And this one from the Washington Park Zoo:

This is me and Midge, my traveling companion, picnicking on our way to Milwaukee aboard the mighty Hiawatha service:

Once here, we checked into the lovely Hotel Schroeder (separate rooms, of course):

The rooms are lavish and the chandeliers are quite the thing!

I did have a bit of work, I took a morning meeting with Neil Hoffman, the president of the art school:

Then it was off to Gimbels for some shopping:

As my message sys, quite the haberdasher. Last night took us to the Schlitz Palm Court:

Midge has been quite the traveling companion, but she’s a bit of a scamp, if you ask me. We went to get our portraits shot, today, and just look at the outfit she’s chosen:

I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is an emphatic NO, she’s a trollop, yes, but she tells me she prefers the company of women. Just my luck.

I’ll be sure to send more postcards of my travels. Midge is leaving in a few days time, and I’ll be on my own in this lovely city.

Cheers,

Pawn XOXO

This from CNN’s website right now:

Americans use enough plastic in year to shrink wrap the state of Texas.

CNN

Okay, when can we start?

It’s a summer’s day on an English country estate in the Berkshires, and each member of the Bliss household has decided to invite their secret paramour down from London for the weekend. Only thing is, none of them, mother Judith, former leading lady of the London Stage, nor father David, successful novelist, Simon, trouble making son nor Sorel, ever-romantic daughter, has let on to anyone else their plans.

To say more would give away the most peculiar entertainments of this decidedly outlandish family.

This production, cleverly directed by Rebecca Holderness, with classic Art Deco setting by Kurt Sharp, provides the perfect playpen for this raucous family and their sometimes witty, sometimes outrageous, pursuits. Pamela Rehberg’s costumes evoke the bygone era of the Roaring Twenties.

Holderness has done a brilliant job of interpreting this period classic for a modern audience. Without altering dialog, she worked with this fine cast (2/3rds of whom are graduating seniors), finding their way into characters from another time, understanding the sensibility behind the humor, and making the language speak clearly to us. Their first rehearsal of the script was at Ten Chimneys, the Genesee Depot estate of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, contemporaries and colleagues of Coward. In this setting, and through personal selections of inspiring totems from that era – photographs, music, etc. – the cast crafted their characters.

The cast and crew of the upcoming production of “Hay Fever” had their first read-through at the renowned Ten Chimneys.

Other stand-out performance nods to Toni Martin, whose sheer force of will powers the towering character of Judith Bliss, undoubtedly the star of this family, and on the flip side, Evan Koepnick, whose sweet and subtle reading of Sandy Tyrell, Judith’s romantic notion, is a delight for his meek ignorance in the face of daunting excess.

Tonight’s performance brought one wholly unexpected piece of theatrical gold which is unlikely to be repeated. Near the end of the second act, Lineve Thurman, as Jackie Coryton, plops down dejectedly onto the divan, which one can only assume had been rushed to the stage, as it audibly cracked. Rather than being thrown by this, Thurman took it for an extra laugh, and worked it into the rest of her scene. This is the sort of skill that no class can teach, and Thurman carried the night with it.

I was just walking back to the office from lunch when I saw some college age kids getting microphones and such hooked up, ahead of me on the corner.  As I approached the intersection a young man with a microphone reached it out towards me, his colleague holding up a small video camera.

“Excuse me sir, could you spare a moment for an interview?”

“About what?” I inquired.

“Ephemeral.  It’s for a class.”

“Sure.” I said.

There was a brief pause as the young man with the microphone looked at me expectantly.  A young woman in a yellow and orange striped shirt looked on, equally expectantly.  The man with the microphone had an oddly shaped head, quite asymmetrical.

“Do you know what it means?” he finally asked.

Of course I know what ephemeral means.  Right? For a moment my mind raced.  I do know what it means, don’t I? Or is it one of those words I only think I know, something I have always only defined by context?  This brief moment of confusion was put down when I confidently said, “Fleeting, not permanent.”

“Thank you,” said the microphone man, and stepped back.  I continued on my way, my ephemeral contribution to their student film now complete.

The Oklahoma Legislature voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to override vetoes of two highly restrictive abortion measures, one making it a law that women undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before having an abortion.

Strict Abortion Measures Enacted in Oklahoma | New York TImes

In the interest of fairness, Pawn feels we should have similar requirements for prescribing certain erectile dysfunction treatments.  Perhaps mandate that all men be required to listen to tapes of crying babies and change a few diapers before getting those little blue pills…

Set in a seaside resort in Norway, this tense drama focuses on one woman, Tekla, and two men, Adolph, her younger husband and Gustav, a mysterious stranger also staying at the resort.  At the open of this roughly 90 minute show (no intermission, although it feels like 3 acts) we find Adolph, a self absorbed man who fancies himself an artist.  He is in conversation with Gustav, a new acquaintance whom he has just met at the resort — the same resort where, some years past, he met the older, married Tekla, who threw over her first husband for the young and bright Adolph.  The Adolph we meet now seems neither bright nor to possess any self assurance.  He prevails upon the older, and quite self-assured Gustav for advice.

