Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Moonlight and ‘The Sounds of Music’)

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” — Lorenzo from English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1 (1596-98)

Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on a Fearful People ‘Possessed With Rumors’)

“But as I traveled hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied,
Possessed with rumors, full of idle dreams,
Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear.” —English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), King John (1594-6), Act 4, Scene 3 

William Shakespeare died on this day in 1616 at age 52, but his influence reverberates to this day.

Following decades of Tudor authoritarianism, Shakespeare knew that it was safer to project his insights into distant times (King John’s death predated the playwright’s by four centuries) and even distant lands (in the case of The Tempest, a small, remote island in the Mediterranean).

His history play King John is one of his thornier and less performed works, but such was The Bard’s genius that even in this passage from the play, he served as a profound analyst of how corruption and tyranny at the highest government levels lead inevitably to rampant conspiracy theories and contagious fear.

Quote of the Day (Athol Fugard, on Rejecting Negativity)

“It came quite early in my life. I realised one day what is necessary is that you leave the destructive negative emotions…outside the door and close the door. The only emotion I sit with when I write is love.”—South African playwright Athol Fugard (1932-2025) quoted by Franklin Nelson, “Obituary: Chronicler of South Africa’s Painful Era of Apartheid,” The Financial Times, Mar. 15-16, 2025

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on Why ‘Writing Is More Important Than Acting’)

"Writing is more important than acting, for one very good reason: it lasts. Stage acting only lives in people's memories as long as they live. Writing is creative; acting is interpretive.”— English playwright, fiction writer, memoirist, composer, actor and wit Sir Noel Coward (1899-1973), quoted in The Noel Coward Reader, edited by Barry Day (2010)

The 125^th birthday of Noel Coward passed almost two weeks ago, but I couldn’t allow 2024 to go by without noting the worldwide observance of the event.

The image of Coward that has come down to posterity—in dinner jacket, with slicked-back hair and cigarette in hand (kind of like what you see with this post)—obscures a polymath of ferocious energy and dedication who shames the rest of us by comparison. 

Even more than the bon vivant of legend, it is this artist who scoffed at notions about his genius but gladly accepted compliments about his professionalism, that I celebrate with this post.

One last thing, though: You’ll notice in the above quote that Coward refers not to “acting” in general but to “stage acting” in particular. The latter certainly offers the possibility of an electricity between audience and performer that is not possible on film.

But film acting, in contrast, certainly “lives in people's memories as long as they live.” Coward himself is a good example.

Modern audiences will have no idea how he appeared onstage in 1933 with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in his comedy Design for Living. But as long as a TV station or movie revival house exists, viewers can watch him 18 times on film, from his 1935 screen debut in The Scoundrel to his 1969 swan song, The Italian Job.

Those roles, as fleeting or even imperfect as they could sometimes be, show why so many people of his time—and even ours—remain “mad about the boy.”

Flashback, November 1604: Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ Premieres With Dark Mirror of Its Time

When it was presented by "the King's Majesty's players” 420 years ago this month, Othello seems to have pleased his primary audience, King James I, still only a year and a half into his reign.

Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice” is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays, current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common practice of actors donning blackface for the role.

But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its own time—an era of danger and secrets.

Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home. 

(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)

Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both leaders:

*survived narrow escapes;

*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;

*came to their new status as foreigners (James had been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello, “the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as being from modern North Africa);

*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders (James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).

For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare, like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”

Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character (three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.

The time element may be the most important, as Iago, with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander. Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they are dead.

Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue, Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.

The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to the Ottoman Empire.

Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.

Even in this point of geographic deflection, Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the political very quickly.

In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor) daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).

Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw a translation).

Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if— this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.

Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World, these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.

In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.

I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage, playing the role before King James.

But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago. 

Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.

But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer attention is also grounded in the play itself:

*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple ones;

*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also, because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set expectations about their relationship;

*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in his plotting;

*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”

The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."

(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona.)

