Where are Fellini’s circuses?
La Dolce Vita clowns?
On the first day of Spring
I’m looking
At the only joy in town
Joni Mitchell, The Only Joy in Town
Yellow daffodils and purple petunias line the walks in Bryant Park. A mysterious snow-like matter alights from every tree. The Mitzvah tanks, wranglers for wayward Jews, prowl the avenues. The good and the bad rain down this time of year; personally, I’m bracing myself for the hay fever and grass allergies that make me feel as if I’m suffering from dread TV Movie Disease, that mysterious ailment that fueled the plotlines of every other movie-of-the-week back in the 70’s. When you’re a slave to the rhinitis, the scratchy eyes, headaches and a voice likely to disappear mid-sentence, well, it’s enough to give even a lesser hypochondriac pause.
For now, everything feels a little brighter, more amplified. New York culture certainly gets a lift, witnessed by Ann Liv Young’s Snow White at the Kitchen this past month, and Le Vue Long’s fascinating, if unsuccessful Story of Us at DTW. At the theater, a few shows of note have landed: Curtains, the new Kander/Ebb (with an assist from the inestimable Rupert Holmes) musical at the Hirschfeld is here after a successful run out West. The great Vanessa Redgrave is back in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking; the book on which it’s based is one of the more astounding ruminations on grief one is likely to read this, or any year. By the way, there’s a camp out there of Didion naysayers; having just re-read The White Album, I confess I’m one of the yeas. Didion remains one of the smartest observers of the way we live in these trying times—long may she wave.
Soon to see the lights of Broadway are revivals of O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, a prescient work, as the issue of evolution insinuates itself back into the nation’s consciousness and classrooms. The director Harold Prince has been missed, so thank god for LoveMusik, the Prince-helmed new musical based on the correspondence of Lotte Lenya and that other theater-ultra, Kurt Weill, so get your tickets (I’ve got mine).
Two authors have new works to ponder: Colm Toibin (The Master, The Blackwater Lightship and my personal favorite, The Story of the Night) has written Mothers and Sons, a new book of short stories, and I guarantee that once you’ve read him, you’ll wonder at the time you’ve wasted on lesser contemporary authors. The same can be said for the towering Andre Aciman, a local boy (by way of Alexandria, Egypt) and memoirist whose first novel, Call Me By Your Name, arrives courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I’ll get to those as soon as I’ve finished Claire Messud’s enjoyable (so far) The Emperor’s Children.
Finally, keep an eye out for A Tribute to Joni Mitchell, as artists from Bjork to Prince cover the songs of this seminal artist. I’ve heard an advance copy—it’s brilliant, so put it on your list.