Waiting for Levittown

It has been a very powerful day in New York. My matinee was spent waiting for Godot and who showed up but John Goodman, Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin and John Glover. These are four of the most powerful people you can see on the stage.

The four bring a physicality not usually seen in the existential piece. Goodman, if only through his size (but with many more gifts), brings a menacing quality. John Glover brings in some non-human qualities to his role. Nathan Lane dances with Bill Irwin. What a production.

On to Levittown for opening night at the Theatre at Saint Clements church. Where to begin?

How about beginning with the creek of the wood on the third stair that seems to make that noise which signals another family member's presence in the middle of the night. But nobody's there. How about all the sights and sounds of the old family home long after many of its residents are gone?

Perhaps this is why the "geographic cure" is a recognized psychological approach to the ghosts and memories (good and bad) in most families. The idea is that if you move away (from house, family, etc.) you leave some troubles behind you. Playwright Marc Palmieri explores the creeks and groans in the old family homes in a Levittown housing project in New York. These family members didn't move away and so must confront both real family members and sundry ghosts from the extended family, war buddies and the past.

There's rich ground to plough here. Artifacts, dead family members and poorly remembered past events are all real (albeit absent or even inaccurate) as socializing agents. If this weren't such a weighty play I'd work in the song "I Remember it Well" from Gigi, sung by Hermine Gingold and Maurice Chevallier.

In fact we don't remember anything well when it comes to family history, but I digress.

What is slightly underdeveloped is the theme of passing down hurts and wounds from generation to generation. The identical homes in the housing development is a metaphor for this no doubt, but the theme of "normalization" in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is dense territory not fully explored.

There are loaded guns all through our memories, relationships and family homes, and this play asks us to confront them.

Special comment about the performance of actor Curzon Dobell. It has been said by those who claim to know about such matters that British, Canadian and American actors are distinguished thusly:

The British act mainly with their heads (Olivier, Gielgud and so on)

Canadians act mainly with their chests (Christopher Plummer, William Shatner especially as he wheels through the decks of the Enterprise)

Americans act mainly with their crotches (Al Pacino in Salome for example)

Well, this chap seems to act with his entire body. This is fitting since he was born in America, grew up in Canada and was educated (in part) at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in the UK. His whole body includes intense and controlled hand movements as if to release his angst through his finger tips. He leans his head back on the living room chair as if the weight of the world is contained in his head, yet his 165 lb, 6' frame looks as if it might not hold the intensity and weight of the complex thoughts in his head.

Dobell has a unique quality to his voice (as does John Malkovich) and a body intensity as does Christopher Walken.

At any rate, my wife and I ran all the way back to our hotel with his performance living rent free in our minds. He's playing an abusive and menasing father rather too well.

It was fun to see Mr. Dobell act because one of the last times I saw him perform was about 38 years ago when he was in radio and convinced me of the merits of going into that business--a recommendation that I have been grateful for weekly. It seems to have worked out reasonably well for both of us--him especially.

Shaw Festival 2009

Sunday in the Park with George

George is pointillist, impressionist painter George Seurat. The Park is the Island of La Grand Jatte. Art critics and sociologists endlessly speculate about who is whom and relationships depicted on the canvass. Like all good art, the discussion can take you to gender, class, politics and elsewhere.

Stephen Sondheim wrote this after deciding to quite Broadway and stick to writing mystery novels. He was lured back and this is a result.

Like several of Sondheim's works, it doesn't immediately hit a potential theatre goer that looking at a picture (or invading Japan in the case of Pacific Overtures or killing customers in your barber shop and baking them into pies--Sweeney Todd) will make for a great stage play, but it does. It does for the same reason that art critics and sociologists discuss the original endlessly. I've seen a Broadway production and the only thing more beautiful was a Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme. It took 20 minutes for a set change, at the end of which we were in a Paris apartment and it was the only time I've ever seen an audience applaud a set.

But I digress...

Impressionist paintings are easy on the eyes and so if you have a moment when the action or the song isn't completely captivating, there's the eye candy.