Gustav claims to have diagnosed in Adolph incipient epilepsy and prescribes abstinence as the only treatment.  Though at first protesting, Adolph accepts this once Gustav succeeds in making him question both the love of his wife and the solidity of his marriage.  Gustav is vicious and hateful in his views on women, and we can only imagine that he has had a bad time of it with the fairer sex, or, as Gustav would have it, “A fat boy with overdeveloped breasts, that’s what you see. Basically, a badly made youth. A child who’s somehow managed to shoot up to adult height without growing any muscle—a chronic anaemic who haemorrhages regularly thirteen times a year.”

Gustav seems quite certain that Tekla is flirting with younger men — on the ferry, in town, at the resort — he seems to know exactly what is going on even though he admits to not having left the resort where they all are staying.  It isn’t long before we in the audience start to suspect the true motivation behind Gustav’s actions, but I shan’t spill that here.

By the end of this first scene, Gustav has convinced Adolph that Tekla is playing him for the fool, and that he need only lay in wait for proof.  This Adolph does, as Tekla returns from her outing.  Soon she is engaged in a familiar pas da duex with Gustav, unaware that Adolph is right outside the door listening to it all.

“Creditors” the title is explained a couple of times in a sort of massive transactional-analysis manner by both Gustav and Tekla in separate scenes.  We owe those we have wronged, and they may sometime collect from us.  This show takes this idea to the extreme as we see three players, or are they three pieces, push each other’s buttons and pull each other’s strings in fits and outbursts of painful jealousy and retribution.  The final scene, tho the most contrived of the script, is none-the-less believable, and most painful indeed.

The cast, Anna Chancellor as Tekla, Tom Burke as Adolph and Owen Teale as Gustav, are all as fine as one could wish for in this taught production.  Rickman’s direction is spot-on, the dialog utterly natural and unforced, no matter how banal or vicious it may be.  The set, by Ben Stones, is light and airy and feels just right for the action and setting.  I’ve seen Donmar in their London home, and can tell that this set was built for that thrust stage.  Plopped down here, in the Harvey’s deeper proscenium, it still works just fine.  Costumes by Fotini Dimou, lighting by Howard Harrison and music and sound by Adam Cork round out the technical credits.  And to their credit, in the finest tradition of current London standards, their pure naturalism and adherence to history serve to make them fall from view.  We see the characters and the story, not the trappings of theatre.

This was a great day at the theatre, and Rickman has succeeded in his goal of not just getting out of the way of his performers, but of getting them out of their own way.  This not only lets the script shine through, but more importantly lets it do so as compellingly believably as possible.

Fred Ebb has passed away, but Scottsboro Boys is one of several projects he and Kander completed to some degree. With Thompson’s script this show has been brought successfully to the stage fully formed. This is no workshop piece, it is a proper show, and one fully expects that it will see it’s way to Broadway at some point, as many other Vineyard productions have done (such as [title of show], the last show Pawn saw here).

Scottsboro Boys is a show within a show. We start with a woman sitting at a bus stop, and then suddenly a squadron of singing, dancing minstrels enter through the audience, sweeping her up in their song and quickly arranging the sole set decoration – a dozen chairs – into various configurations. Then enters John Cullum (Northern Exposure, Mad Men) as Interlocutor. [In this age of gratuitous applause, he of course receives a raucous welcome from the audience. Pawn finds this new tendency of New York audiences to applaud the performers for simply showing up to be most annoying, and hopes it is short lived.] Cullum’s character is a Southern grandee, imagine Colonel Sanders, who leads this merry minstrel band. He introduces us to the Scottsboro Boys, a minstrel act, and as the show within the show starts, the performers ask if this time they can tell the truth in their performance. He agrees, and we’re off.

The Scottsboro Boys are 9 black men, ranging from 13 to mid-twenties in age, who are riding a freight train from Chattanooga, Tennessee through Alabama when it is stopped by rail inspectors. A pair of white hookers are working the train, and when caught they claim to have been Shanghaied and raped by these 9 men. Of course this being the deep south in the 1930s, the men are soon on death row for this fabricated offense. The musical tells their whole story, in all its regrettable twists and turns, with all the characters, other than Interlocutor, played by black men. The whores, for example, are played by two of the nine suspects, the various guards, attorneys and police are played by two other black men. This turns out to be an incredibly effective device.

