Let’s start this little trek down memory lane with a look at my favorite books of 2006. (And, to state the obvious, not all were published in 2006; that’s just when I read them.)
I start here because I had a wonderful year of reading. When I anally add a title to my list(s), I give it a simple A-C listing (I suppose I could go below C, but the chances of my finishing something that wasn’t even worth a C are slim). At the end of the year, I try to stick with the contemporaneous rating, even though I sometimes feel I’ve been rather harsh—or perhaps it’s that I get more generous as the memory fades. This year, of the 57 titles that I read, I only awarded one C—to Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade—and really, the failing grade was awarded to the odious Mr. Morgan; the diaries themselves, although clearly bogus in that they were written long after the events occurred, were hideously compelling. I also only gave five B- ratings, along with 29 B’s, 20 B+s, and two well-deserved A’s.
Not necessarily in order of preference, 10 (more or less) favorites from 2006:
Arguments With England: A Memoir, by Michael Blakemore. I have to admit, I didn’t know who Michael Blakemore was when I first came across this book, but the copy that came to the office included the glowing review Simon Callow wrote for the Guardian, which convinced me to give it a whirl. What a fantastic book! Blakemore is a wonderfully evocative writer—about acting (both doing it and witnessing it), family, promiscuity, relationships, leaving home, England in the 1950s and ‘60s. Ach, he’s great about pretty much everything, actually. It’s one of those memoirs that feels honest (how can we ever really know?) because he doesn’t pretend that he didn’t fail at some things or that he wasn’t sometimes a bit silly or pompous, but he also avoids that annoying memoirist’s trick of pretending that everyone got along wonderfully and life was always peachy. The young Blakemore is often broke and feuding (most entertainingly with Peter Hall) and involved in messy love triangles (most entertainingly with Vanessa Redgrave and Peter Hall), but by the end of the book, he’s starting to have some success as a director. I hope he’s working on another volume right now, because after spending nearly 400 pages on his early stumblings, I want to know what happened as he became more sure-footed. (His novel Next Season is also very entertaining. Read it after you’ve read the memoir, so you recognize the real folks behind the fictional characters.)
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel If there’s a You Say Tomato books of the year list, there’s an Alison Bechdel title onit. After more than 20 years and at least 11 volumes of Dykes to Watch Out For, her intricately detailed (and very funny) social history that sparkled in relative obscurity, the wonderful Fun Home—a graphic memoir—got the plaudits and attention that Alison has always deserved. (Time magazine’s book of the year, Entertainment Weekly’s nonfiction book of the year, and a million Top 10 lists.) Still, I can’t help wondering if a) the word “dykes” hadn’t been in the titles; b) there’d been a man at the center of those earlier books, she might’ve avoided all those years of obscurity.
Obedience, Struggle and Revolt, by David Hare. I know, it sounds like a report from the B&D committee of a Spartacist splinter group, and no one could accuse David Hare of being a comedian, but there’s some wonderful stuff in this collection of lectures. (Yes, lectures.) I could’ve done with a little less John Osborne worship (Sir David, baby, make your case and move on), but Hare is a clear thinker and (sometimes) a devastating case-maker.
Primo Time, by Antony Sher. Obviously, a lot of this year’s reading was focused, in one way or another, on the theater. Of the “actorly” books that I took in, I particularly enjoyed Sher’s account of developing his one-man show Primo—fashioned from Primo Levi’s writings about his time in Auschwitz. It seems silly to complain about the author being self-absorbed—that’s kind of the point of the book—but if any of my friends were contemplating becoming involved with an actor, I’d get a copy of this book into their hands, stat! Years ago, I read Sher’s wonderful novel Middlepost. I’m not sure if it was in Primo Time or Year of the King that Sher talks openly about his frustration at the low effort-to-response ratio of fiction-writing and his hopes that his diaries might be a profitable side line (I’m being much more crass about it than he was). I hope they do—like Simon Callow (with whom he has a ton in common and with whom, I understand, he has quite a rivalry)—it’s astonishing that such a talented actor would be such an excellent writer.
