The Sound of the Crowd

Broadway’s Most Wanted

The U.S. has now pledged $350 million in Tsunami relief, increasing by 10 times the amount Bush was willing to give at first.

Two I like from Pandagon this morning.

One: “Ah irony, the last refuge of the idiot.”

Two: The dream is over.

Quite aside from his music (and if you know his music you know that’s quite an aside), Artie Shaw was an interesting man. He was one of the few people ever to turn away from acclaim and for the most part, stay turned away (are you listening, Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend?). He quit performing in 1954 when he might have kept making hits. This was an act considered so remarkable that 50 years later it’s in the first sentence of his obituary.

His seven wives (including such pin-up girls of his day as Ava Gardner and Lana Turner) suggest that he may have been an easy man to love, but not live with. In her autobiography Gardner wrote of his constant attempts to educate her. And in filmed interviews and in prose he comes off as one of those people who seems to be disappointed all the time you’re not as smart as he is.

The thing is, he actually was pretty smart and a true innovator in jazz. He was among the first to add strings to it and was the very first to add the harpsichord.

In regards to the former, I came to know Shaw’s music when I took a course in jazz history, and the instructor showed a rare copy of the documentary, “Artie Shaw: Time is All You’ve Got,” which is unfortunately not widely availible on video, despite having won an academy award. One of the moments I will never forget from that documentary is a close-up of Shaw just listening to a 1930s recording of one of his compositions for clarinet backed by a string quartet. It’s quite a lovely moment, and if there’s any silver lining to Shaw’s death, it’s that maybe now the film will get a DVD release (he was reportedly the one holding it back).

In 1940 with his “Gramercy Five,” a “jazz chamber group” that included a harpsichord, he made one of my favorites among all the tracks of his that I have heard, “Summit Ridge Drive.” It still sounds at least 20 years ahead of its time to me.

His sound remains a definitive one of its period and is still heard today in the seemingly unlikeliest of places. Next time you watch that episode of “Friends” where Joey helps the apartment manager learn how to ballroom dance, listen to the music. That’s Shaw’s arrangement of “Begin the Beguine.”

After leaving music he claimed to want to devote himself to being a writer, and actually he was a pretty good one. I’ve got a lot of regard for his autobiography, “The Trouble With Cinderella.” But only three books in 50 years suggests Cinderalla wasn’t the only one having trouble.

I’m told jazz enthuisiasts still debate over whether Shaw or Benny Goodman was the better clarient player of the swing era. I’m firmly in the Shaw camp. His hit record of “Stardust” always gives me images of a rain-swept street in a seaside town in the ’40s, tinged with nostalgia for a place I’ve never been in a time I never lived in.

I’ve just completed watching the first three seasons of 24 on DVD, playing catch up before the fourth season premiere next month, and man am I hooked.

A couple of observations. First, a general comment about all three seasons: The high quality of the acting, writing and production values, combined with the tightly knotted plots of each “day,” gives the show a tone that I think is truly unique in modern television. It feels like I just watched a movie and its two sequels rather than 72 episodes of a televison series over the past three weeks. This isn’t normal television.

Second, the third season in particular ought to be required study for about 98% of TV writer/producers out there. One of the worst things about watching a show you once loved hit the skids is that you keep watching, hoping the people who made the show you loved but have now lost their balance will right themselves. Sometimes you get lucky and they do, such as in the fourth season of West Wing. Sometimes you get Buffy, and they don’t, insisting to the end that they have everything planned out as they take the wagon over a cliff.

24 does.

The first nine or so “hours” from 24’s third season are wildly askew. They’re never flat-out bad, but there’s a feeling that the writers were throwing everything they could think of at the wall to see what stuck. The mid-course correction they achived is even more impressive when you consider that they did it by “retconning” the first part of the season. Reportedly never more than a few episodes ahead in their planning, they seem to have seen that what they were doing wasn’t working. So they blew it up and started over. And did it without destroying the willing suspension of disbelief the format requires (though I admit they stretched it even more than in previous years), That’s an amazing feat of TV engineering. As a bonus, some of the scenes from the first batch of episodes become re-watchable from a new perspective: Why is character X doing Y…

From the reboot, the show takes off for the finish line, until the last few episodes are about as incredible as anything they ever did. I can’t wait to see what the new day will bring.

Mark Evanier provided a link to an interview with Jerry Orbach from last year in which he talks about his theatrical career. And here’s the obit from The Washington Post.

Most of you already know that I don’t think George W. Bush is a very good president (understatement) and that although I think Bill Clinton was wrong in not a few of the things he’s done, he was a better one.

You also know that sometimes subconciously, sometimes not, I also compare Mr. Bush’s performance to the wish-fufillment character of Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.

I’ve also just completed watching on DVD the first three seasons of 24 (about which more in a later post), which featured Dennis Haysbert as the noble President Palmer.

Clinton. Bartlet. Palmer.

Any of them would be better than this. As we saw on September 11 in that classroom, this is not a president who is at his best in a crisis. He hasn’t done anything because public opinion has not yet forced him to and no one has yet told him what to do. But it will, and they will. We can expect probably within the next few hours images approved by the white house of Bush manfully taking command of the situation and letting his heart bleed just a little for the cameras, compassionate conservative that he is.

President Clinton. President Bartlet. President Palmer. Where are you when we really need you?

This is turning into a bad year for those of us who love the theatre. First Fred Ebb dies, then Cy Coleman, now Jerry Orbach has died at the age of 69. Orbach was of course best known to most as the star of “Law & Order,” and his voice was heard by millions of children as the candlestick in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”.

But to me, he was the great star of The Fantasticks, in which he sang “Try To Remember.” And the man who created the role of Billy Flynn in Bob Fosse’s original production of Chicago (the part Richard Gere played in the movie). And perhaps most personally important to me, he was Paul the puppeteer in the Broadway production of one of my favorite musicals, Carnival. It was his first role on “the great white way.”

He will be missed.

“…we’re devoting less than half of what Bush is planning to spend on his own inauguration to helping people recover from one of the worst natural disasters in human history.”

–Eric Alterman

Thanks to the good people at The Disney Channel, I’ve finally seen The Princess Diaries. Those of you who know me or have been reading this blog will know why I’ve been wanting to see this movie: Because I have come to the completely objective opinion that I love the films star, Anne Hathaway, and that she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

But I’d never seen her act, never having seen any of her films (most of them being made for 15-year-old-girls, and you know, it’d just be icky). My love is based purely on talk show appearances where she certainly seems to be smart and funny, and of course, that whole most beautiful woman in the world thing.

Now comes the moment of truth: How did I like the movie that made “my” Anne a star among the Teen Choice Awards crowd?

Well, as a movie, it’s below average, with Garry Marshall’s too-familiar directing tricks both good and bad and a script that is merely servicable (and badly serviced).

But “my” Anne has that movie star thing going on, the eye falls on her naturally and is inclined to stay. And damnit, pretty girls who can play comedy rule my world, and Hathaway can. She’s the next Julia Roberts just waiting for the right role.

If only I knew someone, a writer perhaps, with a knack for writing women’s roles who could write her a good part in a good film, and with whom she could then fall in love and raise three children.

I am completely rational about this. I’m not even going to point out that there was once another Anne Hathaway who was married to a playwright. That would be silly.