Quote of the Day (Juan Ramírez, on Shakespeare and the Theater’s Hardiest Superstition)

“Perhaps the industry’s best-known bylaw is that, unless acting in Shakespeare’s early 17th-century play, one should never say the word ‘Macbeth’ inside a theater — otherwise you risk ruining the current production. The origins of this are predictably murky. The play traffics in things that might very well incur a hex — witches, hauntings, grisly murders — but one possible source could be the simple fact that, in an era when most theater companies operated in repertory (performing a rotating selection of popular works), ‘the Scottish play,’ as the piece can be safely referred to, was a guaranteed moneymaker. If your season was failing, it might be time to stage ‘Macbeth.’”— New York-based Venezuelan-American writer and critic Juan Ramírez, “Don’t Say ‘Macbeth,” in T (The New York Times Style Magazine), Nov. 17, 2024

I noticed the above article, with its explanation for the bad luck associated with saying the word “Macbeth,” on the same weekend that one of my local PBS stations was re-running a charming indie production from a few years ago, called—yes, The Scottish Play.

But even before writer-director Keith Boynton had alluded to this curse in comic cinematic fashion, someone else had beaten him to it in the early oughts: the creators of the fun Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, set in a fictional Shakespearean festival like the real-world Stratford Festival.

One episode from its second season, “Rarer Monsters,” sends up the whole jinx with tongue in cheek, much like the rest of this series.

Some readers of this post—those who have a real sense of theatrical history—are likely to protest: “But, Mike, the curse is real!” 

They’ll point to a legendary British production of the play starring Sir John Gielgud, when three actors died during the show’s run and a costume designer killed himself right after the premiere.

And what about poor Charlton Heston, who, in a 1953 production, had severe burns to his legs—the result of his tights being soaked in kerosene?

“Fie!” as The Bard would say (and as I do now). Did that stop Gielgud from directing a 1952 production of the play with the Royal Shakespeare Company? And did the curse stop Heston from coming back to the play for the fifth time in a 1975 staging with Vanessa Redgrave?

Well, I will give the skeptics this: Those witches at the start of the show, if costumed and lit correctly (maybe like the image accompanying this post), are definitely enough to give one…the Willies.

Quote of the Day (Moliere, With Don Juan on How ‘To Do Anything I Want With Impunity’)

“If it happens that I am discovered, without my lifting a finger I’ll see the whole cabal espouse my interests and defend me in spite of and against anyone. In short, this is the real way to do anything I want with impunity. I shall set myself up as a censor of the actions of others, judge everyone harshly, and have a good opinion of no one but myself. If once anyone has offended me the least little bit, I shall never forgive, and shall very quietly retain an irreconcilable hatred. I shall play the avenger of Heaven’s interests, and, on that convenient pretext, harass my enemies, accuse them of impiety, and contrive to turn loose against them some undiscerning zealots who, without knowing what it’s all about, will raise a public outcry against them, load them with insults, and d—n them loudly by their own private authority. That’s the way to take advantage of men’s weaknesses, and for an intelligent mind to adapt itself to the vices of his day.” —French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), Don Juan, or, The Stone Guest (1665), translated by Donald Frame, in Tartuffe and Other Plays (1967)

In writing a play for his time, Moliere ended up creating a seriocomic parable for all times—but one that seems especially prescient for this troubled season in American history.

I couldn’t help sharing the astonishment of the spineless but sensible servant Sganarelle, who, after warning his master about a fearsome moving and talking statue that represents doom, hears Don Juan blithely reply, “hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.”

Every line in the above quote feels as if it could have been said now about a national figure who, whatever his other qualities, surely knows how to “take advantage of men’s weaknesses.”

(The image accompanying this post shows Andrew Weems as Sganarelle and Adam Stein as Don Juan in a production of Don Juan, which played in The Old Globe Theatre of San Diego from May 8 to June 13, 2004. It was directed by Stephen Wadsworth.)

