Quote of the Day (Anna Hempstead Branch, Warning of the “Magic of the Coin That Sings”)

“Oh, when we speak, Great God, let us speak well.
Beware of shapes, beware of letterings,
For in them lies such magic as alters dream,
Shakes cities down and moves the inward scheme.
Beware the magic of the coin that sings.
These coins are graved with supernatural powers
And magic wills that are more strong than ours.”--Anna Hempstead Branch, Sonnets From a Lock Box and Other Poems (1929)

Movie Quote of the Day (Ferris Bueller, on How to Fake Out Parents)

Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick): “The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good non-specific symptom; I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh... you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office. That's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.”—Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), written and directed by John Hughes

A quarter century ago on this date, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was released, quickly cementing John Hughes’ reputation as the auteur of Teen America. After Home Alone four years later, Hughes never again matched his streak of success in the Eighties, and, though he kept writing screenplays that were produced, he simply withdrew from all things Hollywood.

But when he died of a heart attack almost two years ago, at age 59, I was surprised at how much a chord his teen comedies still struck with the middle-aged. A number of my friends on Facebook, for instance, mourned his passing, quoting especially from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

What makes Ferris so well loved by the middle-aged? Well, he embodies everything we wish we could have gotten away with in high school but probably didn't. He thinks high school is “childish and stupid”—an inarguable truth, I think.

And yet, there is nothing mean about Ferris, and nothing really risky like alcohol and drugs. (Okay, maybe that business with his friend’s car is a bit…but aside from that…) When it comes to creative excuses and eluding a fascist school administrator—well, he’s a veritable Einstein.

In a way, I feel sorry for the teens of the last decade. For their film fare, they’ve been stuck with a vapid vampire franchise and the “Saw” horror films. Twenty years before, they could have watched movies that gave them, for all their sweet and sassy surface, something resembling their own lives.

If John Hughes earned the nickname given him by critic Roger Ebert—“the philosopher of adolescence”—it might have been because, in the words of the late writer-director: “I don't think of kids as a lower form of the human species.”

This Day in Theater History (Birth of Terence Rattigan, Knight of the “Well-Made Play“)

June 10, 1911—Terence Rattigan, whose mastery of the “well-made play” led to knighthood and made him a case study in fickle critical favor, was born in London to a line of distinguished Anglo-Irish lawyers, diplomats and imperial administrators--a group that followed norms that, if broken, had grave consequences for their future.

Gay rights and posthumous revelations about the playwright’s private life have led a number of observers to associate the obsessions in Rattigan’s work--repression, shame and failure--with his need to remain in the closet at a time when homosexuality was still illegal under British law.

While Rattigan did treat his sexuality through parallelism and indirection, it is also true that he became familiar with the implications of breaking social rules even earlier than his realization of his sexual orientation.

At age 11, Rattigan’s life was shaken to its foundations when his father Frank was forced out of a diplomatic post over his handling of a crisis in the Balkans. Left with only a small government pension, Frank suffered a midlife crisis, taking to drinking and extramarital affairs--and exposing his son to gossip at school about his parent. Childhood shame leaves a stinging brand in many writers (e.g., Dickens, Frank McCourt) that it often takes a lifetime--and a life's work--to deal with, and so it was here, I think, with Rattigan.

I have wanted to write about Rattigan for awhile. This post represents a particularly apropos time to do so, for three reasons:

1) it’s the centennial of his birth;
2) this year marks the 60th anniversary of the classic film adaptation of one of his finest works, The Browning Version;
3) June is not simply the end of the school year but, for many teachers, the end of their careers in education—a moment that for many in the field (including the protagonist of the The Browning Version) represents bitter regret over the death of their greatest hopes.

The 1956 London premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger did more than signal the advent of the so-called “angry young man” movement in British theater, film and fiction. With its fierce class consciousness, its bile, and its disdain for proper “form” (dramatic and otherwise), it also represented an all-out assault on an entire tradition of theater to which Rattigan belonged: the “well-made play.“

Once an indication of solid craftsmanship, the “well-made play” has now become, in certain quarters, a snobbish dismissal of certain works as old-fashioned. In this view, adherence to the Aristotelian classical tragic unities of time, setting and action led to a kind of hopeless stodginess.

Rattigan in particular became a sitting target for criticism. He had almost invited it, after all, with an ill-advised 1950 essay in The New Statesman on “the play of ideas.” Being bound to “themes of urgent topicality,” in the manner of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, he insisted, was creatively injurious. “The trouble with the theatre today,” he concluded, “is not that so few writers refuse to look the facts of the present world in the face but that so many refuse to look at anything else.”