Fifth Row Center: A Critic’s Year On and Off Broadway, by Benedict Nightingale, and The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, by William Goldman. Nightingale comes across as the nicer chap (or perhaps it’s my soft spot for writers who confess their flaws) and Goldman is the more astute phenomenon-namer, but both these books taught me a lot about commercial theater, New York, and the life of the theater critic.
Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, by Rory Stewart. It was a bit of a year for memoirs for me. I also enjoyed Stewart’s The Places in Between, but this account of his time as vice-governor of the Iraqi province of Maysan is astonishing. The conflict in Iraq has brought us some great books (The Assassin’s Gate, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, to name but a couple), but Stewart wasn’t a journalist or an academic (like Larry Diamond, whose Squandered Victory is also about how bureaucracy and meddling politicians made a tough challenge impossible); he’s a traveler who wants to make a difference by listening to people and taking account of history and trying to do the right thing. He doesn’t have a career to make or points to score, and he has to admit defeat pretty early. (Read excerpts from the book at Slate.)
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright. The chapters about the philosophical origins of al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden’s path to infamy are fabulous. As interesting as the latter sections on flawed FBI agent John O’Neill are, that part of the book felt overpowered by the brilliance of the al-Qaida section. Still, as everyone says, it’s a total page-turner.
The Q Guide to Broadway, by Seth Rudetsky. I bought this book to give to a musical-theater-loving British friend who’s coming to New York in the spring. In the end, I had to buy a new copy to give away, because I couldn’t bear to part with it. It’s a small, unpretentious book, and Rudetsky wears his expertise lightly. Not only does he have musical-theater trivia down flat, he really knows music and does a great job of explaining why some songs or musicals work while others don’t. It’s also laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny.
What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, by Zoe Heller. I picked up the novel, which I’d been wanting to read for a while, in anticipation of the movie. I inhaled the book—it’s smart, it’s beautifully observed, and it’s deliciously creepy—but having finally seen a trailer for the movie and read some reviews, I won’t be seeing it, as much as I love Dame Judi and Dame-to-be Cate. The book is a classic example of an unreliable narrator, which I guess you have to clarify when making a movie, but making a predatory friend into a predatory lesbian is not cool.
The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuscinski. If the beginning of the year was all about theatrical tomes, the last month or two has been dominated by Africa. In January, I’m off to Nigeria, so I’ve been boning up by reading books with such cheery titles as The Open Sore of a Continent, This House Has Fallen, and Where Vultures Feast. Someone recommended Kapuscinski, and all I can say is, “Why haven’t I read him before?” I immediately ordered four other collections—and have loved Shah of Shahs, about Iran. Wonderful writing, and a great translation by Klara Glowczewska.
The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. It’s been a while since I read the big novel of the moment and truly enjoyed it. Hideous and yet irresistible characters, a relentless narrative, and lovely observation. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of the book yet, but I will, very soon.
The final rundown on my 2006 reading was: 57 books, of which 22 were works of fiction (including four young-adult novels), 28 were nonfiction (including two works of graphic nonfiction), and seven were plays.
As I said about this time last year, I’m more than a little embarrassed by my habit of making compulsive lists of the movies and plays that I see and the books that I read. (Actually, I’ve only been keeping a list of the plays that I see for a couple of years now—I wish I had a better record of what I’d seen in London, Madrid, Seattle, and on my quick jaunts to New York when I still lived on the West Coast.)
Anyhoo, what’s the point of feeling self-conscious about my anorak tendencies, may as well just revel in them and reveal them. (And it’s not like I’m providing a pivot table or offering any complicated correlations.)
In 2006, I saw 71 plays (confession: this does count five constituent plays of Druid/Synge separately; second confession, yes, five, I left before the last one!); I saw 22 movies; and I read 57 books.