Quote of the Day (Tom Stoppard, on Nature and Each Moment)

“Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment.”—Czech-born British playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter Sir Tom Stoppard, Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia, Vol. 2 (2002)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘All About Eve,’ As a Theater Critic Introduces Himself and His World)

Addison DeWitt [played by George Sanders] [voiceover intro]: “To those of you who do not read, attend the theater, listen to unsponsored radio programs, or know anything of the world in which you live, it is perhaps necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. My native habitat is the theater. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theater.” —All About Eve (1950), screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz based on the story “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary Orr, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

At this point in the Academy Award-winning All About Eve, Addison DeWitt is merely droll, in a way that Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward might approve.

But look at the picture accompanying this post. This is an observer who not only takes it all in, but is utterly unillusioned by it all.

Cynical and manipulative, he is also one of two outsiders who perfectly understands the vanity fair of swollen egos, insecurities, and deceptiveness in which the actors, playwright, director, and other assorted figures in this comedy-drama move.

The other outsider is Birdie Coonan, a former vaudeville actress, now the personal assistant and confidant of reigning theater queen Margo Channing. Like DeWitt’s, her sideline view of events allows her to see early on through the movie’s title schemer, Eve Harrington.

Addison and Birdie differ vastly in class and education, but neither is anybody’s fool. “You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I,” Addison says in confronting Eve, a true Becky Sharp of Broadway. “We have that in common. Also, our contempt for humanity and inability to love, and be loved, insatiable ambition, and talent. We deserve each other.” 

Birdie, less self-interested than the critic, is equally perceptive of motive, telling Margo that Eve is studying her, “like you was a play, or a book, or a set of blueprints. How you walk, talk, eat, think.”

For his performance as DeWitt, George Sanders won an Oscar. For hers as Birdie, Thelma Ritter—one of Hollywood’s consistently superior character actors—received her first of six Oscar nominations.

Not one of these netted her the coveted statuette, leading the actress to a most Birdie-like wisecrack: “Now I know what it feels like to be the bridesmaid and never the bride.” 

Quote of the Day (Moliere, on Reason Vs. Love)

“Each day my reason tells me so;
But reason doesn't rule in love, you know.”—French playwright, actor, and theater manager Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, aka Moliere (1622-1673), The Misanthrope, translated by Richard Wilbur (1666)

The image accompanying this post, from a 2013 production of The Misanthrope at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre, features Erik Hellman as Alceste, Moliere’s title character, and Grace Gealey as Celimene, the coquette who distracts him from reason.

This will not be a Happy Valentine’s Day for Alceste!

Quote of the Day (Jean Kerr, on Playwrights Eavesdropping on Audience Comments)

“Most authors waste a great deal of valuable energy in a foolish effort to overhear the comments of the paying customers. They do this, mind you, even on those occasions when the audience has coughed and muttered throughout the first act with an animosity that has caused the actors to fear for their safety and the producer to leave town. Even in these circumstances the playwright somehow imagines he will overhear a tall, distinguished man (clearly a United States Senator) say to his companion 'Egad, Helen, it's plays like this that make theatergoing worthwhile.' "—Irish-American humorist-playwright Jean Kerr (1922-2003), The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

Nowadays, film and theater companies spend a lot of money on something called marketing to figure out why audiences like or hate certain productions. It was far less scientific in the mid-century heyday of Jean Kerr and her husband Walter—who, when he wasn’t trying to write plays of his own, was turning his hand far more successfully to theater criticism.

Jean had her share of opportunities to try to gauge audience reactions, having written several plays herself. One was, as these things go, a triumph—Mary, Mary, which ran for 1,500 performances and was turned into a movie. Other comedies were not so successful: Jenny Kissed Me, Poor Richard, Finishing Touches, and Lunch Hour.

And then there was Goldilocks.

I’ve decided that by the end of the year, I really, really must blog about this musical collaboration between Jean and Walter—an experience so hideous that the couple agreed never to mention its name again.

Whatever. Jean Kerr never let disaster stop her—it just became fodder for a future play, or, more often, a humor column, brought together in four collections during her lifetime.

Most famously, she wrote Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, a look at midcentury life in the suburbs minus the angst of John Cheever or Mad Men. As Elizabeth Austin wrote in Washington Monthly after Kerr’s death in 2003, the playwright-humorist “created a persona that was competent, funny, self-assured, calm in the face of domestic emergency, unapologetically competitive on the tennis court, and tremendously gifted when it came to keeping a houseful of youngsters happily occupied on a rainy afternoon.”