Had he been wiser, Rattigan might have inoculated himself against criticism by acknowledging that his own plays were very much taken with “the theater of ideas”: in his case, what happens to people who step outside commonly accepted social boundaries:

*In The Deep Blue Sea, a drama that originally starred Margaret Sullivan on Broadway and was revived by the Roundabout Theatre Co. in 1998 with the equally wondrous Blythe Danner, Rattigan considered how a woman just over a suicide attempt tries to cope with her wayward lover and the loss of her marriage. A subplot features a former doctor struck off the medical register for an unspecified shameful offense (perhaps performing an abortion?), now reduced to a bookmaker's clerk.

* In The Winslow Boy, a well-to-do British family see their financial status threatened once the father attempts to prove that his teenaged son was innocent of the charge of petty theft at his naval college.

* In Separate Tables, a supposedly retired British major is exposed as a fraud when a past secret--his arrest for exposing himself in a theater--is revealed.

* And in The Browning Version, a chilly martinet of a classics teacher at a prep school, disliked by his adulterous wife, colleagues and students, is forced into a bitter reconsideration of his life when he is compelled by a bad heart and his unsympathetic headmaster into early retirement.

For all its heartfelt moments, Mike Figgis' 1994 cinematic revival of the latter doesn't measure up to Anthony Asquith's 1951 original, which had Michael Redgrave in one of the highlights of his career as the despised Andrew Crocker-Harris. It's too bad, because one of Rattigan's themes here--about the frequent thanklessness of a profession that, for all its idealism, produces so many burnt-out cases--remains timeless.

In certain ways, Rattigan resembles another playwright “across the pond” from him, the American William Inge, only two years his junior. Both were gay; both reigned supreme at theater box-offices at midcentury; both wrote screenplays, with widely varying results (Rattigan superb, in adaptations by Anthony Asquith of Winslow and Browning; subpar, in Asquith's work on Rattigan's original screenplay, The V.I.P.'s; Inge superb, in Splendor in the Grass, subpar in Bus Riley's Back in Town); and both were in such critical disfavor that their personal lives derailed into heavy drinking, depression and, in Rattigan's case, exile from Britain.

But here, matters diverged. By the time Inge was committed suicide in 1973, he was no longer mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as the greatest living American playwrights, and, despite the occasional revival (Come Back, Little Sheba, a few years ago, on Broadway), his reputation has still not recovered.

On the other hand, Rattigan rallied long enough to see at least a partial re-evaluation of his work. His knighthood in 1971--a nice 60th birthday present--occurred at the same time that the fortunes of his nemesis, Osborne, began to slide. He could still rail in annoyance that "the whole Royal Court thing" (the acclaim for Look Back in Anger) had upended the fortunes of him, Noel Coward and J.B. Priestley, but he was still working, and, even as his health declined precipitously, managed to finish another play, Cause Celebre, before his death in 1977.

(Incidentally, if you ever have a chance to rent it, watch a 1987 PBS adaptation of the latter--starring Helen Mirren, as a married woman whose affair with a young handyman leads the latter, in a jealous rage, to kill her husband.)

And now, in the year of his centenary, Rattigan is being accorded what Dominic Cavendish, in a story in the U.K.'s Telegraph, calls "pointed and unapologetic veneration." The playwright's native land is seeing productions this year of Less Than Kind, The Deep Blue Sea, and Cause Celebre. Closer to home, the Roundabout is mounting Man and Boy, Rattigan's 1963 drama about a business tycoon whose dishonor upends the life of his son.

Undoubtedly, the Roundabout saw echoes of the Bernie Madoff scandal in this long-neglected play. Yet I don't think the mature Rattigan could have written it without understanding, from his own bitter, long-ago experience with his father, how the son in his play felt.

By including a Rattigan play in the same season as Look Back in Anger, the Roundabout is implicitly suggesting that the British theater tradition has ample room for both Rattigan and Osborne. Let's hope that contemporary critics realize what hat their forebears of a half-century ago missed: that Rattigan's work is filled with the subtlety, understatement and restraint that actors crave.

Photo of the Day: An Inviting Spot to Dive Into!

The image accompanying this post shows the fountains at Rockefeller Center, across the street from where I work. I’ve always been fascinated by the spray and movement associated with fountains and waterfalls. But over the last couple of days, with temperatures and humidity in the Big Apple reaching their usual summer ugliness, I’ll bet that more than a few people had same wish that I did: to dive into this nice, cold water and cool off fast.

