Culture Watch

A Peek behind the Neon Signs at a Secret Los Angeles Night Club, 1953: This Is Not "I Love Lucy"

by Bruce Chadwick

Play It Cool Acorn Theater Theater Row W. 42d St. New York, N.Y. We all know what it was like to live in Los Angles in 1953. There are numerous books, movies and television shows that tell us. We never get the real story, though, because the history we know edits out the history we should know -- and don’t.Play It Cool, that just opened on Theater Row, in New York, pulls back the censor’s patch on history and tells us the story of gay life in L.A., centered in Mary’s Hideaway, a gay night club that bristles with hot jazz, new talent and old woundsPlay It Cool is a new look at gay life in the early ‘50s but, at the same time, a well-staged ‘noir’ type of play that outwardly resembles dozens of late 1940s and early 1950s black and white night club movies and police shows in theaters or on television. It opens with a detective in a fedora and brown trench coat smoking a cigarette and setting the scene for Play It Cool. The detective then steps into the play itself and a rich and dangerous story about gay life in Southern California unfolds.

Othello’s Wars, Wives and Wickedness Heat Up Sixteenth-Century Venice

by Bruce Chadwick

OthelloThe Shakespeare Theater of New JerseyDrew UniversityMadison, N.J.Othello is generally considered one of Shakespeare’s boldest plays.  It has history, military, wars, generals, friends and foes (often the same people), race, the beauty of Venice, and a timeless story of love and betrayal.  It also has two of the best roles in theater history in Othello and his ensign, Iago.  It is a lengthy, though, and complicated, making it hard to produce well.It is produced well, very well, in its latest revival at the Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey, where it opened last weekend.The 1604 play by William Shakespeare opens up with the arrival of a black Moor general, Othello, in Venice at a time of triumph for the army and a time when Venice, an independent republic made up of more than two hundred islands, is in political decline and threatened by the Turks.We quickly meet Othello, his lovely young wife Desdemona, his trusted right hand man Michael Cassio, and the shady ensign/slave, Iago, who plans to convince Othello that his aide and Cassio are having an affair.  The reason:  he thinks that the destruction of Cassio will make Iago the chief aide in the army.

Theater World Hopes History Plays Make Up for Historic Hurricane Losses as Season Opens

by Bruce Chadwick

The unprecedented weekend shutdown of New York’s Broadway and Off-Broadway theaters by Hurricane Irene August 27-28 cost the theater industry nearly $10 million in lost ticket sales.The Broadway League’s figures showed that in the previous week, theaters earned over $20 million in ticket sales, but during the hurricane week, they took in just $11 million. Hurricane week had 131,000 ticket buyers versus 218,000 in the previous week. The drop off was about the same in percentages for Off-Broadway shows (one theater in Vermont was destroyed by the hurricane). The theaters have been shut down before, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and during last winter’s blizzard, but those closures were just for a single day.The theater needs another record-breaking season like last year to offset the hurricane losses and is once again relying on a number of plays about and from history to do so, starting with a very ballyhooed revival of Follies on September 12.  It is the first of more than fifty plays about the past scheduled to open in New York this season, with more to be named later. .

On Stage, New York Commemorates the Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks

by Bruce Chadwick

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working at my home in the northern part of New Jersey.  I called my office at New Jersey City University to find something out.  I called from my bedroom.  It was a quiet and peaceful morning. The leaves had started to change colors in the small woods behind my house; birds chirped.“Are you watching TV?” Jeannine, the secretary who answered the phone, said in a frantic voice.“No,” I said.  I hadn’t looked at the television all morning.“Quick. Turn on the TV. Two large jetliners have crashed into the World Trade Center. They think it’s a terrorist attack,” she said.I turned on the television and half sat, half fell into the chair in front of it as I saw smoke billowing from the tops of the Twin Towers.  I grabbed the phone and called my wife at the high school where she worked.  She took the call in an office where many teachers had gone to watch television’s coverage of the attacks.

Eric Foner: Colbert and the Daily Show "an opportunity not to be missed"

by Eric Foner

After my first appearance on The Colbert Report a student remarked: “you’d better retire now, professor—you’ll never be able to top that.”  I have appeared on many TV shows, from Donahue back in the 1980s to Charlie Rose, The Open Mind, and others, but judging from the notoriety one achieves (for twenty-four hours), The Daily Show and Colbert Report are different.  Of course, these are comedy shows.  But even in this unusual venue it is possible to say something useful about history.

There Is No Business Like Show Business and No History Like the History of It

by Bruce Chadwick

There is an immortal song in the play Annie Get Your Gun called “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”  This year, the theater world seems intent on proving that with a long stream of plays and musicals about iconic figures in the history of entertainment.  Whether you like to dance to the music of 60s’ rock group the Shirelles, love the classic operatic singing of Maria Callas, want racial history, sexual history or any kind of history of entertainment and its stars, it is all on stage somewhere in America.

