Terry Teachout's Blog, page 120

TT: An election everyone can love

Because of a glut of openings on Broadway, The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which I review the Roundabout Theatre Company's excellent new revival of The Mystery of Edwin Drood . Here's an excerpt.

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If Charles Dickens had lived to finish "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," it might have ended up becoming one of his best-remembered books, though not so much for its literary quality as its subject matter. Imagine, if you dare, a novel about an outwardly respectable choirmaster who is secretly addicted to opium and who strangles his nephew in a fit of passion (or does he?) because they're both in love with the same woman. Who could resist a yarn like that? It's got everything but serial murder! Alas, Dickens died of a stroke in 1870 before he could pen the final chapters, and the unfinished manuscript became a half-forgotten curiosity known only to Dickens buffs and scholars of Victorian literature--until Rupert Holmes came along.

Mr. Holmes, a multitalented singer-songwriter who topped the pop charts in 1979 with "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)," had the uncommonly clever idea to turn "Drood" into a Broadway musical in which the audience is invited to vote on the ending. Is Edwin Drood really dead? If so, did John Jasper, the mad choirmaster, kill him--or was he murdered by one of the other characters? As gimmicks go, that's a pretty slick one, and though Mr. Holmes had never previously written anything for the stage, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" ran for 608 performances. Now the Roundabout Theatre Company has brought "Drood" back to Broadway in a revival directed with rip-roaring éclat by Scott Ellis, and I'll be surprised if it doesn't run at least as long as the original 1985 production. For sheer fun, this show is hard to top....

Mr. Ellis keeps his actors on the gallop, and they give every sign of having the time of their lives, especially the plummy-voiced Jim Norton, who never met an "r" he didn't rrrrroll. No less amusing is Chita Rivera, the proprietress of the opium den in which Jasper (Will Chase) takes his discreet leisure. Ms. Rivera delivers her lines in an accent that is an indescribably complicated and preposterous mixture of mock-Cockney and...well, something else. While the singular talents of Jessie Mueller, one of the most gifted young singers to hit Broadway in the past decade, are largely wasted on the supporting role of Helena Landless, an exotic babe from Ceylon, it's still a pleasure to see and hear her in any capacity whatsoever....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Snapshot

New York City Ballet performs two excerpts from George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer , set to music by Brahms. This performance was originally telecast on CBC's L'Heure du concert in 1961. The featured dancers in the first sequence are Jillana and Conrad Ludlow:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"Omission and simplification help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

TT: Lookback

From 2006:

Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d'art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don't speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film--not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it--is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"In the light of what has been said about persuasion-by-association and the enhancement of emotions by subliminal suggestion, let us try to imagine what the political meeting of tomorrow will be like. The candidate (if there is still a question of candidates), or the appointed representative of the ruling oligarchy, will make his speech for all to hear. Meanwhile the tachistoscopes, the whispering and squeaking machines, the projectors of images so dim that only the subconscious mind can respond to them, will be reinforcing what he says by systematically associating the man and his cause with positively charged words and hallowed images, and by strobonically injecting negatively charged words and odious symbols whenever he mentions the enemies of the State or the Party. In the United States brief flashes of Abraham Lincoln and the words 'government by the people' will be projected upon the rostrum. In Russia the speaker will, of course, be associated with glimpses of Lenin, with the words 'people's democracy,' with the prophetic beard of Father Marx. Because all this is still safely in the future, we can afford to smile. Ten or twenty years from now, it will probably seem a good deal less amusing. For what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact."

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

TT: Almanac

"The translator, let me suggest in passing, must never be frightened of the word 'paraphrase'; it is a bogey of the half-educated. As I have already tried to point out, it is almost impossible to translate a sentence without paraphrasing; it is a paraphrase when you translate 'Comment vous portez-vous?' by 'How are you?'"

Ronald Knox, On Englishing the Bible

TT: Just because

Ray Bradbury appears as a contestant in a 1955 episode of Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life:



(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: James Lapine, alchemist

I review the new Broadway revival of Annie in today's Wall Street Journal. Very much to my surprise, I loved it. Here's an excerpt.

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Annie is dead--but "Annie" lives. Two years after Harold Gray's long-running comic strip about a plucky orphan child finally breathed its last, the perennially popular 1976 stage version of "Little Orphan Annie" is back on Broadway for the third time. For anyone surprised that the musical responsible for inflicting "Tomorrow" on the world has proved to have that kind of staying power, here's an even bigger surprise: This revival of "Annie" is fabulous. Creatively staged by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim's longtime collaborator, and smartly cast from top to bottom, it makes a convincing case for a musical widely regarded by cynical adults as suitable only for consumption by the very, very young. Even if you're a child-hating curmudgeon, you'll come home grinning in spite of yourself.

What makes this "Annie" so special is that Mr. Lapine, who claims never to have seen the show prior to directing this production, decided to approach it not as an exercise in neon-lit nostalgia but as a hard-headed fable about life in the Great Depression. His Annie (Lilla Crawford) has a side-of-the-mouth Brooklyn-style accent, while Miss Hannigan (Katie Finneran), who runs the orphanage-sweatshop on whose doorstep Annie's parents left her, is a nasty, drunken slut. And while the second act remains relentlessly optimistic--it couldn't very well be anything else--Mr. Lapine has also succeeded in endowing the relationship between Annie and Daddy Warbucks (Anthony Warlow), the tough-guy tycoon who adopts her, with wholly credible emotion.

That last twist is the most striking aspect of Mr. Lapine's staging, and his stars deserve great credit for bringing it to fruition. The eleven-year-old Ms. Crawford's voice is (if I may resort to euphemism) penetrating, but she has more than enough acting talent to compensate for the undeniable fact that she sings REALLY LOUD. As for Mr. Warlow, an Australian musical-theater performer with extensive operatic experience, he's destined for stage stardom. Not only does he sing "Something Was Missing," his solo number, with bewitching finesse--vocal connoisseurs will be dazzled by his skillful use of head voice--but he acts as well as he sings....

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Read the whole thing here .

An interview with James Lapine and Andy Blankenbuehler, the director and choreographer of Annie:

TT: Almanac

"'The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'"

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

TT: Keeping it personal

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I look at how artists respond to great public events like Hurricane Sandy--and how amateurs sometimes do a better job. Here's an excerpt.

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Here's a safe bet: The e-mailboxes of every editor at every publishing house in Manhattan are filling up with proposals for novels about Hurricane Sandy. And here's a safer one: If any of them actually get written, they'll be awful.

Artists of all kinds have a weakness for Big Statements. But few of them are equal to a challenge the size of Sandy, which laid waste to much of the eastern seaboard. Consider the art created in response to 9/11. Was any of it good? Truth to tell, just about all of it is already forgotten, and rightly so. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," classical composer John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls," singer-songwriter Neil Young's "Let's Roll," sculptor Eric Fischl's "Tumbling Woman": All now seem hopelessly inadequate to the task of embodying such an event, much less clarifying its human impact....

Who, then, will best tell posterity what it was like to be on the receiving end of Sandy? If I had to guess, I'd look to the innumerable photographers--most of them point-and-shoot amateurs--who have spent the last couple of weeks sharing images of the storm and its aftermath on Flickr and Instagram. Their snapshots are anything but slick. All they show is how things looked: Refrigerators in front yards, uprooted trees and caved-in roofs, flooded tunnels, darkened houses on the edge of collapse, and water everywhere. Naïve? Sure, but that's what makes them so telling. Another way of describing them is unpretentious. Such photos are properly modest in the face of the nightmare that is a natural disaster. Instead of preaching a sermon, they invite you to look--and despair....

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Read the whole thing here .