I won’t go into all of the details of the show, except to say that Kander & Ebb, as is their wont, do not shy away in the least from the delicate subject matter. We witness the invasion of Northern meddlers, in the person of a carpetbag carrying Jewish attorney from New York, funded by the Communist Party, who is held up by the Alabama Attorney General as proof that these “boys” must be guilty and should be used as an example to those meddling Yids and Yanks to keep their (hooked) noses out of Southern business.

The production is fantastic, the songs are sharp and tight, and unmistakably Kander and Ebb. Fans of Chicago, for example, will hear strains of Mister Cellophane in this show’s Nothin’. The set, by Beowulf Boritt, with it’s ingenious interlocking chairs which form so many clever arrangements, is otherwise more of a suggestion of what might be realized once the show makes it to Broadway. Kevin Adams’ lighting thus ends up pulling more weight, which it does wonderfully. Toni-Leslie James’ costumes are absolutely stunning, and serve to punch-up a show which may otherwise strain under the constraints of the smaller venue.

As for Stroman, she has shown a deft hand with this difficult material. It is hard to guide this magnificent ensemble of actors through the roller coaster storyline, keeping their emotions at just the right level at all times while still keeping their motivation believable and the entire piece moving along. The cast is outstanding, with special kudos to Brandon Victor Dixon as Haywood Patterson and especially to Derrick Cobey as Andy Wright, whose emotional confrontation with a recalcitrant and manipulative Forrest McClendon as Atty. Samuel Leibowitz (one of many roles-within-a-role he takes on as Mr. Tambo) has the audience gripped and silent near the end of the show.

Scottsboro Boys closes tomorrow, but I am sure that we will see it reappear in a larger venue soon.

This afternoon took Pawn and X to the final matinée of Love Is My Sin at Theatre For A New Audience at the Duke Theater. Theatre For A New Audience seems to have failed its name in this case, as this collection of 31 of Shakespeare’s sonnets are over 400 years old; the performers, Natasha Parry and Michael Pennington are well past 60 and the audience? Let’s just say the average age of the audience is recently deceased. It is worth noting that even though the company offers a $25 ticket for anyone 30 and younger, it would appear from today’s crowd that only one or two such tickets were used.

Love Is My Sin is a recital more than a performance, with Parry and Pennington taking turns (mostly) reading or reciting the sonnets. The collection, edited by Parry’s husband of 60 years, Peter Brook, is lovely. He has grouped it into 4 sections: Devouring Time, Separation, Jealousy and Time Defied. This is a great way to bring the sonnets to the attention of a wider audience and make them accessible. Truly, this could have been theatre for a new audience. Alas, it was not today.

My only negative notes on this able performance, with music by Frank Krawczyk, is that the sound sucked. That these able actors were miked at all is more a testament to the age of their audience (many wearing audio assist headphones) than any need to fill a cavernous space (the Duke is only a bit over 200 seats). Parry’s mike was distorting for the last half of the 50 minute show, and the whole system teetered on the edge of feedback, with a faint ringing around every sibilance. This put a fatiguing finish on an otherwise delightful time.

Tonight, to cap of this trio of reviews, was Michael Moschen at NYU’s Skirball Center, a part of their Big Red Chair family series. Moschen (a MacArthur Genius grantee) is a juggler who has developed witty and beautiful extensions to the art, which find him sometimes simply playing with geometrical shapes in ways which make for great visuals, but are not strictly juggling. That’s fine with us! Coupled with careful and effective lighting the result is truly beautiful stage images, and not a little fun. Moschen talks to the audience at times, explaining how he does what he does, or why he does it one way or another. He shares some interesting observations with us. And then other times he is silent, and just gives us the stunning scenes, with his props and tools.

It was a fairly short show, weighing in at a little over an hour, and yet again, no intermission. In an interesting twist, not a single show I’ve seen on this trip has had one.

Tomorrow we will venture to Brooklyn Academy of Music for Alan Rickman’s production of Strindberg’s The Creditors. No intermission there either, in a piece Rickman described to the Times as “Three people being pulled backwards through a hedge for ninety minutes.” Yippie!

We got off to a late start this morning. Well, more correctly, X got off to a late start. I was up at the crack of 6:30, as per usual, and writing until X got up at the more leisurely crack of 9:30 [twas 8 a.m.-X]or so. We trekked uptown to 103^rd Street and the Museum of the City of New York which is currently hopping aboard the Addams Family fueled Hype extravaganza by presenting Charles Addams in New York. This retrospective showcases about 60 of the cartoonist’s original drawings and paintings made for the New Yorker, Collier’s and others. It is a lovely little show, well displayed (although some of the large reproduction pieces were peeling at the corners) with thoughtful background information and artifacts from the artist’s work room and personal collections.

One endearing feature is the inclusion of several rogue characters from the cartoons, excised from their original homes and now peering around corners, traipsing along the baseboards or otherwise interfering with the exhibit. We exited through the gift store, where X picked up a Chas Addams address book to replace her worn, George Costanza-esque model.

