Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on a Wrong Way of ‘Solving the Irish Question’)

“There are some who will welcome with delight the idea of solving the Irish question by doing away with the Irish people.  There are others who will remember that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and that we have now to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but in the New.”— Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), review of J.A. Froude’s “Two Chiefs of Dunboy, " The Pall Mall Gazette, Apr. 13, 1889

This Day in Theater History (‘Ernest in Love,’ Musical Adaptation of Wilde, Opens Off-Broadway)

May 4, 1960—They’ve made musicals from the grimmest possible subject matter, so what’s wrong with adapting a great English comedy as light as a souffle? That, evidently, was the thinking behind Ernest in Love, which transformed The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde into a clever musical that premiered in New York at the off-Broadway Gramercy Arts Theatre.

Sixteen years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Ernest in Love.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady, and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.

It was only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957. Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage, which it did three years later.

The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time. 

Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour. 

Composer Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”

Critics applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.

Ernest in Love was quickly overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42 years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111 performances.

Luckily, an original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone gets around to it.

Croswell and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich, a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a matinee.

Though Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.

As for Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”

Whenever the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used to torture a suspected spy.

Just think: Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…

TV Quote of the Day (‘Northern Exposure,’ on Human Wants, Needs and Desires)

Ruth-Anne Miller (played by Peg Phillips) to Maurice J. Minnifield (played by Barry Corbin): “You know what Oscar Wilde said? He said, 'nothing human is alien to me'. It's just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we're all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. It's like a kind of poetry.”— Northern Exposure, Season 5, Episode 12, “Mister Sandman,” original air date Jan. 10, 1994, teleplay by Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, directed by Michael Fresco

This blog post is dedicated to the memory of my dear friend Ann, who adored this offbeat series—one that, even in the context of current network TV, remains highly unusual in content.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on the One Thing Still Impossible in Russia)

Michael: “What has the tyrant done now?”

Vera Sabouroff: “Tomorrow martial law is to be proclaimed in Russia.”

Everyone: “Martial law! We are lost! We are lost!”

Alexis Ivanacievitch: “Martial law! Impossible!”

Michael: “Fool, nothing is impossible in Russia but reform.” — Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, and poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Vera: Or, The Nihilists (1880)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Retrieving One’s Youth)

“To get back one's youth one has merely to repeat one's follies."—Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Good Advice)

Lord Goring: “I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.”

Mrs. Cheveley: “Oh! pray don't. One should never give a woman anything that she can't wear in the evening.” —Anglo-Irish playwright, poet, dandy and wit Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), An Ideal Husband (1895)

Quote of the Day (Andre Gide, on How Oscar Wilde’s Work Never Matched His Table Talk)

“The best of [Oscar Wilde’s] writing is but a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him talk find his writings a disappointment. Dorian Gray was originally an admirable story, much superior to La Peau de Chagrin! Far more significant! Written, alas, it is a masterpiece that falls short. His most charming tales are too literary; despite their grace you are too much aware of affectation; preciosity and euphuism cover the beauty of the first inspiration…and when, later, Wilde works over his sentences, strives for his effects, it is by a prodigious overlay of conceits, of petty inventions, amusing and bizarre, in which emotion is brought up short, so that the surface shimmer conceals from mind and eye the profound central emotion.”—Andre Gide (1869-1951), on friend Oscar Wilde, “In Memoriam: Oscar Wilde,” translated by Jeffrey J. Carre, in Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality, edited by Justin O’Brien (1959)

One hundred sixty-five years ago this week, Oscar Wilde—who attracted international attention for his flamboyance and wit even before he wrote anything substantial, finally conquered the London theater scene, only to see it vanish after a scandalous trial—was born in Dublin.

I have posted several times on the Anglo-Irish man of letters, including this one from five years ago, on the 160^th anniversary of his birth. Yet the nature of his character and achievement is such that I felt more could be said about him.

Much of this was brought to mind for me when I came across Andre Gide’s poignant tribute to his deceased friend Wilde. The French Nobel Prize-winning novelist and diarist recalled meeting the playwright in 1891 at a dinner for four, where the other guests took a backseat as the older writer spoke without ceasing:

“Wilde did not converse; he narrated. Throughout almost the whole of the meal he did not stop narrating. He narrated gently, slowly; his very voice was wonderful.”

After his confinement for violating England’s anti-homosexuality legislation, Wilde, under the assumed name Sebastian Melmotte, moved to the continent, where he encountered Gide again. By this point, Wilde was a wreck of a man.

Several friends tried to mount a critical rescue mission after Wilde’s death in 1900, Gide observed:

“Unfortunately, their action was based on a misconception, for it must be admitted that Wilde is not a great writer. The leaden life preserver that was thrown out simply completed his ruin; his works, far from supporting him, seemed to sink with him. In vain a few hands stretched out. The waters of the world closed over him; it was the end.”

Nobody alive, of course, has ever heard Wilde in conversation, so it is impossible to determine the validity of Gide’s comparison of the playwright’s table talk with his work. In 18^th century London, the same point might have been made about Samuel Johnson, judging from James Boswell’s biography.

But Gide accepted too readily Wilde’s lament, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” The value of a work can be determined at least partly by whether it continues to be read or performed.

By this measure, Wilde’s work in the last half-dozen years before his fall from grace—his dazzling comedies (especially The Importance of Being Earnest), Salome (the basis of  the Richard Strauss opera), The Picture of Dorian Gray, and “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”—assure him of a secure place in the literary canon—probably an even more certain place than that of Gide himself.

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on His Unusual Mother)

“Come home with me. I want to introduce you to my mother. We have founded a society for the suppression of virtue.”—Trinity College undergrad—and future playwright—Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), inviting a classmate to a Merrion Square (Dublin) salon held by his only slightly less flamboyant mother, the poet Speranza Wilde, quoted in Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (1919)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Rules About Reading)

"Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read." —Anglo-Irish playwright and short-story writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Conversational Tendencies)

"I like to do all of the talking myself. It saves time and prevents arguments."— Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist and short-story writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), "The Remarkable Rocket," in The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

Quote of the Day (Oscar Wilde, on Luck and Remarriage)

"When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs." —Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)