I would say you get something of a sense of this warmth and vivacity in today’s quote, as well as in the image accompanying this post.

This Day in Theater History (Moliere, Stricken Mid-Performance, Dies Offstage)

Feb. 17, 1673—Maybe he was tempting fate, but, just as Moliere was mocking doctors in the latest satire he'd written for his troupe, The Imaginary Invalid, he began to cough and gasp towards the end of the comedy's fourth performance. 

The audience, at first stunned, fell into familiar laughter when they saw the French actor, director, theater administrator, and playwright grinning. But he had been coughing up blood and had to be carried home in a sedan chair.

Moliere frantically urged his company to summon his wife and a priest to hear his last confession, but neither arrived in time before he died, at age 50, succumbing to a seizure brought on by tuberculosis.

Why didn’t Moliere call for a doctor as he expired? I can think of four possibilities:

1) He knew his case was hopeless at this point, as he’d been suffering from TB for several years, refusing to let it curtail his creative activity;

2)    2) He thought doctors were incompetent and/or useless;

3)    3)  He dreaded physicians (an attitude not entirely excluding Possibility #2, given the state of 17^th-century medicine); and

4)    4)  Dialogue he’d written for himself in his new farce, a broad wink to the audience, might have revealed how he thought men of medicine would react to his emergency: “Your Molière’s an impertinent fellow… If I were a doctor, I’d have my revenge… when he fell ill, I’d let him die without helping him. I’d say: ‘Go on, drop dead!’”

But the choice of the two people that Moliere (the pseudonym adopted by Jean Baptiste Poquelin) did want at his side echoed the two major controversies of his life and career. 

There was a two-decade difference in age between him and wife Armande, at a time when significant age gaps between spouses were even more snickered at than they are now. 

Adding fuel to the wisecracks aimed at him: the rumor that Armande was either the sister of his former mistress or her daughter by Moliere.

(Remember: With no such thing as exercise regimens, understanding of diets, or regular checkups, a 50-year-old man in 1673 was more like 60—at least.)

Moliere was fully aware of what a buffoon he looked like to his critics. The School for Wives (1662), written not long after his marriage, featured the playwright himself as a foolhardy bachelor bound and determined to wed a pretty young thing. 

And in The Misanthrope, the title character is nearly undone not just by his judgmental temperament but by his jealousy of the younger, flirtatious woman he loves.

As for a priest to hear his confession: the Roman Catholic Church came closer to wreaking vengeance on him than the medical profession did. Though Moliere had been careful in Tartuffe and Don Juan to show that he despised religious hypocrisy rather than the practice of religion itself, the Church saw these plays as direct attacks on the institution. 

When he died, his widow had to plead directly with King Louis XIV (someone that Moliere had been careful not to offend) to allow a Christian burial—an appeal only granted on the condition that the ceremony be done with no pomp.

Today, nobody but Moliere scholars knows the names of his critics. But in the three and a half centuries after his death, his work continues to entertain audiences and influence members of the profession for which he literally gave his life. 

Ever since I saw a local production of Don Juan—and a 1970s PBS telecast of Tartuffe starring Donald Moffat and Tammy Grimes—I have marveled at Moliere's slashing wit, as well as his sprightly dialogue rendered in Alexandrine rhymes (and translated superbly by American poet Richard Wilbur). 

I could not let this post go without discussing a bit more about the most dramatic exit he ever made. Have any other entertainers died under similar circumstances?

Well, yes. Interestingly enough, quite a few opera singers died onstage. (I suppose that the enormous vocal demands of their work—and, sometimes, the singers' big frames—left them vulnerable.)

