ON THE STAGE
The theater offerings in Sarasota are so well done and so polished that you almost don’t need to go to New York. This week we saw a stunningly good performance of Robert Schenkkan play, All the Way, at the Asolo. I didn’t know of it before (not having followed Broadway closely in the past), but it was the Tony Award winning play of 2014. It focuses on Lyndon Johnson’s presidency from immediately after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to LBJ’s election 11 months later. Detailing Johnson’s determination to get a Civil Rights bill enacted, it is a linguistically colorful and dramatic account of all of the bullying, badgering, flattering and dealing that was required with stakeholders as various as Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover to the Southern Democrats in the House and Senate. It was a turbulent period and timely in light of today’s discussions of racial profiling and the Black Lives Matter initiative.
As as a pre-Valentine treat, we enjoyed Living on Love, a musical romp about two self-centered aging celebrities, a flamboyant maestro and an equally narcissistic diva, long married to each other. Enter their ghost writers, an aspiring male novelist and an equally ambitious (for 1957) female editor, and you have conflict, comedy, and love. Added in are the two male house staff whose Tweedledee and Tweedledum routine is a hoot! At the end, besides singing and dancing, they offer up a revelation of their own. Sheer fun!
BOOK REPORT
I admire Lauren Groff’s craft. She is a creative writer and her staccato prose is full of picturesque allusions. I read the first half of Fates and Furies, the part that is from playwright Lotto’s perspective, but then I abandoned the book after a few pages of Mathilde’s side of things. I just didn’t care enough about these two individuals and their friends or their marriage to persevere. It wasn’t fun nor, for me, rewarding.
On the other hand, I’m finding Beryl Markham’s West with the Night fascinating. It’s a memoir, but according to the 2013 introduction by Sara Wheeler, a highly selective, edited one. Markham had three husbands, but there’s nary a mention of any of them, and Wheeler states some events didn’t happen or have been altered.
Although Markham was a pioneering aviator, the book is primarily about her unconventional life in British East Africa (now Kenya) as a young child, as a racehorse trainer, and later as a mail pilot and tracker of elephants for hunters. She was raised by her father, roamed the wilds with the natives, and learned to ride and hunt. Originally published in 1942, the book was somewhat lost due to the war; when it was re-issued in 1983, Markham was still alive and the book had a surge of popularity. She’s a lovely writer and the attention it got is well deserved! It could easily be paired with one of Alexandra Fuller’s memoirs about her own haphazard upbringing in Africa.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Header image: valentine2015s.blogspot.com