RIP Nick Ashford and Jerry Leiber: You Created the Soundtrack for a Multiracial America

by Mark Naison

When I discovered that two of the greatest pop songwriters of all time, Nick Ashford (of the duo Ashford and Simpson) and Jerry Leiber (of Leiber and Stoller) both died yesterday, August 22, my first impulse was to go into mourning.  As someone who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and came of age as a civil rights and anti-war activist at Columbia University in the 1960s, I looked to songs that they had written (from “Hound Dog” and “Stand By Me” to “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Solid as a Rock”) as part of the soundtrack of my life and markers of my personal and political evolution.But after thinking about their music—not only on its impact on tens of millions of people of my generation, but on the cultural politics their songwriting reflected—I think it’s important to understand that they were figures who, in their own way, helped redefine race in United States by creating a sonic universe in which people of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds could find joy and meaning.

Fringe Festival: "Noir" is Hard-boiled Good Fun

by Bruce Chadwick

On Stage: ‘Law and Order,’ 1953 In the late 1940s, Hollywood created a sleazy, shadowy urban crime drama genre of movie that was later dubbed film noir by [French] critics.  In these hundreds of noir movies, brutal murder mysteries took place at night, in the shadows, involved savage men and gorgeous women and always had syrupy music playing in the background (and at least one victim thrown through a window).  Lately, writers and cinematographers have enjoyed making fun of these fifty-year-old ‘tough guy’ movies. Now playwrights are poking fun, too.  One of the best is Noir, by Stan Werse, set in New York City in 1950, the post-World War II era when city night clubs thrived, newspapers put out eight editions a day and the Yankees won the World Series every year.  Noir, one of the 194 New York Fringe Festival plays, opened last weekend with loud gunfire and louder laughs at the Connelly Theater downtown. The plot of Noir is simple.  A bold, good looking young detective, Clay Holden, gets caught up in a complex murder investigation that centers on his shadowy, newfound girlfriend, Helen Lydecker, who insists that she is the victim of a bad guy’s scheme.  To win her love, and solve the case, Holden charges off into the night after whom he believes is the killer.

Chasing History through the Streets of New York

by Bruce Chadwick

Some of the fun of seeing plays about the past that are part of the annual summer Fringe Festival in New York is that you can literally chase history over the sidewalks of the city. Fringe fans use the festival program and city maps to see whichof the 197 plays they can see almost back to back. Sometimes, if the play and subway times match, you can see three plays in one day.I picked two history dramas in the Cooper Square area of the city, five blocks apart, and caught one hour long play at noon and a ninety minute play at 2. The trick? Move fast!Chagrin LaMaMa Theater 74A E. Fourth Street New York, N.Y. You remember the child geniuses.  They were the ten- and eleven-year-old kids with extraordinary mental powers that the media loved.  They read the novels of Hemingway at four, were piano prodigies at eight, invented things at twelve, and went to college at fifteen.  You read about them in newspapers and magazines and saw them on television.  Everybody was startled by their mental powers and fearful that they could never lead a normal life.

"Chasing Heaven" Chases the Question of Who Writes History

by Bruce Chadwick

Chasing HeavenFlamboyan Theater107 Suffolk StreetNew York           Who writes history?           Historians today produce an endless number of books about people they never met who lived a hundred years before they were born in places they never visited. How do we know that they got the story right?            That is the question of Chasing Heaven, one of the history plays in this year’s Fringe Festival, in New York, that opened Saturday. The play is the story of a Pulitzer Prize winner who is asked to re-write a Porgy and Bess like black folk opera from the 1930s that became a musical and cultural masterpiece. She wants to update it and to do so plans to drop legendary characters and change the colorful, local southern black dialect of the play that she thinks is cartoonish. Is she right to do that?

A Sarcastic Play about Bombings, Suicides, Police Scandals, Anarchists and the New Left in Italy in 1969 Scores for New Jersey Theater

by Bruce Chadwick

Accidental Death of an Anarchist Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey Drew University Madison, N.J. Political eruptions spiraled out of control in the 1960s.  The radical Weathermen in the U.S. plagued police.  The Baader-Meinhof gang wreaked havoc in Germany, and the Irish Republican Army battled law enforcement and the British government in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  In Italy, the 1960s ended with the awful bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agriculture in the Plaza Fontana, Milan, in 1969.  Seventeen people were killed and 88 wounded. Police arrested 80 suspects. One of them, an anarchist and railway worker named Guiseppe Pirelli, was questioned by several police officers for three days without being charged, and then mysteriously defenestrated at police headquarter and died on impact when his body hit the street below.  His death, Pinelli’s supporters said, was yet another incident of police brutality and a shining example of a government in shambles.  The police denied any wrongdoing and said Pinelli was overcome by a strange emotional disorder and jumped.  An official investigation ruled Pinelli’s death an accident and cleared the police.

How Real is the History in Historical Dramas? It May Not Matter

by Bruce Chadwick

What did the victims of the Salem witch trials actually say when they were about to be hanged for their “crimes”?  We don’t know.  Playwright Arthur Miller didn’t know, either. He obtained all of his material from slender court records of the era and was not privy to any of the dialogue when he wrote The Crucible. Did Caesar really say “Et tu Brute?” when his friend Brutus was about to stab him in the Roman Senate in 44 B.C.? William Shakespeare didn’t know. He based his classic play on the historical work of Plutarch, who didn’t have the exact dialogue, either.We do not know, cannot know, who said what in most of history.  Even today, with round-the-clock television, text messages and emails, we can’t get everybody’s conversation down for the ages.What playwrights who write history plays try to do is present an historical event, or a biography, as accurately as possible and attempt to present dialogue that hopefully fits the situation in a way that their characters might have delivered it.  They use their research of people’s lives and statements to do so.  This can get tricky.

