Terry Teachout's Blog, page 142

TT: Sondheim in the park

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two newly opened musicals, the Shakespeare in the Park revival of Into the Woods and the Broadway transfer of Bring It On . The first is a mixed bag, the second a pleasant romp. Here's an excerpt.

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The Public Theater's outdoor revival of "Into the Woods" is a fine idea--on paper. Where better to mount Stephen Sondheim's fractured-fairy-tale musical than in Central Park's tree-lined amphitheater? What's more, some aspects of this production, which was jointly directed by Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel and is based on a 2010 revival that they created for London's Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, live up to the promise of its conception. Donna Murphy and Jessie Mueller, for instance, are terrific, and the "Midsummer Night's Dream"-style set, designed by John Lee Beatty in collaboration with Soutra Gilmour, makes imaginative use of the Delacorte Theater's natural surroundings. If only the sparkle-free, visually unfocused staging looked half so good! It's hard to imagine a production of "Into the Woods" going flat, but that's what this one does.

Messrs. Sheader and Steel have added an interesting new twist to James Lapine's book. The narrator becomes a young boy (alternately played by Noah Radcliffe and Jack Broderick) who wanders into a nearby forest to escape a family argument and gets swept up in the fast-unfolding plot, in which Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and Jack (the one who brought down the beanstalk) run collectively afoul of a witch, a wolf and a giant. This is, or could be, a clever framing device, but it's never made sufficiently clear who the boy is or why he has stumbled into the action of "Into the Woods." Nor does Mr. Sheader know how to use the Delacorte Theater's large stage: Not only is too much of the show performed too far upstage, but the actors are deployed in such a way that you're unsure where to look....

Ms. Murphy plays the Witch with thrilling ferocity, while Ms. Mueller, the Cinderella of this revival, is the finest young musical-comedy singer to hit New York in the past decade. Just as she came out of the otherwise horrible "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" smelling like a hundred-dollar rose, so is her performance in "Into the Woods" fully realized and wonderfully touching....

"Bring It On," which was inspired by the 2000 screen comedy, tells the story of a white-bread cheerleader (played here by Taylor Louderman) who learns a Lesson in Tolerance when redistricting forces her to transfer to a hip-hop high school. It might just be the best-made commodity musical ever to come to Broadway. No, it isn't at all surprising, much less challenging, but Amanda Green, Tom Kitt, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeff Whitty have collectively transformed the movie into a soufflé-fluffy confection that goes its dopey way with charm and pep....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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:

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 9, reviewed here)

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

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, 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 CHICAGO:

• Freud's Last Session (drama, PG-13, restaging of off-Broadway production, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN MINNEAPOLIS:

• The Sunshine Boys (comedy, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• A Little Night Music (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:

• The Admirable Crichton (serious comedy, G, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant."

Denis Dutton, "Of Human Accomplishment"

TT: Snapshot

Eleanor Powell, Buddy Rich, Bert Lahr, and the Tommy Dorsey band perform "I'll Take Tallulah" in Ship Ahoy:



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

TT: Almanac

"Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms (trans. Franz H. Mautner and Henry Hatfield)

TT: Lookback

From 2006:

I have a feeling that the reason why awards in the arts tend irresistibly toward irrelevance is that they contradict the essential nature of art. The fact is that there are only two "prizes" worth having, short-term success and long-term acclaim, neither of which can be conveyed by any means other than the uncoerced consensus of the relevant public. Yet as self-evident as that might seem, there is some irresistible impulse built into the human psyche that makes us keep handing out awards anyway....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"It had been a joke, another Dalziel story to tell old friends, but Pascoe had since realized what he recognized once more now as he looked around this smoke-filled room with its gaudy vinyl wallpaper, its formica tables and stackable chairs, its shouted conversations and screeched amusement, its pints of bitter and port and lemons--that some catch of self-awareness in him could never be released sufficiently to let him plunge without restraint into these less than Byzantine pleasures. It wasn't just the natural watchfulness which becomes second nature to most detectives. It was a need to assess before experiencing. It was a distrust of the commonality of pleasure. It was a sense of the cry of bewilderment in human laughter. Above all, it was a longing for joy and a fear of being duped and debased by some shoddy substitute."

Reginald Hill, A Pinch of Snuff (courtesy of Mrs. T)

TT: The place to be

John Douglas Thompson, Gordon Edelstein, and I have a week's worth of rehearsals for Satchmo at the Waldorf under our belts. We're very pleased with our progress to date. Not only is most of the script now staged, but Lee Savage's set (the model for which is pictured above) and Ilona Somogyi's costumes are under construction at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, and I've written three new speeches since we went to work on Tuesday.

Mrs. T and I celebrated last night by watching Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy , the greatest backstage movie ever made. Now that I've collaborated on two operas and a play, I understand better than ever before exactly how good it is. As I wrote in a 2011 "Sightings" column about Gilbert and Sullivan, Topsy-Turvy is

a deeply knowing fictional study of how a theatrical production takes shape....We visit the office of Richard D'Oyly Carte and notice with surprise that he has a phone on his desk; we dine in Victorian restaurants, sit in Victorian parlors, go backstage at the Savoy Theatre and watch a prop man shake a piece of sheet metal to simulate the sound of thunder. Detail is piled on imaginatively re-created detail, and by film's end you feel as though you've taken a stroll through a vanished world.

Whenever I watch Topsy-Turvy, I'm reminded of how much I love being immersed in the endlessly complex process of rehearsing a show. You feel as though you've slipped through a hidden door and vanished into a secret world, a parallel universe populated by variously eccentric geniuses who are totally devoted to lifting your script off the page and bringing it to life. I treasure every minute I spend in their company, and I learn a hundred priceless things each time we assemble in the rehearsal room.

Tonight I'll be watching a preview of Into the Woods in Central Park, but I plan to drive back to Massachusetts as soon as it's over. I've got an eleven o'clock call in Lenox tomorrow morning, and I can't wait to rejoin my new friends and resume the ecstatically hard work of putting Satchmo at the Waldorf on stage.

TT: Just because

Dizzy Gillespie and his big band play "Salt Peanuts" in the 1946 film Jivin' in Be-Bop:



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