Quote of the Day (Rob Lowe, on Truth, Lies and Acting)

“I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.”--Rob Lowe, “Lowe, Actually,” Vanity Fair, May 2011

The above quote is part of a section on the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Outsiders, which gave rise to the career of Rob Lowe and virtually an entire generation of actors. I can’t say that I’ve really been a Lowe fan before (and, if you want to know the truth, I’ve been a little suspicious of the guy after that X-rated video of him with a fan at the 1988 Democratic Convention surfaced).

But this reminiscence made me really feel what it must be like to feel your entire life riding on a single audition. It made me want to see The Outsiders, and even some of the rest of Lowe’s work. Maybe he‘s an intelligent artist rather than a guy simply trading desperately on his good looks. Maybe his memoir, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, will answer the question definitively…

Quote of the Day (Wilfred Sheed, on Cole Porter)

"New celebrities whiz by so quickly these days that even the real ones seem to last only fifteen minutes. Yet all the while, Cole Porter still sits up there high and dry on the ninetieth floor, untouched by time or fashion, like a cast-iron statue of a basic joke. Whatever else the culture may be up to this year, there always seems to be room for Cole at the top. His wit still clicks, his tunes lilt, and the mere mention of his name makes people smile in both anticipation and memory.”—Wilfred Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty (2007)

Like novelist Dawn Powell, Cole Porter—born on this date in 1891—can be thought of as what Powell called a “permanent visitor” to New York. Both were Midwestern implants who came to Gotham during the 1920s. Although each hobnobbed among the intelligentsia and glitterati, they became, once the Jazz Age was over, all too familiar with depression and sorrow.

In the late Wilfred Sheed’s collective biography of the creators of the Great American Songbook, his chapter on Porter recounts a pivotal meeting in 1926, when the native of Peru, Ind., and graduate of Yale told a startled Richard Rodgers that he wanted to write “Jewish songs.” Five decades later, the still-surprised collaborator of Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II admitted that it was the WASP bon vivant—not himself and his partners, nor the Gershwins, nor Irving Berlin, nor Harold Arlen—who created “the most enduring Jewish music” of them all.

The facilitator of that 1926 encounter between the two future giants of the American musical comedy was Noel Coward. In his recent book of collected lyrics and reminiscences, Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim, comparing Porter and the British king-of-all-entertainment, noticed the usually discussed commonalities between the two (notably, homosexuality and fascination with the rich), but also a major difference between the two, one detrimental to Coward’s art. While Porter was born rich, Sondheim observes, Coward, born in poverty, “was an intruder and covered his desperation to be part of it by sneering at it. It’s the difference between affection and affectation.”

So brilliant are Porter’s lyrics that the melodies are often forgotten--not unlike Sondheim’s. But, as Sheed writes, Porter’s “words might have made it to Broadway at any time, but not by themselves, and it would take him the best part of a decade to get the tunes he waned, that’s to say tunes that could ‘touch your heart’ or tickle your funny bone.”

My own first intense exposure to Porter came via the melodies, sans lyrics, in the form of an unjustly neglected LP by two classical guitarists: In the Still of the Night, by John Holmquist and Dan Estrem. You gain an even greater appreciation of songs such as "I've Got You Under My Skin," "Night and Day," and "Love for Sale" when you can only experience them through sounds rather than words.

Two more thoughts, sparked by reminiscences of people who knew Porter:

1) I chose the image accompanying this post because it shows Porter as an indefatigable craftsman. Indeed, Sheed takes issue with the thought that it was Porter’s wife Linda who dragged him away from parties so he could write. In fact, Porter had a strong, abiding work ethic. Another person who felt the same way about the composer was Moss Hart, Porter’s collaborator on the musical Jubilee. In a 1959 essay in Harper’s Magazine on his friend, Hart recalled how, on a round-the-world cruise, Porter tore himself away from everyone when he heard a native dance and, struck by one particular word, composed “Begin the Beguine.”

2) I chose the following quote, from Frank Sinatra, because it mentions my hometown: “Many, many years ago when I was a young man, I was working in a roadhouse in Englewood, New Jersey, just across the river from New York." [This would be The Rustic Cabin--which would actually have been just the next town up from me, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.] "One Sunday evening, when there were about thirty or forty people present in the club, I was singing with the six-piece orchestra. I was also the head waiter, answered telephones, and made out the radio programs…. A party of people arrived. I recognized Mr. Porter. Of course, I was absolutely astounded that he’d be in the same room. I had been singing only about a year-and-a-half or two years and I always tried to do as much Cole Porter material as I could because, as I said, I enjoyed his lyrics. Another reason: Mr. Porter, unlike Mr. Rodgers, let’s say, didn’t go out and get loaded because of an arrangement somebody else made of his music. Mr. Porter was a very liberal man in that sense. He really didn’t care how you arranged it as long as you did the song in its entirety. Even if you changed the tempo from a slow four to a twelve-eight, it made no difference to him.”