Movie-going has taken a huge hit since we moved to New York. I saw 106 movies in 2004, my last full year in Seattle; then 42 in 2005; then 22 in this first full year here. New York is a great movie city—but so is Seattle. There’s nothing like the magnificent SIFF on my New York cultural agenda, nor is there anything like the Warren Report —at least that I’m aware of. (The one time I went to a New York ObserverCinema Club screening, the line was ridiculous. We didn’t make it into the movie, despite arriving early—I decided right then that it wasn’t worth saving the price of admission.) But the biggest reason for the low movie count, of course, was that I spent more than 65 afternoons and evenings in the theater.
I don’t think I’ll do a series of Top 10 lists or anything quite so formal, but check back over the next couple of days for my thoughts on the most memorable—and sometimes disappointing—plays, books, movies, TV shows, and music of 2006.
2006 Pilot Season: Comedies, Part 2, 'Til Death and Happy Hour
TV networks schedule their hottest shows for Thursday nights because that’s when movie studios want to advertise the weekend’s new movies and when stores want to advertise the weekend’s special offers. In the 8-9 p.m. slot this fall, Fox has lined up two new comedies—‘Til Death, a vehicle for Brad Garrett, late of the most inexplicably popular show in TV history, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Happy Hour. This means that the time slot that once featured the women’s-empowerment classic Living Single is now misogyny central.
Happy Hour won’t last long—it’s the latest in a weird sequence of short-term Fox sitcoms featuring young men new to Chicago, dealing with work and apartment quandaries (I liked last year’s The Loop much better). It begins when Henry, who recently left his sweet job managing John Deere inventory in Missouri to live with his girlfriend in Chicago and work in her family’s business, finds himself dumped and therefore homeless, jobless, and loveless. He goes to another apartment in the building where Larry needs a new roommate to replace Brad, who has just moved in with his fiancee, Tina, who has totally—and absolutely humorlessly—castrated and infantilized her man. Larry takes pity on Henry—and even sends him off to a job interview with his old, old friend Amanda, a likable slut with no control over her mouth (the words that come out of it or the deep-dish pizza that goes into it).
Once again, there were zero jokes in the entire show, and although Amanda is somewhat sympathetic (with the emphasis on pathetic), the basic thrust—make that the overt story line—is that women are out to destroy men: Henry’s ex-girlfriend ruins his life, Tina ruins Brad. The only laugh lines—and you have to use an extraordinarily broad definition to find anything that qualifies—are, when Larry sees Tina in the apartment building, “The lesbian lip-waxing meeting is down the hall” (man, homophobic woman-hating is funny!), and, when Amanda is interviewing the shorts-wearing Henry for a job (his ex won’t let him into the apartment to get his clothes): “I can see your balls. … There’s nothing about them I can’t see.” Start engraving the Emmy!
The title of the show refers to Larry’s daily 4 p.m. martini appointment. Happy hour, he believes, is the time between “something bad (work) and something good (dinner). Enjoy it!” Fox’s conceptual problem with these shows about young men in between something easy (living with your parents) and something hard (paying your own way) is that, in real life, happy hour is only fun about one time in five. Usually, you end up feeling worried about something you said, in trouble about something you did, or in really deep trouble about something you didn’t do because you had a wicked hangover the next day.
Happy Hour’s lead-in is even more cynical and misogynistic, if that’s possible, though we do at least see that the women aren’t the ball-busting, fun-killing dragons men say they are. But, boy, do they say it a lot. Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher are Eddie and Joy Stark—a high-school history teacher and a travel agent married for more than 20 years—Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Foster are their next-door neighbors, newlyweds Jeff and Steph. Since Jeff is the new vice principal at Eddie’s school, they carpool together, providing Eddie with much time to lecture Jeff on wives and their soul-crushing ways.
