My Favorite Quote
Reaching my own personal centennial is cause for a bit of reflection on my first century — and on what the next century will bring for the people and country I love. To be honest, I’m a bit worried that I may be in better shape than our democracy is. — Norman Lear, father of six, an Emmy-winning television producer and a co-founder of the advocacy organization People for the American Way.
Best News About a Show: Another Run For the Yiddish Fiddler On the Roof
Fiddler On the Roof is my favorite musical, so I've happily seen and reviewed it whenever it showed up at any of the theaters I've covered. You can still read my reviews at http://www.curtainup.com, the now archived Curtainup front page. When you go to the special Google search box there and type fiddleryiddish18.html, your search will land at the link of the Curtainup review at the downtown opening as well as its move uptown. To read reviews of the many other productions I've seen and reviewed, type in Fiddler On the Roof.
If you missed the indomitable Yiddish Fiddler, this latest run at New World Stages on 50th Street from November 13, 2022 to January 1, 2023 is a great opportunity to catch up with it. And you don't have to be Jewish or understand Yiddish to enjoy it.
Honoring Equality In Pay and Supporting Experimental Talent Comes With Tough New Challenges
Supporting work with limited audience appeal and ending unpaid internships and underpaid staff positions does indeed bring up the problem of how to pay for it. Most artistic directors depend heavily on revenue earned from ticket sales. Thus, commendable as becoming a more diverse, equal opportunity organization is, operating this way is indeed problematic. What Jenny Gersten, the artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, has done is the obvious first step for others as well — to produce fewer shows. Since these internships and low-paying jobs are invaluable, this means fewer opportunities to become theater professionals. Clearly a case of curing one disease but causing another.
Those in charge of small theater companies supporting experimental work are also forced to deal with the reality of having to satisfy the tastes of people who attend shows. Here again, they won't be able to put on as many productions as in the past.
In The Summing Up, the still-in-print memoir of his professional life, Somerset Maugham explained that he quickly learned that to support himself as a writer he had to figure out how to tell stories that people found interesting and entertaining. As Maugham saw it, without an audience he had no play; and without readers he couldn't get published and earn royalties.
Of course, revivals of beloved shows like Fiddler On the Roof have the advantage of a loyal fan base, ready to see any new interpretation.
No playwright could write a more gut-wrenching, emotion-stirring script, and construct it as a mind-blowing docudrama that painstakingly reconstructs how a group of citizens stormed the home of our democracy in order to stop Vice President Mike Pence from making the election of the duly elected president official. That duly elected president was not the sitting President Donald Trump.
The Select Committee wisely enlisted long-time TV news chief James Goldston to produce this depressing exercise in lawlessness and deluded beliefs in conspiracy. Goldston has managed to present the hearings held so far like eight terrifyingly real episodes in a mini- series, using the committee members and witnesses as his cast, and the Congressional chamber and all manner of visuals to make it all weirdly engaging.
Goldston was fortunate to have a strong lead in Vice Chairman Liz Cheney. Her dry persistence and occasional sarcastic putdowns gave the hearings its most memorable dialogue. Who can forget her refusal to justify Mr. Trump's listening to Rudy Guliani's terrible advice with "he's a 76-year-old man, not an impressionable child."
With another set of hearings already announced for September, I find myself hoping for a Season 3 in which sanity is restored.
My Latest Screening Gem: 20th Century Women
What luck that this 2016 American comedy-drama written and directed by Mike Mills and starring Annette Benning, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, and Billy Crudup is still available at Showtime. While my grandson Jack is too young to have seen any of Benning's many outstanding stage performances, he was smitten with her as well as the rest of the cast. In fact, he liked everything about this film, enough so to have seen it numerous times.
Finally. . .
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