Not Gaga Over the Lady

Early Tuesday afternoon, entering the lobby of the Rockefeller Center building where I work, I was greeted breathlessly by a co-worker: “Lady Gaga was here! You missed her by only two or three minutes!”

Several other co-workers caught a glimpse of her, and one posted a shot of the songstress on Facebook. All in all, quite a crowd had gathered in the lobby for the impromptu sighting, and that was even without benefit of her (perhaps) accidentally-on-purpose wardrobe malfunction while being honored as a Fashion Icon at the CFDA Fashion Awards at another point in the day.

Count me among the unimpressed.

Don’t get me wrong: I can be as star-struck as the next person. Work over two decades in midtown Manhattan, as I have done, and you’re bound to come across somebody famous.

Over the years, commuting to or from work or stepping outside during lunch, I’ve been startled by the sight of Henry Winkler (three times, all while appearing in a Broadway show with his good friend, the late John Ritter), Erin Brockovich, former local anchorman John Roland, and boxing promoter Don King (that skyscraper-high ‘do made it impossible for him to appear inconspicuous, even if he wanted to be).

In the same building where Lady Gaga appeared (on her way up to an interview in Howard Stern’s studio), I’ve stood only a few feet away from Fox News’ Alan Colmes (across the street from his employer, with a cellphone seemingly glued to one ear, wearing sunglasses even though he was indoors) and Knick great Walt Frazier (dressed uncharacteristically in a dark three-piece suit, looking more like a banker than the flamboyant Clyde). In the case of the hoops legend, I resisted the impulse to burst out in delight, as a good female friend of mine once did (“It’s my hero, Walt Frazier!”), or as Andy Richter, on his knees before his personal deity, William Shatner, did on Conan O’Brien’s old show, muttering a mantra suitable for the occasion (“I am not worthy…I am not worthy”). Two other co-workers encountered John F. Kennedy Jr. and Garry Marshall (“Yeah, that’s me,” said the Happy Days director when asked if it was him. “What’s it to ya?”).

But really, how on Earth does Lady Gaga--she of the impossible fashion sense (don't try her outfits even at home!)--belong in such company?

Let’s stipulate my prejudices at once: My musical tastes run to jazz, folk rock, classic rock, and classical music. Note that, if you want to have enduring power in these genres, sensationalism only gets you so far without talent. Also note that these styles emphatically do not include the form to which Lady Gaga belongs: Bimbo Pop.

Madonna became the pioneer—or, if you will, the den mother—of these female singers starting with an early ‘80s stage performance, when her antics—writhing on the floor in a wedding dress during “Like a Virgin”—led even the jaded Cher to burst out to a companion, “What the hell is that?” That was a seminal event in Bimbo Pop, a style dependent on empty sensation. Impressionable young children—now grown up to include not only Lady Gaga but also Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Katy Perry and Lindsay Lohan—took notice, to unhappy effect.

Though for some people imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, in Lady Gaga’s case blatantly stealing someone else’s work is.

As I was sitting in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago, an insistent, propulsive beat filled the air around me. After a few seconds I thought, Why does this sound familiar? Another 20 or so seconds and a more aggravating thought followed: Why does this sound like Madonna, even though I know it isn’t? Then, a moment of stunned recognition hit me: That’s “Express Yourself” but with different lyrics and a different voice!

In checking Lady Gaga’s Web site, I didn’t see the Material Girl and co-writer Stephen Bray receive any credit for “Born This Way.” I can’t say if they are so credited on her album because I refuse to shell out my hard-earned money on that stuff.

It wasn’t that long ago that even the mere suggestion of borrowing without attribution might have sparked a lawsuit in rock ‘n’ roll. (See George Harrison’s unhappy legal experience with “My Sweet Lord,” which some claimed echoed far too much the Sixties hit “He’s So Fine.”) But I guess today everything is different, and perhaps Madonna doesn’t mind the greatest piece of creative “indebtedness” since Brian DePalma latched for dear life onto the mature masterpieces of Alfred Hitchcock.

“God doesn’t make mistakes,” Lady Gaga announces in “Born This Way.” Most of us didn’t need a loud dance tune to figure that out already (it's in His/Her job description--it comes with being perfect).

But human beings sure make mistakes, and one of them is to make a heroine—a icon even, for God’s sake—out of someone who has demonstrated little creative ingenuity in anything, with even her method for grabbing public attention out of another performer’s playbook.