Corruption, Greed, Evil Bankers, Swindlers, Underwater Mortgages, Unpaid Debts and a Devastating Recession: Does This Sound Familiar?

by Bruce Chadwick

Timon of Athens Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey Drew University Madison, New Jersey In the opening scene of Timon Athens, set in the late nineteenth century, a wildly-dressed prostitute with flaming red hair piled high on top of her head, at a carnival with a dazzling string of bring lights over her, curtsies towards the audience.  “Athens: greed and corruption,” she wails and the play begins. The play is an allegorical tale of Timon, a philanthropist in ancient Athens who gives away much of what he has and is then sued by dozens of bankers to get what they can before he hands out everything.  He turns to his friends for money to pay his debts and they shun him. The bankers are corrupt, the businessmen greedy, swindlers are on every street corner, the spending is excessive, everybody is deeply in debt, you imagine that unemployment is high and the government seems unable to help anybody.  Chaos reigns. Does this sound familiar?

The Baby Boomers Tell Their Story, Warts and All

by Bruce Chadwick

Boomers: the Musical of a Generation June Havoc Theater 312 W. 36th Street New York, N.Y. Boomers: the Musical of a Generation starts off with a GI in World War II raising his rifle and shouting that Americans always win.  The show then leaps to 1967 and the end of a championship season for that same GI’s superstar son’s football team, where the players yell that they win.  This winning theme is repeated again and again until Americans start to lose in the Vietnam War. Boomers is part of the Midtown International Theater Festival, a two-week only Off-Broadway showcase of some thirty new dramas and musicals (it ends July 30) that hits New York every summer.  Eight or nine of the plays are history plays like Boomers, and Boomers is a pretty good one. It is the story of a typical middle class, small-town American family with a generation gap, parental disputes, drugs, drinking, marital woes, friends that are killed and a country that goes through an enormous change during their time on earth, 1945 to the present (well, the early 1990s in the show).

Analyze This: On the Eve of World War II, Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis Spar in an Intellectual Boxing Match

by Bruce Chadwick

Freud’s Last Session Marjorie Deane Theater 3 W. 63rd Street New York, N.Y. It is September 3, 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II and sending all of Europe into trauma.  In his new London apartment, walls lined with books and windows overlooking the street, his patient’s couch on the far side of the stage, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud sits pensively.  He is awaiting a visit from theologian and novelist C.S. Lewis, a professor at Oxford.  Lewis thinks he has been summoned because he poked fun at history’s premier shrink in one of his books, but that is not the reason.Freud, an energetic atheist, wants to see Lewis to talk about God.  Just after Lewis arrives, an air raid siren goes off and the two men grab gas masks and try to flee the apartment and get to a shelter across the street.  It’s a false alarm, though, and all is safe.  The pair settles down for their historic meeting.

Tyne Daly Sensational as Maria Callas, Star of Opera History

by Bruce Chadwick

Master Class Samuel J. Friedman Theater  261 W. 47th Street New York, N.Y. Tyne Daly’s living room shelves are full of awards, including four Emmys for her role as a female cop in the long-running TV series Cagney and Lacey.  Few of her performances in the past were as stirring as her portrayal of 1960s and ‘70s opera superstar Maria Callas, a diva with a capital D who ruled the gossip columns as completely as she did the stages at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and La Scala in Milan, in a revival of the 1995 play Master Class, that opened on Friday.

Powerful Play on 1920 Harvard Secret Court Uncovers Sex Scandal

by Bruce Chadwick

Unnatural Acts Classic Stage Company 136 E. 13th Street  New York, N.Y.In 2002, a Harvard underclassman journalist, Amit Paley, was rummaging through packages of documents in the University’s archive. By sheer accident, he stumbled upon a box of 1920 material marked ‘secret court,’ opened it and began to read…Now, nine years later, Tony Speciale and the members of the Plastic Theater have turned the ‘secret court’ proceedings into a powerful and explosive new play, Unnatural Acts, that opened last weekend at the Classic Stage Company in New York. The riveting play, that seethes with tension, is the story of a tribunal of Harvard deans who presided over a kangaroo court and booted ten students out of Harvard for the crime of being homosexuals. The behind-closed-doors work of the tribunal began after one suicide and ended with another. In between lay one of the most compelling, and very covered up, tales of gay history ever told. And it all transpired within the hallowed halls of Harvard.

Academic Publishing in the Age of the Download

by Jim Cullen

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Opens Summer with a Luscious Wink

by Bruce Chadwick

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare Theater of New Jersey Drew University Route 24 Madison, New Jersey

Tennessee Williams's Dark, Disturbing Play About a Crippled Hustler

by Bruce Chadwick

One Arm Acorn Theater 410 Theater Row New York, N.Y.