Terry Teachout's Blog, page 169

TT: Inside the sausage factory

I've written a bonus drama column for today's Wall Street Journal in which I have mostly good things to say about the Broadway revival of The Best Man and mostly bad things to say about End of the Rainbow . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Give the devil his due: "The Best Man," Gore Vidal's play about what ambitious men will do to one another in order to live in the White House, is a solidly crafted drama that has lost not a scintilla of its relevance since it first opened on Broadway in 1960. For all the frothy paranoia of his public statements on politics, Mr. Vidal knows, or knew, a good deal about how people get elected--his grandfather was a senator--and that knowledge helps to make "The Best Man" both witty and perceptive.

Though the 2000 Broadway revival of "The Best Man" was only modestly successful, this one seems destined to be a knockdown hit, both because of its trillion-watt cast (I mean, James Earl Jones and Angela Lansbury--what more could you want?) and because it was staged by Michael Wilson. Mr. Wilson, the man behind Signature Theatre's unforgettable production of Horton Foote's "Orphan's Home Cycle," is one of our very best stage directors, and he has collaborated closely with Derek McLane, the set designer, to create a show that glides from scene to scene with the seemingly effortless fluidity that is his trademark.

Bill Russell (John Larroquette), the hero of the piece, is an Adlai Stevenson stand-in, brainy and sardonic, whose private life makes him a dicey presidential candidate (his closet is full of skeletons, extramarital and otherwise). The same is true of his opportunistic opponent, Joe Cantwell (Eric McCormack, formerly of "Will and Grace"), a slicked-up Joe McCarthy type who may be a sexual switch-hitter. Their fate is in the hands of Art Hockstader (Mr. Jones), the popular ex-president whose endorsement both men seek--and who has more than a few secrets of his own....

I last saw "The Best Man" six years ago in a top-notch production by Chicago's Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, which mounted the play in a 150-seat house, thus making it possible to deemphasize the comedy (of which there is quite a bit) and concentrate on the elegantly written showdowns between the main characters. On Broadway, Mr. Wilson has necessarily and wisely opted for a broader approach. He has also taken full advantage of Mr. Jones, who is in lionesque form. It isn't always fun to see an actor having fun, but Mr. Jones plays President Hockstader with a lip-smacking panache that is guaranteed to please....

Tracie Bennett can sing like Judy Garland, more or less, and if you have any interest in hearing her do so, go see Peter Quilter's "End of the Rainbow," a play about the last pathetic months of the drug-sodden Garland's life, in which Ms. Bennett gives what amounts to a mini-concert of Judy's Greatest Hits. Be forewarned, however, that Mr. Quilter's script is heavy on bitchy one-liners and light on insight, and that Ms. Bennett's portrayal of Garland-at-the-End-of-Her-Rope is a heavily shellacked impersonation that slops over into shameless caricature....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me was the ability to think in quotations."

Margaret Drabble, A Summer Birdcage

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

It is an aspect of American manners that our politicians emulate our advertisers by engaging in the 24-hour robotic spin that determines their every public utterance: "So, Senator, how do you explain the presence of that cheap hooker in your hotel room?" "When I am elected president, the failed economic policies of the current administration will be reversed, thus reducing the burden on the middle class!" (No doubt this phenomenon is in large part a function of the takeover of the political process by lawyers.) In the process, they debase the culture as well, precisely because they're not fooling anybody....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Just because

Larry Adler plays Debussy's "Clair de lune" on harmonica in the 1944 film Music for Millions:



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

TT: Almanac

"I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe."

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

THE MAN BEHIND THE MUSIC MAN

" One of a bare handful of hit Broadway musicals to have been written in its entirety by a single person, The Music Man opened to rave reviews in 1957, beat out West Side Story at the Tony Awards, and ran for 1,375 performances. Then it was turned into one of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever filmed. It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2000, filmed a second time for TV in 2003, and continues to be performed regularly by regional and amateur theater companies throughout America. Why, then, is Meredith Willson--the author of its libretto and music and lyrics--so completely forgotten?..."