More postings to come after I've seen the Shaw version. But in general, it's a must-see if only, but not only that Sondheim is the last of the line and keeper of the faith. Mentored by Ocsar Hammerstein II, he is responsible for the bounce in Broadway in the late 1960s on after popular culture ceased to be based on this American art form. Popular culture was Broadway, with even the smallest towns occasionally seeing touring companies and their radio stations playing the hits from My Fair Lady, The Music Man (before the Beatles turned Till There Was You Into a Rumba) and South Pacific.

But I digress...

Here is what was going through my mind as I watched the Shaw Festival version in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. First was the famous quote from New York theatre critic John Simon who called this group of players the best rep company in North America. I was watching acting and singing, but the players would also be dancing and goodness knows what else in other productions that week. What a workout.

The next thing is what a treat it is to see a professional production in a 32o or so seat theatre. Broadway and the west end have a few about double that size, but normally it's 4 or 5 times that size. I feel like I'm in the production at the Royal George Theatre.

Next is that the festival deserves full credit for staging the major Broadway productions. Between about 1920 and 1960 dozens of fabulous productions were staged and it's just not happening anymore. I don't think you can go through life without seeing them. Sondheim the the last of the line, starting with West Side Story and giving the genre a little longer life with his various hits.

Next, I began thinking about visual literacy. This is the week that President Obama staged managed the nomination of a Supreme Court judge as if it were a campaign event. Leno is leaving The Tonight Show and Elizabeth Edwards is still making the rounds with her tell-all book.

We are fascinated with behind the scenes issues. On visual literacy, when you show a photograph to some isolated people they look to the sides and behind the picture to see the context. It doesn't make immediate sense. A famous Australian documentary mainly showed feet walking, because that's what nomads and travellers on "walkabouts" know and are concerned with.

This may be similar to what Sondheim went through looking at Seurat's work. What's going on in this picture? What are the relationships between and among the people depicted? What were the people doing before and after the picture was painted? That's what Sunday in the Park with George deals with, as we listen to Sondheim's complex music.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

For those who don't have enough alcohol and drug abuse in their lives, there's Eugene O'Neill. He comes by the interest in the subject honestly. Born in a Broadway hotel, his older brother drank himself to death at age 45 and he abused alcohol himself. As he died in a hotel room in Boston he was heard to whisper, "I knew it, I knew it. Born in a hotel room and God damn it, died in a hotel room."

As Richard Gwynn recently chronicled in his book about Canada's first Prime Minister (John A The man Who Made Us), drinking to excess was much more common in our parents and grandparents time. Even before that, in England, a scarcity of potable water caused even children to drink ale. Eight glasses was the limit, and if someone was acting strangely, s/he was considered "one past the eight."

A few seasons ago I saw Moon on Broadway with Kevin Spacey. His manic energy and lost soul quality somehow gave the depressing topic of alcohol abuse a sweat flavour.

Good King Charles' Golden Days

Before I see a Shaw (or sometimes Priestly) play, I think of cable TV political talk shows. What? Imagine Chris Matthews (MSNBC) or Don Newman (CBC Newsworld) welcoming a round table consisting of a member of the clergy, a professor, author, retired politician, feminist scholar and retired Supreme Court judge (add your own favourites) and they begin a lucid discussion of power, culture, gender, leadership (in Good King Charles case) and other topics. There are no commercials. There is an intermission. No one shouts over the other. As with all drama and poetry, it's like real life with the boring bits edited out. The topics have been written and edited carefully by a smart guy to sound like general conversation.

What's equally amazing is that the topics of class, the nature of work and the other topics Shaw tackles are as fresh and relevant today as they were up to 100 years ago when conceived and wrote his major works.

So here are some of the topics this play tackles:

-gender relations, gender roles

-civics & governance

-science vs religion

-religion vs religion

Isn't this exactly what is the mainstay of cable talk today? At two points in the third act, the King speculates that there must be at least a half a dozen good rulers and a half a dozen good legislators in the land. He wonders how you'd go about finding them and then putting them to work.

After the convoluted primary season in America, which got more than a few people favouring direct democracy, and Canada's near constitutional crisis, this is a very, very good question.

Brief Encounters

Long before Seinfeld's show about nothing, there was Noel Coward. In Private Lives a world traveller is asked about various locations and manages to explain that China is "very big" and that Japan is "very small." As the British would say when they are not the least bit interested in something..."how interesting."

