series of inconveniences, air travel has become an endurance test for a free world locked in a system of terror and liberties impounding counter-terrors.

It seemed right for me to go see World Trade Center on its opening night here in New York City, especially since some of the proceeds will go to charity. I lived in Manhattan on the day of the attack and the anguish of its aftermath. Reminders and memorials far more eloquent and than Stone’s film lined the city’s crowded if quiet streets—candles on the doorsteps, “missing persons” photographs on the walls, and distress signals in the faces of those lingering among strangers whose presence offers some reassurance that the world had not yet come to an end. Today, the World Trade Center site (pictured above, in a photograph I took last Tuesday), is a gash in the cityscape bespeaking the pathology of terror.

Telling the events of that day from the perspective of first responders and their families, Stone’s World Trade Center struck me not merely as sentimental but spurious. Denying the politics of terror and offering instead something akin to Backdraft with a “based on a true story” tag, the film plays a game of “Good cop, bad Capra” with those who are most anxious to attack it. It refuses to be sensationalistic, but falls far short of making much sense of matters so staggering to most of us. It has nothing to share beyond the uplifting message that the human body can endure great pain if sustained by a will to live.

We all are living and fighting for the basics, for the love of someone or the passion for something—including those in our midst who love to hate us and are willing to be consumed by and give their lives for that love. It is the realization of the potential destructiveness of fierce attachments that makes terrorism such a frightening presence in our lives. It is this disconcerting realization that World Trade Center leaves out of the picture, thereby falsifying an historical event that gave rise to the passion-stirring and hate-begetting war on terror.

Unlike the riveting United 93, Stone personalizes the event, embedding the extraordinary in ordinary stories of everyday middle-class and endorsed-as-traditional family living. With a narrative structure fit for a Lifetime television movie of the week and performances so perfunctory as to collapse under the burden of sentiment they are supposed to carry, World Trade Center is an abject failure in Hollywood storytelling.

Turning a landmark event into a Hallmark card, it even manages to reduce the eponymous structure and the smoke rising from its rubble look to a poorly executed CGI effect. Given the footage we have all seen and shed tears over, this faking was most distressing to me. Then again, even the homeless and the streetwalkers—stock figures meant to suggest urban grittiness in films set in the metropolis—came across like so many Hollywood extras dressed up for the occasion.

It was distressing that I could not be made to feel anything but dissatisfaction, having suffered so greatly on that day and being generally so receptive. Other around me even burst into uneasy laughter at the sight of Jesus holding a water bottle, an image of astonishing tackiness. It is telling that the most poignant moments in the film flickered before me in news footage of the world’s response to the attack, images of people who did just what I did when the towers came down: watch in horror.

These snippets also carry the political message that Stone’s dramatizations obscure: that the world’s love for America, so evident on the day of the attack, has been squandered and that neither our homes nor the world beyond are any safer in the age of counter-terrorism.

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A New York Souvenir Is Glorious! in London

Well, I am on my way to London in a few hours, even though I have barely recovered from my trip to New York City, a souvenir of which is a lingering cold. Still, I am looking forward to a weekend in the metropolis, where I’ll be reunited with my best pal to celebrate his birthday and the twentieth anniversary of our friendship. We used to have our annual get-togethers in the Big Apple, but the Big Smoke will do.

While there, I would love for us to take in a few shows, impervious as he is to the wonders of the “wooden O.” I, for one, have had some terrific theatrical experiences lately, including a rare staging of the outrageously bloody Revenger’s Tragedy at New York City’s Red Bull Theater, an all-male production of The Winter’s Tale by the touring Propeller company, and an out-of-tuneful Broadway evening with Judy Kaye in Souvenir.

True, the 9 December issue of Entertainment Weekly did not exactly endorse Souvenir, reviewer Thom Geier calling Stephen Temperley’s play “too broad, too shallow, and far too long for [its] modest pleasures.” Still, Kaye is marvellous in the role of Florence Foster Jenkins, the tone-deaf soprano and unlikely recording artist who managed to fill seats and thrill audiences in NYC’s Carnegie Hall, unaware that many came to gawk and deride, not to admire her.

I have seen musical-comedienne Kaye several times onstage and even had an after-theater drink with her, back in November 1992, when she played Sweeney Todd‘s Mrs. Lovett at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey. Her portrayal of the real-life phenomenon that was Florence Foster Jenkins managed at once to amuse and touch me, even though Souvenir, as written by Temperley, is slight, repetitive, and less than incisive.

You’ll have to get up close and zoom in on Kaye’s features—the snare and shelter of Jenkins’s oblivion expressing itself in innocent smiles and youthful exuberance, the firm belief in her musical disabilities as she refuses to heed the at fist cautioning then caustic words from her hapless accompanist, and the terror of recognition when at last she discerns the cruel laughter of the crowd—to wrest any oomphs from Temperley’s pleasant and chuckles-filled survey of the dubious diva’s odd career. Fortunately, I sat in the third row. Anyone back on the balcony is unlikely to get half as much out of this play, which is suited to a smaller venue than Broadway’s grand Lyceum.

Upon returning to the UK, I learned that another dramatization of Jenkins’s life, conceived by another playwright (Peter Quilter), is currently playing in London. Called Glorious, this version stars Maureen Lipman, whom I have last seen opposite Ian McKellen in the pantomime Aladdin at the Old Vic. Ms. Lipman hasn’t got Kaye’s pipes, but her acting garnered some favorable notices. I am sufficiently intrigued by Jenkins’s antics to judge her performance myself later this year.

How come there are two plays running simultaneously about a 1930s New York City curiosity, a novelty act who, like those making a spectacle of themselves during last year’s American Idol auditions, has become an old joke few can recall? It is encouraging, somehow. Ready to rediscover most anything, the public might yet turn a favourable ear to the golden age of radio. I sure wouldn’t mind having someone to talk to . . .