Feed

W.M. Akers

By W.M. Akers 5/15 9:30am

books

total chaos cover

On the Trail of the Next Great Crime Novel: After ‘Dragon Tattoo,’ Will Readers Flock to a More Exotic Noir?

Detective Fabio Montale is having a rough week. His best friends are dead, he keeps getting beaten up, and his city is descending into, as the title of the novel he stars in suggests, Total Chaos. But he still has time for a little bass. Fennel-stuffed and grilled, maybe, with a lasagna sauce and peppers, “gently fried.” Some friends are coming over for pastis and Lagavulin and gin rummy by the sea, and they expect the copper to cook.

“I was finally calming down,” Montale thinks. “Cooking had that effect on me. My mind could escape the twisted labyrinth of thought and concentrate on smells and tastes. And pleasure.”

Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/30 5:42pm

theater

Alenka Kraigher, Nicolas Noreña and Rocco Sisto in 'Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance).' (Photo by Joan Marcus))

Strings Attached: Back From Retirement, Richard Foreman Brings His Ontological Hysteria, and Old-Fashioned Prostitutes, to the Public

One morning last month at the Public Theater, Richard Foreman was having trouble with rage. On a stage crowded with pillows, stuffed animals and string, an actor droned through a monotone monologue. He made it halfway through before Mr. Foreman, the last standard-bearer of the 1970s avant-garde, stopped him in the middle of a line about “incalculable rage.”

“What’s another word for rage?” Mr. Foreman asked the room. “Rage sounds weak.”

“Fury?” suggested the actors. “Ire? Wrath?”

“Maybe it needs another leading word. Not incalculable rage. Black rage?” Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/02 3:24pm

books

Can't Anybody Here Play This Game

The Biggest Losers: Looking Back at Jimmy Breslin’s Mets Bible

In the summer of 1962, New York fell in love with a man named Marvin Throneberry. A subpar first baseman who had washed out with the Yankees, he was sliding toward early retirement when he was rescued by the fledgling New York Mets. As thanks, he played worse than ever before—once getting called out on a triple for failing to step on first and second base—but each time “Marvelous” Marv came to the plate, the city chanted: “cranberry, strawberry, we love Throneberry!”

It was a third-rate chant for a third-rate player, but in the Mets’ first season, it didn’t take much to make the fans cheer. The team was on its way to 120 losses—a baseball record that stands to this day—but with the Dodgers and Giants five years gone, New York was desperate for something to scream about. Throneberry’s Mets were more than lovable losers—they were spectacular. “Name one loyal American,” writes Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (Ivan R. Dee, 128 pp., $12.95) “who can say he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.” Published 50 years ago this week, this beautiful little book remains the ur-text for Metsian blundering. Here is the franchise’s origin story, writ in Mr. Breslin’s trademark barroom prose and cast with enough devils, heroes and clowns to fill out a pantomime of Faust. They are gamblers, toughs and crusty baseball lifers whom Mr. Breslin rallies in opposition to “the era of the businessman in sports,” when America’s postwar success led to a “dry and agonizing” focus on the bottom line. Read More

By W.M. Akers 12/18/12 1:30pm

Coping Mechanisms

Ink-stained solace. (NYTimes.com)

After Newtown, the Comfort of a Broadsheet and Turner Classic Movies

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend’s stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside. Read More

By W.M. Akers 9/18/12 3:50pm

books

109-TheCocktailWaitress-fixed

The Case of the Missing Novel: James M. Cain’s Lost Novel Finally Surfaces After 35 Years

At the end of chapter two of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice—published in 1934, the same year the Hays Code sanitized Hollywood—a drifter takes a job at a gas station and sees the owner’s wife for the first time. The two find themselves alone for a few minutes. He kisses her, and she begs him—“Bite me! Bite me!”

“I bit her. I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.” What took the Twilight saga 1,700 pages, Cain got to in eleven.

