I'm not much of a theater fan (If it can't be served on a screen & speakers in the media &-everything-else room, it probably isn't worth cultural consumption. Or the agoraphobia.) & even less an enthusiast of the musical theater. (Or cabaret, which is what, I s'pose, the event was.) So an item concerning Broadway personage Betty Buckley wouldn't ordinarily catch my eye, even when wandering the empty aisles of Bow-Tie Daddy Tucker Carlson's The Daily Caller looking for more inanity than I'd already found, but I couldn't help but notice an item entitled “Betty Buckley: From Broadway Dame to Super Lame" (Welcome to fourth grade, where mere lame becomes super lame.) & decided to take a peep.
And what should confront our wandering eye but a title change? Now it's "Betty Buckley’s performance at Cabaret Festival falls flat." Having checked the title, the serious snarker's next move is to determine who wrote it, which often gives insight into the why of its typing.
Emily Esfahani Smith, the managing editor of the Hoover Institution journal Defining Ideas, is an editor at the blog Ricochet.com and a senior editor at Smith and Kraus, the largest publisher of trade theater books in the USA.
One could assume that E.E. Smith is vastly more qualified than I to pass judgement on a performance of this type. On the basis of the performance, anyway. (That assumption turns out to be wrong. Whatever a senior editor does at the largest publisher of trade theater books in these United Snakes doesn't have much to do w/ theater. Especially when one can become a "senior" editor w/in a yr. of graduating w/ a B.A. in horseshitphilosophy.)
The theme of the teary night was nostalgia for a bygone youth. For two hours, the 63-year-old Buckley sang the songs that defined her celebrated career on the stage ...
[...]
These days, though, Buckley’s star is a dull glimmer of light, a fact that hung in the air like a dead weight at Town Hall when in one song she sang, “I can smile at the old days / I was beautiful then.” After struggles with alcohol and drug abuse, the lines on her face have hardened, and her movements on the stage are not as lithe as they once were. Her career, of late, has felt forced as well: the last decade of her career has been defined by guest appearances on television shows like Monk and Law and Order, and retrospective albums like “Betty Buckley: Fifteen Year Anniversary Re-Release.” Her Town Hall appearance, though part of the Cabaret Festival, doubled as a promotional concert for her latest CD, “Bootleg: Boardmixes from the Road.”
The nerve of this old woman: Singing & stuff; neither pretending (nor moving as if) she were 33; aging in general (That really gets to the youth, doesn't it?) & forcing(?) her career. Because a 63 yr.-old woman not getting all the Helen Mirren roles has no one but herself to blame.
By now it's obvious this exercise in spite had very little to do w/ Buckley's performance. She doesn't move like twenty-nothing Smith any more (Startling revelation, eh? Let's see how well E. E. moves in 20 or so yrs., when she's 43, let alone when/if she makes it to 63.) her face is not as smooth as Smith's, & her voice (Again, I don't know from Broadway, but I'll assume that the first aspect of any performance by a long-time Broadway vet addressed by a reviewer would be whether the notes are being hit.) is not mentioned beyond "sugary notes:"
But when Buckley veered into what she called some of her “personal favorites” — music by singer-songwriters like Paul Simon and Mary Chapin Carpenter — her sugary notes fell flat. Singing Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On,” she managed to take an already maudlin song and make it even more so with her gestures and elocution
I doubt (it's hard to be certain) if those "sugary notes" have much to do w/ the quality of Buckley's voice. Much more likely that young Smith (as one might imagine from her editing the Institute of Vacuumology's Defining Ideas journal) has absorbed the demented Reagan-style Pollyanna-ism that Hooverites embrace, & she's pig-biting mad that the gig will not be limited to upbeat Broadway crap, & is therefore, implicitly or explicitly, an anti-American event! And sleepy!
When she performed the second Mary Chapin Carpenter song of the night, “I am a Town,” she nearly lulled the audience to sleep by slowing way down a song that is already dragging.
(A cursory Google-ing of Smith leads to the unfortunate conclusion that she was the editor of the Dartmouth Review. Do they no longer teach syntax at Dartmouth?)
We find the real point on the second page. Hold on, it's going to be a bumpy ride, night, or whatever that line Bette Davis recited in that movie was:
Sure, Buckley is getting maudlin on the stage, but she is also getting political up there too. Buckley is not only stuck in the past when it comes to her career, but also to her views of the treatment of gay men. In a prelude to The King and I’s “We Kiss in a Shadow,” she invoked our universal right to live how we were meant to and love who we were meant to. In the era of gay marriage, isn’t that so last decade?
Here I must pause, dumbstruck. The idea that this young person, who doubtless would love for the clock to be turned back-back-back to before the New Deal, if not before Woodrow Wilson & his "progressive" bullshit & income tax, is so au courant w/ what's happpening now in the world of gay men (A link to a Smith item in the WSJ, entitled, "Washington, Gay Marriage and the Catholic Church: D.C.'s same-sex marriage law has put the archdiocese in a bind." Reset that clock to pre-Vatican II while you're at it. Need you know more?) is silly enough, but I must have been around the corner buying cigarettes & missed the news that all the problems imposed on gay people by contemporary American society had disappeared w/ the wave of a hand. Era of gay marriage? Is gay marriage the law of the land now? What else have I missed? I don't go out that much, so I don't know how I missed that too.
And now E.E. Smith will define grace & gracelessness for us.
Though she came out on top, Buckley rather gracelessly called Dunaway out at Town Hall for not having the stamina to perform as Norma on stage, while she, Buckley, did: you see, Buckley spent her early youth earning money by performing for hours on end at a Texas amusement park, as she told the snickering audience that night.
Of late, Buckley has returned to those Texas roots. Splitting her time between her ranch and the occasional regional theater gig, her life is winding down like the words of one of the sentimental songs she sang at Town Hall: “I am memory and stillness, I am lonely in old age; I am not your destination / I am clinging to my ways / I am a town … southbound.” As the sun sets on Buckley’s days in the limelight, let’s hope that old age is more graceful to her than she is to it.
Sweet Blood of Gee-ziz, Emily, just track Ms. Buckley down & put her out of her graceless misery before she sings another maudlin song. Maybe you can get to her before the lines on her face get harder. We're sure you'll be graceful about it.
Plus which (it's the new "also"): Worth a click for the comments. Some of the commenters were at the show, if you want perspective. The first one is especially worth it & claims "Ms. Smith also deleted the reference to Buckley’s supposed “geriatric” audience in her cowardly revision." I'm not so sure it was Smith who edited the article, & there's nothing to indicate that it was edited, just a mention in the dateline that it was "updated" 26 hrs. after its original appearance. Bow-Tie Tucker's journalistic integrity shining through.
M. Bouffant