But there have also been several notable cases of other comic actors who, like Moliere, were struck down during a performance:

• Redd Foxx, the example that sprang immediately to my mind, died of a heart attack in October 1991 during rehearsals for the sitcom The Royal Family—and cast and crew, remembering his many feigned attacks two decades before on Sanford and Son, did not immediately suspect anything was amiss this time;
• Dick Shawn, perhaps best remembered as the hippie actor "LSD" in Mel Brooks' film The Producers, suffered a fatal heart attack during a performance at the University of California, San Diego's Mandeville Hall; and 
• Al Kelly, a vaudeville comedian, died in the audience in 1966 right after delivering a Friar's Club roast of Joe E. Lewis.

(For more details on Moliere's death, see this fascinating 2013 post by French literature scholar and novelist Maya Slater, on the Oxford University Press blog.)

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on an Easy Casting Decision for One of His Shows)

“The girl who plays Nancy is quite remarkable. She can neither sing, dance nor act, has a lisp and no top to her head! I left terse orders for her to be replaced.”—English playwright, singer-songwriter, and director Noel Coward (1899-1973), on an inadequate cast member in an Australian production of his musical Sail Away, June 6, 1963 letter to private secretary Lorn Loraine, in The Letters of Noel Coward, edited by Barry Day (2007)

Quote of the Day (Noel Coward, on an Actor Being Rejected for an Upcoming Tour)

Gary Essendine: “Beryl Willard is extremely competent. Beryl Willard has been extremely competent, man and boy, for forty years. In addition to her extreme competence, she has contrived, with uncanny skill, to sustain a spotless reputation for being the most paralysing, epoch-making, monumental, world-shattering, God-awful bore that ever drew breath...I will explain one thing further - it is this. No prayer, no bribe, no threat, no power, human or divine, would induce me to go to Africa with Beryl Willard. I wouldn't go as far as Wimbledon with Beryl Willard.”

Liz: “What he's trying to say is that he doesn't care for Beryl Willard.” —English playwright, actor, director, and singer-songwriter Noel Coward (1899-1973), Present Laughter (1939)

Quote of the Day (Terence, on a Playwright’s Disasters in Ancient Rome)

“Now for my sake give a fair hearing to my plea. Once more I am presenting The Mother-in-Law, a play for which I have never been able to gain a hearing uninterrupted, so much has misfortune dogged its progress….When I tried to produce it the first time, the report of boxers (joined to the belief that a tight-rope walker would appear), the throng of their admirers, the shouting, and women’s screaming forced me off stage before the end. I then decided to employ my usual approach on the new play and try it out again; I put it on a second time. The first act was going well when news arrived that there was to be a gladiator’s show. In surged the people, pushing, shouting, jostling for a place, leaving me powerless to hold my own.”—Ancient Roman playwright Terence (c. 186-159 BC), “The Mother-in-Law,” in The Comedies, translated by Betty Radice (1965)

And the creators of modern theater—an anxious crew depicted in the Michael Frayn farce Noises Off—think they have it bad!

(The image accompanying this post, a Roman mosaic, depicts actors and a musician. It comes from “The House of the Tragic Poet” in Pompeii.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Slings and Arrows,’ on the Curse of Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Play’)

Ghost of Oliver Welles [played by Stephen Ouimette]: “The Scotsman is evil. Both he and Banquo encounter the witches, both their futures are foretold, but only The Scotsman goes on a killing spree.”

Geoffrey Tennant [played by Paul Gross]: “‘The Scotsman’? Oh, do you mean- Mac-beeeth?’

Oliver: “Geoffrey, please!”

Geoffrey: “What?”

Oliver: “Don’t say his name aloud!”

Geoffrey: “Who? Mac-beeeeth?”

Oliver: “You’re just asking for trouble.”

Geoffrey: “Well, we are rehearsing a play called Mac-beeeth. It’s gonna be a little awkward if I can’t say the title character’s name.”

Oliver: “This isn't actually rehearsal. This is a meeting after rehearsal.”

Geoffrey: “Oh, I'm so sorry, Oliver, I forgot—you believe in ‘the curse.’”

Oliver: “And you don't?”

Geoffrey: “No. The only thing cursed about this play is that it is extraordinarily difficult to stage effectively.”

Oliver: “So you think you're above this kind of superstitious prattle?”

