Anne Fadiman has written about Coleridge, about a Hmong community in America, about "them" as a singular pronoun with unknown antecedent, and about the habit of annotating books. She understands that a writer needs to "seduce" a reader. So one of her essays begins in this way: It was a late afternoon in November, and I was hosting a college talk by Mark Helprin. During the Q&A, Helprin told the assembled students that making it as a writer today was virtually impossible. A student stood up. Thin. Beautiful. Long reddish-brown hair. Long legs. Flagrantly short skirt. Nimbus of angry energy. She asked Helprin if he really meant that. There was a collective intake of breath in the room. It was what everyone else had been thinking but no one had been brave or brazen enough to say... What follows is a twin portrait. Ostensibly, Fadiman is writing about an impressive student. But--really--she is writing about herself. It's clear that she is tied to her student (...
An indictment of Reagan-era greed, "Little Shop of Horrors" is as close as any work gets to "perfect musical" status. I have really only two complaints. One: the staging of the climactic battle, at least in the current version, is not very convincing. Two: Howard Ashman is sometimes a bit lazy in his mockery of Audrey (particularly in Audrey's awed reference to a "twelve-inch screen," in her "I Want" number). What is especially chilling is the tension between the two main storylines. Seymour tells us that he wants "a way out of here." Audrey, meanwhile, wants domestic tranquility. These two wishes do not have to clash; Seymour could cash a check early in Act Two and leave the flower shop. But Seymour is rapacious. It's Audrey who gets top billing--and, certainly, the current Audrey (Joy Woods) deserves top billing. Audrey's journey is perverse and fascinating. She can't even articulate her wish until the homestretch of...