Terry Teachout's Blog, page 136

TT: Out of the wild blue yonder

In today's Wall Street Journal I review two Shaw Festival productions, Misalliance and Present Laughter . Here's an excerpt.

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Only four Shaw revivals have been mounted on Broadway since the turn of the century, and few regional theaters are doing much better. Not so Ontario's Shaw Festival, which continues to present the plays of its namesake, most recently "Misalliance," on a blessedly regular basis. All praise to the festival for doing so, and for putting on so fine a production of so fascinatingly quirky a play.

Shaw had started to pull away from the well-made neatness of his early stage works by the time "Misalliance" first opened in London in 1910. Michael Holroyd, his biographer, likens the play's fantastic events to something you might expect to encounter in the topsy-turvy world of Eugène Ionesco. Joe Orton was so struck by Shaw's plunge into the deep waters of absurdity that he used a line from the play as the epigraph to "Loot": "Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you." The flavor of "Misalliance" lies somewhere in between these signposts. It's a giddy "debate in one sitting" (to quote Shaw's subtitle) in which a wrangle over marriage and its discontents is lightly disguised as a country-house farce....

Hypatia neatly sums up the play's major failing in this exasperated outburst: "Oh, if I might only have a holiday in an asylum for the dumb!...It never stops: talk, talk, talk, talk." Garrulity was always Shaw's weakness, and he never let himself go more completely than in "Misalliance." Those who, like Hypatia, favor action over words should seek their amusement elsewhere, but they'll miss a stylish staging in which Eda Holmes, the director, keeps the conversational ball bouncing from character to character with breezy effortlessness....

Permanent ensembles typically lack the star-driven firepower of a first-class commercial production. That's what's missing from the Shaw Festival's otherwise solid version of Noël Coward's "Present Laughter," which has been directed with special vividness by David Schurmann.

Coward wrote the part of Garry Essendine, the high-strung but irresistibly charming actor around whose whims "Present Laughter" revolves, for himself to play. Steven Sutcliffe, the very fine Canadian actor who is assuming the role at the Shaw Festival, doesn't make the mistake of trying to "do" the inimitable Coward, but he's still a size too small in the charisma department. If you readjust your expectations, though, you'll likely find Mr. Sutcliffe's performance to be both intelligent and convincing...

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Read the whole thing here .

A trailer for the Shaw Festival's production of Misalliance:

TT: Almanac

"I was never less alone than when by myself."

Edward Gibbon, Memoirs

TT: Almanac

"The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. Nor is it bearable. To acknowledge no values at all is to deny a difference between ourselves and other particles that tumble in space. The irreducible value, though not the exclusive one, is the idea of law. Law is more than just another opinion; not because it embodies all right values, or because the values it does embody tend from time to time to reflect those of a majority or plurality, but because it is the value of values. Law is the principal institution through which a society can assert its values."

Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent (courtesy of Peter Wehner)

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:

• Carousel (musical, G, closes Sept. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• French Without Tears (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Last look

TT: Almanac

Such welcome and unwelcome things at once

'Tis hard to reconcile.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

TT: Snapshot

A CBC interview with Walter Matthau:



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

TT: Almanac

"The good critic is he who recounts the adventures of his soul among the masterpieces."

Anatole France, La Vie littéraire

TT: Next stop, New Haven

Satchmo at the Waldorf has two more weeks to run at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, but Mrs. T and I are finally returning to the world. My brother, sister-in-law, and niece, who flew out to Massachusetts to catch the Saturday-night performance, headed west yesterday. As for me, I'll be in Connecticut tonight, New York City on Wednesday, and Spring Green, Wisconsin, on Thursday, where I'm seeing three plays over the weekend at American Players Theatre , one of my favorite classical companies.

The next stop for Satchmo is New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre . John Douglas Thompson, Gordon Edelstein, and I start rehearsing on September 25 in preparation for a week of previews and our second opening night on October 10. I've already done a fair amount of cutting and revising, and I'll doubtless do even more in the course of the next five weeks. Judging by our audiences in Lenox, though, it's looking like we're going to be in pretty solid shape once we get to New Haven.

I'm tired--really, really tired--but I'm also elated. No matter what happens to Satchmo at the Waldorf in the weeks and months ahead, I'll always have Lenox, where John is playing to sold-out houses, receiving standing ovations every night, and giving one spectacular performance after another. Between Satchmo and my miraculously productive visit to the MacDowell Colony, I'm about to wrap up one of the happiest summers of what has been, at least so far, a charmed life.

And now...I believe I'll take Tuesday off!

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To hear John Douglas Thompson and me talking about Satchmo at the Waldorf with Joe Donahue on WAMC's The Roundtable, go here .

TT: Just because

The Byrds play "This Wheel's on Fire" on Playboy After Dark in 1968:



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