William Finn has one of the most unique, idiosyncratic voices amongst Broadway’s current crop of musical writers, as you can currently discover both on Broadway (with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, but only to January 20, so hurry if you’re in the area and have not seen it yet) and off-Broadway (with Make me a Song, a revue of his songs, that ends even sooner on December 30 at New World Stages, but whose website is currently promising a London run).
But one of my favourite collections of his material is Infinite Joy, an evening that he hosted himself at the Public Theatre’s Joe Pub, and in which he performed a song called “Stupid Things I Won’t Do” that contains one of my favourite lines of his: “Reading papers when there ain’t a review is a stupid thing/and I won’t do it”. Hear, hear!
I’m a voracious consumer of newspapers – on Sundays, I buy four regularly, and sometimes six (at which point the only paper I skip that actually contains reviews is the Sunday Telegraph, the reading of which is another stupid thing I won’t do, so I await word instead from my friend Michael Sharpe about what howlers the review contains every week). But I always turn straight to the arts pages to find the reviews before I read anything else. So this week is always a tough one for me, as the papers in between Christmas and New Year are mostly a reviews-free zone. What’s the point of The Guardian without the daily review page at the back? (Their last one was last Friday). Even The Guardian’s blogs seem to have gone on hiatus: the last new theatre blog was also posted last Friday.
Perhaps I just need to get a life. (Or at least find a life beyond the one I currently inhabit). But I’m finding that the trawl for theatrical nourishment hasn’t actually stopped: last night I even caught a double bill of two new revues at Hampstead’s New End Theatre, an autobiographical one on the career of West End veteran Thelma Ruby and a biographical one on Brel. And tonight I’m catching the Ian McKellen King Lear again, that I’ve not seen since the Stratford opening. The day job also resumes today, too: I also have two columns to file this morning!
But thanks to the West End Whingers, I have solved my (lack of) sending out a personal Christmas greeting: they’ve thoughtfully created a card that features Michael Billington, Nicholas Hytner, Kevin Spacey and yours truly doing an animated Christmas dance! Reading papers when there isn’t a review may be a stupid thing to do, but this particularly stupid click-through is sheer pleasure!
Ah yes, Mark, but if you read newspapers even on days when the reviews are absent they may tell you things you did not know and they may help to develop your political instincts and your wider view of mankind - and that may help your responses to plays to become even more insightful!
And yet, Mr Letts think how much more insightful your reviews would be if your world knowledge extended beyond the passion and prejudices that inform your political writing and into something that could equal Mark's passion for the theatre. Rather than simply writing as a (not often) bemused tourist, there might be some theatrical intellectual criticism and insight in your reviews rather than the easy quote or jab.
It is a scary thought that any intelligent
critic would not read many ENTIRE newspapers
daily to put in context what they see and
review.
Ted
It's a scary thought that any intelligent reader of this blog wouldn't spot that I was being a little flippant! OF COURSE I read (some of) what's in the rest of the papers, but when you buy six on Sundays, it's an impossibility to read them in their ENTIRETY! (And all I said, in fact, was that I read the arts pages first... not the arts pages only!) And in addition to the wealth of daily and Sunday papers, I also check the NEW YORK TIMES online every single day.... not to mention, of course, THE STAGE (the website usefully attached to this blog) and VARIETY!
Clearly your sense of humor or flippancy does
not cross the pond.Glad to know that you are
up to date on this awful world we all live
in. Thank God for Theatre!!