Terry Teachout's Blog, page 164

TT: Footnote to a triumph

John Douglas Thompson is appearing alongside Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy in the Goodman Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Needless to say, I couldn't mention his performance in my Wall Street Journal review of the show because he will also be starring in Shakespeare & Company's production of Satchmo at the Waldorf , my first play, later this summer.

For this reason, I thought I'd let you know what Charles Isherwood had to say about John in today's New York Times:

"The great actor John Douglas Thompson, known in New York for his Othello and Macbeth as well as his stunning performance in O'Neill's 'Emperor Jones,' creates yet another indelible portrait in Joe Mott, the former owner of a gambling house whose gentle good humor masks a volcanic rage at a life warped by racism. Pacing like a caged animal in response to Hickey's needling presence, Joe erupts into near violence with a force that scalds...."

TT: Not a hope in hell

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, filed from Chicago, I review the Goodman Theatre's revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh , directed by Robert Falls and starring Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy. Here's an excerpt.

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No matter how far you have to go to get there, the place to be right now is Chicago, where Nathan Lane and Brian Dennehy are starring in Robert Falls' Goodman Theatre revival of "The Iceman Cometh."

Productions of Eugene O'Neill's longest, most ambitious play are as scarce as $100,000 bills, not because anyone doubts the importance of "The Iceman Cometh" but because it is nearly five hours long and calls for a large cast led by a tireless actor who oozes charisma from every pore. That's why "Iceman" has been mounted only four times on Broadway, most recently in 1999, and never for more than a few weeks at a time. Regional revivals are no less rare--this is the first one of any consequence to be mounted in recent memory--and so Mr. Falls' "Iceman" would be worth seeing even if it were merely adequate. It is, in fact, extraordinary, a totally successful staging of a formidably difficult play in which Mr. Lane gives a performance that will stay with you for as long as you live....

Briskly paced and staged with proper attention to the humor without which the play can grind to a painful halt, this "Iceman" puts the author, not the director, in the spotlight. No overweeningly high concept has been imposed on the script. Instead we see it plain, enacted as a series of unostentatious tableaux that Natasha Katz has lit with a Rembrandt-like feel for chiaroscuro.

Mr. Lane, a first-rate actor who is usually content to appear in second-rate shows, rises to the occasion as effortlessly as he did in the 2009 Broadway revival of "Waiting for Godot." His Hickey is a cracked Babbitt who wears his straw hat at the jauntiest of angles, looking for all the world as though he were ready to break into the old soft-shoe. To see him disintegrate before your eyes in the last act is to gaze into the abyss...

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Read the whole thing here .

An excerpt from Sidney Lumet's TV version of The Iceman Cometh, originally telecast on Play of the Week in 1960, starring Jason Robards, Jr., as Hickey:



A brief clip from the 1999 Broadway revival of The Iceman Cometh, starring Kevin Spacey as Hickey:



John Frankenheimer's 1973 American Film Theatre adaptation of The Iceman Cometh, starring Lee Marvin as Hickey and Robert Ryan as Larry:

TT: Almanac

"The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, reviewed here)

• The Best Man (drama, PG-13, closes July 1, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Columnist (drama, PG-13/R, closes June 24, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Death of a Salesman (drama, PG-13, unsuitable for children, all performances sold out last week, closes June 2, reviewed here)

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

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, 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)

• 4000 Miles (drama, PG-13, closes June 17, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, closes June 3, reviewed here)

IN EVANSTON, ILL.:

• After the Revolution (drama, PG-13, closes May 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, unsuitable for children, closes May 13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"The secret of success is never believing you are successful."

Jeffrey Archer (quoted in Martyn Lewis, Reflections on Success)

TT: Snapshot

Charles and Ray Eames are interviewed by Arlene Francis on NBC's Home in 1956:



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

TT: Angels and demons

I'm filing two Wall Street Journal drama columns from Chicago this week. In today's paper, I report on the Court Theatre's revival of Angels in America and Next Theatre Company's production of Amy Herzog's After the Revolution , in both cases with high enthusiasm. Here's an excerpt.

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Like it or not, Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" is a landmark of postwar American theater. Opportunities to see it onstage are sufficiently rare that they should be seized with alacrity--especially in the case of the Court Theatre's new production, which is a landmark in its own right. Charles Newell, the Court's artistic director, has a knack for creating tightly focused small-scale productions of such sprawling works as "Porgy and Bess." His galvanically staged version of "Angels in America" is very much in the same vein. Performed in the company's 250-seat thrust-stage house, it puts Mr. Kushner's desperate characters so close to the audience that their fear and trembling becomes as immediate as a whispered confession.

No small part of the credit for the potency of this production belongs to John Culbert, the scenic designer, who has shunned hospital-room naturalism in favor of an aggressively simple unit set (the centerpiece is a catafalque-like platform, the backdrop a grid of girders) that seems to float in the midst of infinite space. The sound design, by Joshua Horvath and Kevin O'Donnell, heightens to an alarming degree the atmosphere of encroaching disaster. Everything else is left to the imagination--and to Mr. Newell's cast, led by Larry Yando as Roy Cohn. By turns horrifically gleeful and unexpectedly vulnerable, Mr. Yando's Cohn steers clear of caricature, thus mitigating Mr. Kushner's tendency to demonize his villains....

What would you do if you found out that your grandfather had been a Soviet agent--and that your family had lied to you about it? In "After the Revolution," the 2010 "prequel" to "4000 Miles," Amy Herzog asks this question, and the answer she gives, although fictionalized, is intensely personal. That stands to reason, since something closely similar happened to Ms. Herzog, whose grandfather was revealed in 2000 to have spied for the Russians during World War II.

Ms. Herzog has turned this harrowing experience into an incisive, impressively honest play about life in a red-diaper family. As in "4000 Miles," which is playing at New York's Lincoln Center Theater through June 17, she manages with near-miraculous skill to embed personal drama in a political framework, adding sparkle to the action with deft touches of satire....

This staging, finely directed by Kimberly Senior, features a letter-perfect performance by Christine Stulik as Emma Joseph, the starchily self-righteous young political activist who is jolted to the marrow when she learns the ugly truth about her grandfather....

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Read the whole thing here .

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING CONDUCTOR

" In February , the New York Philharmonic announced its 2012-13 season, the orchestra's fourth under the leadership of Alan Gilbert, whose appointment as music director was the source of much favorable press when it was announced in 2007. No such reaction greeted the news that the Philharmonic would be offering its audiences, among other things, a four-concert Bach series, the symphonies and concertos of Brahms, and a concert version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Outside of the usual pro forma story in the New York Times, the silence was deafening..."

TT: After the fact

Mrs. T and I are in Chicago this week, and I'm going to be busy throughout our stay there, so in lieu of blogging today, I'm posting a video interview that I did in 2009. The occasion was the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong . The interview was conducted by the folks at Big Think , an exceedingly interesting website that is insufficiently well known.

Big Think recently posted this interview on YouTube. If you didn't happen to see it in 2009, you might possibly be interested in seeing what I had to say back then:

TT: Lookback

From 2004:

Since we're on the subject of me, my brother and his daughter were looking at Smalltown High School yearbooks at the dinner table last night, some of which were published back when I edited the high-school newspaper. That was--gulp--30 years ago. As my niece made fun of the hair styles of 1974, I found myself recalling some of the ways in which I first became aware of the larger world of art and culture, and it occurred to me that in lieu of a more formal chronicle, it might be interesting to draw up a list of cultural firsts....

Read the whole thing here .