Long before celebrities became so in great part for not wearing underpants, there was Noel Coward. He invented himself and managed his reputation and fame very professionally.

Born Yesterday

Obama's Inaugural

My book launch, at Ben McNally's book store on Bay Street just south of Richmond in Toronto is on President Obama's first full day in office--January 21st, 5-8 pm. Ben has kindly stocked the new book--Political Conventions: The Art of Getting Elected and Governing and previous publications--

Doing and Saying the Right Thing
Media Relations
Tough Love at the Table
Political Columns: Behind the Scenes with Powerful People

In honour of the event, here are the top ten news stories that the mainstream media are not covering:

1. The inaugural address is important to set a tone for the presidency. Perhaps, but Kennedy's was the best and still featured backward talking -- "ask not...in battle we are" and he passed little legislation and soon after was in Vietnam, Laos (in a bigger way) and the Pay of Pigs. There is no correlation between initial oratory and governing.

2. Why do Americans have a transition that lasts longer than two months? They claim that the staff is so large and government so complex that the transition requires this time. How about when the British ran the world (often with barefoot runners and quill pens as management guru Peter Drucker says). Their transition was days for the government and usually weeks until Parliament met.

3. If Bush was so divisive, why did he not have to use his veto until his second term? The answer is probably signing orders telling the bureaucracy how to interpret legislation, but it's still a topic worth exploring.

4. Unsung heroes of inauguration day. Who covers Hoover, Hayes, McKinley, Coolidge and Eisenhower as great speakers? Each deserves a thought in this inaugural week, especially Eisenhower who once wrote speeches for Gen. MacArthur. A big surprise is LBJ. Google his speech and it is magnificent prose.

5. One of the mysteries of American politics is the reference with which Lincoln is still held. He knew when he announced his candidacy that he would win (because of the vote split among candidates) and that his winning would cause secession. His first inaugural notes that slavery is a State issue and he denounces "the lawless invasion by armed forces of the soil of any State...". He said he had "no purpose...to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so..."He even supported the return of runaway or contraband slaves, even if they'd escaped to a non-0slave state. In a spurious legal argument he also says union is like a contract and a contract can't be broken by only one party to that contract. During the Civil War he couldn't get his generals to act---McClelland to attack at first and Meade to follow Lee to the Potomac at more than a crawl after Gettysburg. Either action would have ended the war early and saved lives.

6. Great public policy can come from the reviled as much as from the revered. LBJ's inaugural announced high-speed rail between Boston and Washington (4 hours) and it now takes 8 hours. Nixon announced that goods must have the cost of disposal built into their price. Ford and Carter had great environmental and energy plans. If any of this had been implemented, it would be America's century again.

7. Disappointments. Reagan, the Great Communicator and Bill Clinton have great reputations as speakers, but, read the text, their inaugurals are just middling.

8. Inflated press coverage. Washington's second inaugural is about 30 seconds long and in his first, he asked for his expenses to be paid while he refused a salary. Washington invented creative expense accounts.

9. Sidebar. While on the topic of speeches, it's too soon to rate Obama's in Berlin, but Regan's is better than Kennedy's. It's longer, more substantial and more direct. Surprising. And it was gutsy of Regan to speak there, given Kennedy's ownership of the venue.

10. Campaign reform. It's time for America to form a more perfect union and reform the party primary and the electoral process. The Union would be more democratic with a national election on a level playing field, rather than 50 state elections.

Q.E.D.

At Issue

This montage of clips from the @issue programs I hosted recently was a great exercise in professional development. I have always encouraged my clients to take as many media interviews as they could. This is a way of collecting thoughts, mastering topics, practicing and keeping current. I took a bit of my own advice with these projects.

Toronto Steakhouses

Toronto Restaurants

Bon Apetite

One of the downsides of business travel is countless restaurant meals. The first hundred or so are a treat, but then you get to dread the boredom of long meals with clients. When there’s nothing else to do, many of us string out the drinks before, appetizers, wine, desert and liquors. It’s an occupational hazard.