A failed opera singer turned journalist, Cain became infamous for novels like Postman, Double Indemnity and Serenade, where raw lust compels ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes. By 1950, his best work was behind him, and he spent the next three decades sliding into obscurity. He died in 1977, so alone that he bequeathed his estate to his landlady. Read More

By W.M. Akers 5/22/12 6:26pm

theater

Alan Cox and Jonathan Pryce in 'The Caretaker.' (Courtesy Richard Termine)

Pinter’s Laugh Track: For Jonathan Pryce, ‘The Caretaker’ Is Personal

Two brothers share a decrepit East London flat. They take in an aged tramp named Davies, who shares the space until the older brother, Aston, evicts him for making noises in his sleep. After being told again and again to leave, Davies still doesn’t listen. “If you want me to go … I’ll go,” he says. “You just say the word.” In the current revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, the audience responds to that line with either tense silence or uncomfortable laughter, depending on the whim of Jonathan Pryce.

“If I think the audience has been laughing too much, I can kill that laugh,” he said last week in the lobby of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. “I’ll even mutter it if I don’t want them to laugh any more.” Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/24/12 6:54pm

theater

Christina Ricci in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (Courtesy Classic Stage Company)

Quick Bright Things: At Classic Stage Company, Bebe and Christina Take on the Bard

Like an unimaginative lover on Valentine’s Day, theater companies like to throw around rose petals. It’s always the same: a single petal drifts from the ceiling, then a second, then a flurry. At the Classic Stage Company’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the petals start when Bebe Neuwirth’s Titania asks her fairies for a lullaby. What starts as a gentle shower turns into a deluge, as though the petals were being sprayed by a leafblower, and finishes with the fairies dumping grocery bags full of them onto their queen. The solemn cliché turns to satire, and the audience chortles as Ms. Neuwirth drifts off to sleep, to spend the next few scenes buried under a six-inch pile of petals. Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/17/12 5:36pm

theater

Alfred Gingold as H.P. Lovecraft. (Courtesy Dan Bianchi)

Thriller on Fourth Street: Dan Bianchi’s Radiotheatre Does Poe and Lovecraft

Ghoulish youths haunt the alleys of Red Hook. The waterfront district is “a maze of hybrid squalor,” “a babel of sound and filth,” infested by “a dread crew of sentient loathsomeness.” South Brooklyn has changed somewhat since 1925, when H.P. Lovecraft wrote “The Horror at Red Hook,” but the long-dead author seems to have grasped something about the essential nature of a visit to Ikea.

But just what does “sentient loathsomeness” look like? How, precisely, might someone translate Lovecraft’s peculiar brand of weird horror to the stage? Dan Bianchi found a solution: he lets his audience do the work for him. Read More

By W.M. Akers 4/03/12 7:25pm

theater

Lead singer of the band in 'One Man, Two Guvnors.' (Photo by Johan Persson)

One Man, Two Guvnors, Four Musicians: How a Group of American Rockers Learned to Be Convincingly British

Grant Olding knows how to bow, and he’s willing to teach Americans. Over the past three weeks, the British composer of the West End smash One Man, Two Guvnors has been transforming a quartet of American youngsters into the Craze, a British rock group circa 1963. He has tailored their accents, poured them into purple suits and taught them that quick, self-effacing bow best known from YouTube clips of the Beatles at Shea Stadium.

As he explained last week, during a break from rehearsal, “It’s a very specific bow.” Read More

By W.M. Akers 3/13/12 3:40pm

theater

Matthew Broderick and Kelli O'Hara. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

The ’20s for the 21st Century

Broadway fortunes have been forged from Abba’s Greatest Hits. Hearts and bank accounts have been broken trying to do the same with the music of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Last year, Kathleen Marshall found success directing a revival of Anything Goes, packed to the gills with Cole Porter classics. Next month, she will attempt a repeat with Nice Work If You Can Get It, an original musical built from the Gershwin songbook, which opens April 24. But despite superficial commonalities with Mamma Mia! and its descendants, Ms. Marshall has one thing to make clear.

“This is not a jukebox musical,” she said last week. Read More