When you see the title ‘Til Death, you can’t help thinking of Til Death Us Do Part, the British show that spawned All in the Family. Yes, Alf Garnett was a wife-berating bigot—but as a million high-school essays have concluded, his intolerance was in the service of counseling tolerance. I couldn’t possibly tell you what ‘Til Death is in the service of—other than paying Brad Garrett’s utilities bill.
Take the time when Jeff believes that he’s going to get a pool table for his new home. No chance, says Eddie, “A pool table is for fun. Men want to have fun. Wives want to walk that fun deep into the woods and shoot it dead. Marriage isn’t about fun. Marriage is more about having someone to drive you to the hospital for your operations.” Or here’s Eddie on what women want: “Even if women don’t actually host dinner parties, they want to believe that they host dinner parties. That’s why you just registered for thousands of dollars’ worth of china. … There’s a reason china rhymes with vagina.” (So why does prick rhyme with dick?)
The vagina monologue is typical of the show’s down-there fixation—Eddie can’t stop pointing out that the kids will have no end of fun with Jeff’s last name—Woodcock—and way too much time is wasted riffing on that, especially when Jeff starts a Web site called mywoodcock.com—oh, hold on, can’t type, stitch! In fact, a lot of the content seems very racy for an 8 p.m. time slot—especially the scene where Jeff, describing how, in a moment of post-coital weakness, Steph agreed to agree to let him get a pool table, does a wife-rogering pelvic-thrust dance around the teachers lounge, while he yells to Eddie, “How about this weekend you can just listen to the sound of me making love to my wife on my brand new pool table.” It’s just gross, and not even vaguely funny. Like the rest of the show.
In TV pilot season, I do something I don’t do during the rest of the year: watch sitcoms. (That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. I watch How I Met Your Mother, Reno 911!, and Weeds—but it’s debatable if the last two shows really qualify as sitcoms.)
The crop of new comedies I’ve seen so far will certainly not affect my long-term viewing habits—they’re all misogynist, derivative, and utterly unfunny.
The worst of the lot was The Class—whose Platonic ideal is Friends. Instead of six pals (including one set of siblings), we have eight pals (including one set of siblings)—young and single and weird in their own special, theoretically endearing ways.
The premise is that Ethan—played by John Ritter’s son Jason—is engaged to a woman he met in third grade. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the day they met, he invites their third-grade classmates to a party. Naturally—because in these shows women are always bitches (unless they’re idiots)—she breaks up with him because he’s way too nice to her, all in the hearing of the reunited class. Cut to a very awkward party. (Awkward is the new funny—except when it’s not.)
The problem with the show—like lots of similar shows these days—is that it’s just not funny. OK, I know it’s not stand-up, so we can’t expect jokes, but shouldn’t there be at least one vaguely comedic situation?
Instead, all the laughs were based on pain. Let’s do a roll-call, or perhaps that should be role-call: Lina hangs up on Ethan’s party invitation call so she can return to reacting to finding her boyfriend in bed with another woman. She’s the kind of person who always wears the wrong thing and says the wrong thing. Lina’s twin sister Kat is a selfish, rude, and apparently pathologically incapable of basic empathy. Duncan is a sweet but immature doofus who lives with—and struggles not to be controlled by—his interfering mother. Nicole, Duncan’s high-school sweetheart is married to a former football star who is much older than she is; they don’t have much in common, and he’s sometimes mean to her. Kyle is gay and apparently in a semi-loving if shallow relationship, but his role is totally undeveloped. Holly is a TV newswoman who’s still mad at Kyle for ditching her for a guy on prom night—the hilarious payoff her is that her husband is very effeminate. (Laugh? I thought my pants would never dry.) Finally, there’s Richie, who was about to swallow a bottle of pills when Ethan called; he and Lina discover an intense connection and see the glimmer of a bright future in their dark, depressing lives. Then, in the final scene of the pilot, he drives his car into her and knocks her down. Hey, even if he just winged her, car accidents are wicked funny, eh?