Geoffrey: “As a matter of fact I do, yes.”

Oliver: “You're talking to a ghost! Wake up and smell the coffin!”— Slings and Arrows, Season 2, Episode 3, “Rarer Monsters,” original air date July 11, 2005, teleplay by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin and Mark McKinney, directed by Peter Wellington

This weekend, I couldn’t help thinking of this quote from Slings and Arrows, the great TV dramedy of the early oughts about a troupe of Canadian actors in a setting with a more-than-passing resemblance to the Stratford Festival.

It seems like quite the year for Macbeth, between the Denzel Washington-Frances McDormand film that came out this past winter and the stage adaptation starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga that premiered on Broadway the other night.

Besides receiving a decidedly mixed critical reception, the Bard’s tragedy is keeping up with its tradition as jinxed, suffering COVID-related nightmares (with not only Craig, its surest draw, forcing cancellation of some preview performances after he tested positive, but enough other absences that director Sam Gold was forced to play a role himself).

No matter. “The Scottish play” will endure despite the morass of challenges awaiting anyone who dares to stage it, because it says so much about the potential for evil that lies within all of us—but, most consequentially, within those close to the center of power.

Quote of the Day (Cherry Jones, on How Theater Makes People ‘Feel Less Alone’)

“The plays I love and the parts I love are the ones that make people feel less alone. That’s a huge part of great art for me – human beings comforting one another with their shortcomings. That’s what theater does so brilliantly....The celebration of an extraordinary life is not going to make you feel less alone. But the examination of a flawed life or a life gone wrong or a life almost extinguished by shortcomings then brought back from the dead, that’s what makes us feel less alone. I’ve listed all of my shortcomings to you. Now if you would tell me all of yours, we’d have an evening of consolation and laughs. And that’s the theater.”—Tony Award-winning actress Cherry Jones, quoted in Alex Witchel, “Cherry Jones, at the Peak of Her Powers,” The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 22, 2013

The image accompanying this post is a detail of a photo of Cherry Jones taken on Apr. 18, 2009, by Kathleen Tyler Conklin, when Ms. Jones was in Paris, TN, her hometown, to raise funds for the Heritage Center and the Lee Academy of Arts.

This Day in Musical History (Loesser’s Saucy ‘How To Succeed In Business’ Takes Broadway)

Oct. 14, 1961—Capping a postwar era in which the executive suite became a cultural preoccupation, the satiric How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying opened on Broadway at the 46^th Street Theatre and promptly became a smash. An adaptation of a 1952 bestseller by Madison Avenue maven Shepherd Mead, the musical went on to post 1,417 performances and win the Pulitzer Prize.

But before achieving critical and popular success, the production (hailed as a “sassy, gay, and exhilarating evening” by the Herald Tribune’s Walter Kerr) had to overcome almost as many obstacles as its main character, the relentlessly ambitious window-washer J. Pierrepont (Ponty) Finch.

The irreverent show represented the last Broadway triumph of composer-lyricist Frank Loesser, who had scored his big hit over a decade before with Guys and Dolls, and the first for actor Robert Morse, playing the go-getting protagonist.

The Eisenhower era burst of American prosperity led the entertainment industry to question the notion of success, on film (Executive Suite, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Apartment) and TV (Rod Serling’s Patterns). But seldom has the subject been dealt with in such a cheeky manner as How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.

Ponty’s aim: Reach the top of at the World Wide Wicket Company. His method: Gain the trust of president J.B. Biggley. His obstacles: Biggley’s idiot nephew, Bud Frump (played on Broadway by Charles Nelson Reilly) and Hedy LaRue, whose employment depends less on her typing and shorthand skills than on her obvious anatomical charms.

Although Loesser had written the book for his musical-opera hybrid The Most Happy Fella (1956), he turned the job over this time to Guys and Dolls collaborator Abe Burrows. Loesser’s songs now sprang more organically from the material, a seamless web of the kind of romance found in other musical comedies with a wealth of targets from the world of business: nepotism, the junior executive, diet fads, the ad campaign, the secretarial pool, the office break, and sexism.