The bigger hazard is bad meals. The bigger hazard still is bad meals or poor service in great restaurants. On my first business trip to Hong Kong, a western client thought he was doing me a favour by taking me to what was reputed to be the best French restaurant in the world--Jimmy's. Well, I was disappointed. I didn't fly across the world to have a meal, a version of which I could have had in Montreal or Paris. The meal may have been great, but the venue was all wrong.

And that brings up the point of context. How you feel about a restaurant and meal is a function of the venue, the people you're with, the day you've had and many other factors. So my commentary on specific restaurants may be unfair and subjective, but it's the only commentary I have.

While I'm on the topic, there was The Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center in New York. The food was mediocre and the service pretentious.

Acquivit? Up near the Rockefeller apartments in New York is one of the great venues of all time. It's a two story waterfall. It's much lauded and written up. The lamb was grey (being ordered rare). I sent it back and it came back equally grey and the server was unapologetic.

Toronto's much famed La Scalla, when it was still around? No. I took one of my first clients there years ago and we had terrible service and unmemorable food. We asked advice about menu items and wine and received none. I think the wine advice was, "Do you want red or white?"
No wonder it went out of business.

The Graycliff Hotel and Cigar Factory in Nassau? Pretty much. Fabulous food...a great history with many famous guests...lots of great service...but I just felt a little rushed with so many servers and the need to order desert a half hour in advance.

George V in Paris? Well, please. A baguette, fromage, jambon in the lobby, staring at $10,000 in flowers mounted at a 45 degree angle in vases was enough to make any food taste good. After a long flight we had a Sancerre for the first time, forever now known as my "breakfast wine" because time zones had me sipping this before noon.

Steak Frites? Everyone is better than the last in Belgium (I've had 18 in a row), but Maison L'Entrecot, a couple of blocks from Etoile in Paris featured a nice surprise. A small portion of flank arrives, sliced horizontally accompanied by frites. I was disappointed in the small portion. As I was finishing, the server came around with the platter and put another round of both on my plate. I went back several nights.

The Palm? Yes, in Washington. The Dupont Circle landmark is where K street lobbyists, lawyers, media etc hang around. It's been a fixture since 1972. I can't remember what I ate. I'm sure it was good. But the deal done was better. The Palm at the Weston in Denver saved me after the Democratic Convention. They'd shut down the food concessions at Invesco Center and I walked out with 85,000 other people starving at midnight.

701 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington. This is smack in between the Capitol and the White House. Steps from the Canadian Embassy and the Newseum. The boss there takes business cards. My first and second trip were separated by several months and he greeted me warmly the second time. "You don't really remember me," I said. He assured me he did. "I put him on the spot asking my name." "Allan..." I was aghast. "Allan...um...Bond." Well, I'll take that shaken or stirred. This guy flips through business cards in quit hours waiting guests' second visits. What a pro.

Boil and Boil Wonderful. Just the name of this Hong Kong restaurant is worth the visit, and the great food is a bonus.

Harry's Cafe de Wheels, Woolloomooloo District, Sydney, Australia. This is the only meal I've not eaten out of a lot of exotic locations. This glorified push cart in a rugged district of Sydney has been a favourite of gangsters and celebrities for years, mainly because it stayed open late. The specialty is a meat pie with whipped peas on top and a ladle of gravy pushed into the peas and turned over so the gravy runs over the peas and pie. I circled Harry's watching others eat. I read all the clippings posted on the side and enjoyed the ambiance of the docks. I couldn't go through with it.

Vauxhall Cafe, near Victoria Station, London, really called The Cafe on Vauxhall Bridge. Jet lagged and too early to check in, we decided to have an English breakfast. Two minutes after lining up and staring at the menu the place filled up with shift workers from the street. Two little people (probably my Welsh relatives) were behind the counter. Looking up me expectantly, I couldn't immediately fathom the menu or what they were saying. I said, "Yes" and sat down. Every minute or two, the nice little lady would yell, "Eggs, bacon, bubble" or "Bubble" or "Eggs, toast, bubble and squeak".

It was then I realized that Monty Python was more journalism or sociology than comedy. Something arrived and I ate it.

Ches's Fish & Chips in St. John's. Yes, more please, yes.