Other than a life-improving re-connection between Duncan and Nicole, it’s hard to see anything other than misery, depression, and darkness in store for any of the other characters. Toward the end of the pilot, Ethan says something along the lines of: “There were 28 in our class. How many are already stuck in lousy jobs and bad marriages? How many of us have already made that one big, dumb choice we’ll never recover from?” Yay, that’s the attitude! I don’t think watching a comedy is supposed to make you feel even more suicidal than the actors.
PS: The actress playing Lina has a very distinctive, oddly pitched, husky voice. I couldn’t place it, but I knew I’d seen her before. Turns out she’s Heather Goldenhersh, who played Sister James in Doubt. I’m guessing she’ll be free for further theatrical engagements very soon.
There’s a line I never tire of trying to pass off as something I just came up with: “The three best words in the English language? All new episode.” And there’s another phrase that’s even more tingle-inducing: “pilot season.” And I’m not talking plane drivers.
At this time of year, I always open up TiVo with antici—pation!
Everything I read about ABC’s new Anne Heche vehicle Men in Trees (crappy title—for one thing it serves up a too-tempting lob for TV Guide’s Matt Roush, who declares the network is “up a tree” and predicts it’ll “get the chop”) made me think that I liked the show better when it was called Northern Exposure. Like that show, which had a surprisingly short life in syndication, it’s a fish-out-of-water tale of a caustic, know-it-all New Yorker who finds herself in the beautiful wilds of Alaska and sets out on a laughter-and-tear-filled journey through the five stages of adjustment. If I had to make a rash prediction after 44 minutes of viewing, I’d say those stages were going to be: arrogance, anger, awe at the rough-hewn beauty of nature, appropriate shoe buying, and acceptance that even guys with bad haircuts can be haut and that, therefore, she can live in a place where you have to stand in the street to get cell-phone reception.
The thing is, since they didn’t even bother to disguise the debt to Northern Exposure, I almost believed it was an hommage rather than a rip-off. Instead of a goofy young man with a movie fetish and a sexy philosophical guy with a radio show, there’s a goofy young man with a radio show and a sexy, resistant-to-the-lead’s-charms fish and wildlife guy. Instead of a March-December couple running the local bar, there’s a chunky guy and his spunky lady running the local bar. Instead of a white female bush pilot there’s a black male bush pilot. Instead of a crusty old lady running the grocery store, there’s an attractive ho with a heart of gold (actually, that character is pretty original—an undeluded woman who’d like to get out of the “hospitality industry” but hasn’t found an alternative way of supporting her family—yet). But this show is fresh, see, because it features a lame crutch that’s only come into fashion in the last couple of years: the knowing, philosophical voice-over. (Actually, there’s also an echo of an even better show—Canada’s North of 60—in the form of the slide-guitar soundtrack and the presence of North of 60 regular Tim Webber. So, the show is filmed in Vancouver, eh?)
Well, there are a couple of original elements: In the pilot episode, Anne Heche was naked once, “dressed” only in a towel once, and down to skivvies what felt like a couple of times. An Alaska-based drama with more skin than an Australian soap! Now that’s an achievement. (Heche’s arms are like matchsticks, by the way, I sure hope she gets some good organic meat on those too-prominent bones in the coming episodes.) Oh, and there’s a recurring raccoon—I haven’t seen an animal character that lame since the talking cat in Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
The writing is pretty good—speaking of the local men, who outnumber women 10-to-1, the female bartender tells Heche, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd”—and the hook-up potential gives it a sexy edge. (Heche is a relationship coach who realizes that she knows nothing about men, but thinks she can figure them out in this testosterone territory.) I wonder, though, if there are enough women characters for the show to succeed on Friday night, where it’s up against Ghost Whisperer and Nanny 911. Men in Trees is better—smarter, funnier, and less treacly—than either of those shows, but that, unfortunately, often counts for little when it comes to the ratings.