Up next? A short bus ride downtown, a quick bite of street food, and then into the Guggenheim. We chose to jet our way to the top and then amble down, side tracking into the annex galleries along the way. There is an exhibit of Paris and the Avant-Garde currently in the annex, which is nothing too exceptional, but seems to have drawn every French visitor in town. Cursing in foreign languages – that’s what these shows are good for. Miro this and Modigliani that. Here a Picasso, there a Picasso… You get the idea. Someone thought it would be a good idea to display nearly identical Picasso and Braques next to each other, which seems only to make them each look unoriginal.

The main gallery featured Haunted, Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance. To be quite honest, a lot of what was here either didn’t move me, or I have already seen elsewhere. There was a piece by Marina Abramovic, oddly enough, which is also on display over at MoMA right now. There were some pieces by Roni Horn, but just one or two, which I have already seen in the company of their brethren in last year’s stunning exhibit at Tate Modern. Likewise a single Annette Messager, which seemed lonely all by itself.

The one image which really stood out for us both was Self Portrait at 3 Years Old by Gillian Wearing. This is a truly haunted image, and was selected as the show image for banners, etc. Wearing takes an image, in this case of herself at 3, and cuts out the eyes. She then poses behind that image as tho it were a mask, and photographs herself. The result is quite lovely and yet decidedly unsettling. Here is a detail:

Once down the ramp, we rolled back onto the street and trudged on downtown to 79^th St. and the Aquavella Gallery, which is currently hosting Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection. This exquisite show of modern American pop art is a stunner. Featuring Warhol, Oldenburg, De Suvero, Rosenquist and more Jasper Johns than you can shake a stick at. Magnifique! There is even a lovely sculpture of the couple, Robert and Ethyl Scull, by George Segal. Her in Jackie O giant sunglasses -X

This show is worth seeing if just for the Jasper Johns. Throw in everything else and it is fantastic. It’s wonderful that private galleries are mounting shows of this scale, as reported in the Times recently.

Speaking of private galleries, our next stop was just a couple of blocks away, on 77^th & Madison for Gogosian‘s Ed Paschke retrospective.

More than 40 of Paschke’s large, stellar, nearly photographic oil paintings in their deeply saturated psychedelic tones are featured. Paschke’s work at times presages computer and video art in it’s look, but decades before anyone was making such art. Look at his 1970 Pink Lady, for instance, Marilyn Monroe’s head superimposed onto an accordion player’s body, and contrast that with what Warhol was doing. Then consider that Warhol was working with screen printing and photography whereas Paschke was working in oils. I don’t mean to take anything away from Warhol, but I think that Paschke’s work deserves more attention than it has sometimes received. This show, expansive and complete, is the best that I have ever seen, and certainly took the prize of all the museums and galleries we attended today. Showing many of the artist’s early works, with frequent use of masks, makes the path to his later works, almost totally abstracted faces with few features left, clearer than ever.

It is at this point that X abandoned me to head home for a well earned nap while I went to explore the Tichý show at the International Center of Photography. Miroslav Tichý was a non-conformist photographer working in a small town in Czechoslovakia, doing most of his work in the 60s and 70s. That was a tough time to be a non-conformist in Eastern Europe, and Tichý paid the price for his insolence.

He made very personal photographs with a very singular purpose. He focused almost entirely on women, and was almost totally informal in his work, shooting about 100 pictures a day using home built cameras with hand ground lenses and his own home built darkroom equipment. His reliance upon these unconventional means was all a part of his method, a sort of silent protest against progress and modernity. I love the gentleness in his images, their rough quality, inherently soft focus. It helps that he seems to be at least a little bit of a letch, as well. That works for me.

ICP’s exhibit includes several dozen of Tichý’s small photographs, as well as samples of his equipment – cameras, enlarger, lenses (Plexiglas ground with toothpaste and ash) etc. I was quite pleased with the entire exhibit. This is the one exhibit I’ve seen on this trip which I wished was larger, but that’s okay – leave me wanting more, I can take it.

Finally, I trekked over to Times Square to see if I could fetch a cheap ticket for a show tonight. I have tried repeatedly to get seats for the Scottsboro Boys, the latest from Susan Strohman, but to no avail. This limited run show (closing Sunday) was sold out in a heartbeat. At the TKTS booth, I found long lines and a tote board which promised a large selection of shows which I didn’t really feel like seeing, let alone standing in line for. Off to the side I saw a barker waving tickets over his head. As I approached he was chatting with someone, and I couldn’t tell which shows he was selling.

“What have you got?” I inquired. “Scottsboro Boys!” came his reply. Bingo! I got a “single in stalls” as the British would say, 3^rd row in the tiny 100 seat Vineyard theater, for ½ price. I couldn’t be happier.

So I am off to the theatre tonight, and X is off to dinner with another old chum. More news later.