In the entire wonderful history of American musical comedy, the lyricists who rivaled Loesser in wit can be numbered on only one hand. 

In one number, he could send up the old-boy network that ran corporations, their sentimental collegiate ties, and the objects of their hatred as sports fans (the “chipmunks”) in “Grand Old Ivy.” 

In another, “I Believe in You,” he penned the kind of love song so often found in musicals, except this time the hero was directing the sentiments to himself as he looked in a mirror—the kind of ironic distance between words and action that Stephen Sondheim would demonstrate mastery of a decade later.

But Loesser and Burrows (who also directed) were fortunate indeed in finding a lead with the manic, zany energy to play Ponty, who assiduously applies the lessons of the kind of American self-help manual dating all the way back to Ben Franklin’s The Way to Wealth.

With his elfin build, gap-toothed smile, and irrepressible energy, Morse was a theatrical Huck Finn, somehow making likable a character with more than a few unsavory Sammy Glick aspects—and was rewarded for his efforts with a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

Even having the right lead didn’t guarantee success for the show, though. Along the way, according to a 50^th anniversary retrospective Playbill article by Mervyn Rothstein, the show had to contend, before its opening, with:

*the replacement of original choreographer Hugh Lambert with Bob Fosse, who, with practically no time left for preproduction work, had to figure out the show’s numbers at night with wife-muse Gwen Verdon;

*a near-disastrous decision by producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin, frustrated by an underperforming out-of-town box office, to rename the show—only to be successfully argued out of the idea by press agent Merle Debuskey; and

*Loesser’s short-lived exit from the show over co-star Rudy Vallee’s never-ending rehearsal insistence on improvements—a departure ended only when he got Feuer to agree to punch out the 1920s crooner when the production concluded (which was never acted upon).

How To Succeed has been successfully revived twice since its original production, featuring turns by Matthew Broderick and Daniel Radcliffe as Ponty. 

Morse, Vallee and Michele Lee (who took over as love interest Rosemary later in its run) repeated their roles in the 1967 movie adaptation—which, though it did not enjoy the success as on Broadway, is still regarded as a largely success transfer to the big screen.

The years after the show brought different fates for veteran Loesser and rising star Morse.

Loesser never again reached the heights he’d enjoyed with Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed. His 1965 musical, Pleasures and Palaces, closed out of town. As critic Terry Teachout notes, in a perceptive essay in Commentary Magazine, the songwriter—depressed that rock ‘n’ roll was rendering his brand of music obsolete—had given up his craft entirely before his death in 1969. 

His demise occurred before he could see revived interest in the Great American Songbook tradition in which he had played such a part through his work in theater and on film (including the saucy—and now rather controversial—Christmas song, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”).

Increasing alcohol abuse in the Seventies and early Eighties led Morse to the hell of the dinner-theater circuit and even unemployment. But a turn towards sobriety resulted in him winning a second Tony for his turn as author Truman Capote in the 1989 drama Tru, and since then he has worked steadily again in film and on TV.

It was through the latter medium that, now-wizened, the former boyish star achieved his most recent burst of fame, as ad agency founder Bertram Cooper in the long-running cable series Mad Men. 

You can bet that showrunner Matthew Weiner didn’t mind any memories viewers might have had of Morse in his earlier turn sending up the Sixties business world. Weiner even allowed Morse a sendoff unusual even for that series by having him staging his goodbye as a musical number.

Quote of the Day (William Saroyan, on Failure and Wisdom)

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning Armenian-American novelist, short-story writer and playwright William Saroyan (1908-1981), My Heart's in the Highlands: A Play (1939)

Quote of the Day (Terrence McNally, on Theater as a Refuge for Movie Actors)

“The theater has become the Statue of Liberty for movie actors: Give us your tired, your poor, your washed up, your strung out.”—American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter Terrence McNally (1938-2020), It’s Only A Play (1985)

The image accompanying this post, showing Terrence McNally at a New York City event, was taken Nov. 11, 2013, by ReadingReed43.