Erm, is it just me, or was Harry Connick Jr. totally off-key in the initial “Tonight” section of his medley. Or as Randy would say “Pitchy, dawg.”
Hey, they just showed us a photo! Sure, it’s of the gathering of more than 100 previous Tony winners, but we can’t actually see it!
When accepting the Tony for Best Score (for Drowsy Chaperone), Greg Morrison’s speech, in which he thanked his parents for buying him a piano, was the first verkempt-making moment of the night. (Of course, if they’re back home in PEI, they won’t be able to watch, except via Webcast.)
Receiving the Tony for Best Direction of a Musical, John Doyle gives the first homo shoutout of the night--wishing his partner, Rob, a happy anniversary (and getting a round of applause for it). We had two last year (Edward Albee dedicating his award to his late partner and Cherry Jones snogging her girlfriend when her name was read). Will we beat that total tonight? Ooh, another gay moment: Harvey Fierstein say, "A gay man's work is never done" when releasing Audra McDonald's train.
I know that reviews always mention Hal Holbrooke's amazing memory (he apparently has massive quantities of Twain memorized and trots out different bits each night depending on the audience or his mood), but I was really worried he was going to lose his train of thought in his rambling preamble. I guess CBS wasn't too worried, though, he got the best guest cutaway guest shots of the night--Les Moonves, Julie Chen, and Brian Stokes Mitchell. Also, a very cool co-presenter, Veronica Mars herself, Kirsten Bell.
Hmm, so Clifford Odets now joins the pantheon of great American playwrights because he has a Tony?
Beth Leavel's speech was lovely, but even nicer were the closeups of Drowsy Chaperone director, Casey Nicholaw, shedding a tear at her joy.
So far, most of the musical numbers have seemed pretty lame--Jersey Boys, especially.
Could the excerpts from the best play nominees have been any shorter? Answer: NO!
Oh, the first political joke--from a puppet, no less! (Not that I'm calling the miraculous Christine Ebersole a puppet.) I suppose a gay puppet counts as a homo moment.
Wow, seeing Christian Hoff I wonder why I sometimes find goofy, emotional speeches irresistible and sometimes find them embarrassing. This was the latter.
LOVE the human tableaux in the Hal Prince lifetime achievement award. A new high in camp (which is saying something at the Tonys).
Hey, another homo moment thanks to Cynthia Nixon! And we're only two-thirds through the telecast. But she didn't thank her girlfriend!
LOVED seeing Julia Roberts get yanked out of camera shot by the award-guardian.
OK, the speeches have been longish, but the musical interruption of Richard Griffiths' speech was inexcusable. As The Playgoer has said, what exactly do they have in mind for the next hour?
In the zippy catch-up on the technical awards, it was heart-breaking to see the winners holding speeches (of which we heard approximately 3 seconds each from just some of them) but not being able to hear them. Bob Crowley's "I should've won it for the other one" was particularly interesting.
Alfre Woodard's dress made it a little difficult for me to focus on James Earl Jones' and Cynthia Nixon's Wilson and Wasserstein excerpts.
Nice writing from whomever came up with this description of the folks in the "in memoriam" section (too bad it was kind of hard to see the photos): "talented partners whose collaboration shall be missed."
Say what you like about Oprah, but she sure can make a speech, and the number from The Color Purple was the best of tonight's live musical presentations.
I have so little interest in Jersey Boys, I can barely bring myself to type out its full title, but I must admit producer Michael David's speech was appreciative and respectful. (And if he's ever short a few bucks for one of his productions, I have an idea for a way he could make some money in December.)
So, the final count was: History Boys - 6, Drowsy Chaperone - 5, Jersey Boys - 4 (but good ones, Best Musical the two actor awards, and the biggest one of all, lighting), Awake and Sing! - 2, Pajama Game - 2, Sweeney Todd - 2, and one each for Color Purple, Faith Healer, and Rabbit Hole. Oh, I almost forgot the special award for Bridge & Tunnel.