WHY STRAIGHT PLAYS CAN'T MAKE IT ON BROADWAY

" So no, we can't have more plays like Tribes on Broadway, not unless some producer with cash to burn finagles a Hollywood star into taking three months off to appear in a limited run. Nor is that situation going to change any time soon. And until the media shift their focus to off-Broadway and regional companies--which is just as unlikely--then live theater, important and vital though it is, will remain on the margins of the larger American culture, vaguely respected but increasingly ignored..."

TT: The truth about Neil Simon

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, I report with the utmost enthusiasm on an off-Broadway revival of Lost in Yonkers , followed by brief and mostly unfavorable notices of Arena Stage's Ah, Wilderness! in Washington, D.C., and the Broadway transfer of Newsies . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and whose original production ran for 780 performances on Broadway, is being revived for the first time in New York--in a 99-seat Off-Broadway house. How are the mighty fallen! But here's the surprise: TACT/The Actors Company Theatre, one of the best small companies in Manhattan, is giving "Lost in Yonkers" a production that will make even confirmed anti-Simonites rethink their position. I've never seen a more emotionally persuasive Simon revival, not even David Cromer's short-lived 2009 Broadway staging of "Brighton Beach Memoirs."

The plot of "Lost in Yonkers" sounds like the premise for a second-rate sitcom: Eddie (Dominic Comperatore) gets into hot water with a loan shark, stows his two boys (Matthew Gumley and Russell Posner) with his gargoyle-like mother (Cynthia Harris) and goofy sister (Finnerty Steeves) and goes on the lam. What makes it work is that Mr. Simon has upped the ante by turning Eddie into a grieving widower, his mother into a loveless monster and his sister into a slightly retarded woman-child with mature sexual urges. The result is a play whose wisecracks float atop a roiling current of anger and despair.

How to balance these seemingly disparate elements? Jenn Thompson, the director, does it by staging "Lost in Yonkers" as though it were a straight-down-the-center family drama. No winks, no nudges, no slapstick: Every scene is played for truth. Yes, you'll laugh--a lot--but never at the expense of believability...

Everything that's right with TACT's "Lost in Yonkers" is wrong with Arena Stage's in-the-round version of Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!" It's like an illustrated lecture on how not to stage a period comedy, a protracted exercise in joke-jerking that seizes every opportunity to be obvious. The only way to perform a play like this one, in which O'Neill imagined the tranquil family life that he never had as a boy in turn-of-the-century Connecticut, is to do it without a trace of irony. Kyle Donnelly, on the other hand, has directed "Ah, Wilderness!" so broadly that you have to wonder whether she takes seriously O'Neill's expressly stated intention to write a comedy that was "not in the satiric vein."...

Imagine, if you dare, a cross beween "Waiting for Lefty" and "High School Musical." Should you find such a combination appealing rather than appalling, you'll like "Newsies," the droningly earnest new Disney musical about the newsboy strike of 1899. Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book, has turned all the characters into flimsy cardboard cutouts, and the songs, by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, are namby-pamby pop-rock sprinkled with phony-sounding period touches....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Why can't straight plays make it on Broadway?

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I offer a hard-boiled answer to a heartfelt question. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Nina Raine's "Tribes," which opened Off Broadway earlier this month, is a superb new play about a dysfunctional family whose youngest member is deaf. Beautifully staged by David Cromer, it was hailed by the critics, myself included, and has extended its run through September.

This was the last sentence of my review: "Why can't we have plays like this on Broadway?"

Everybody in the theater business knows that it's become dismayingly hard to open a commercial production of a new play on Broadway....

Now turn back the clock and look at this partial list of new plays that ran on Broadway during the 1961-62 season: Tad Mosel's "All the Way Home," Harold Pinter's "The Caretaker," Paddy Chayefsky's "Gideon," Robert Bolt's "A Man for All Seasons," William Gibson's "The Miracle Worker," Tennessee Williams' "The Night of the Iguana," Ossie Davis' "Purlie Victorious," Eugène Ionesco's "Rhinoceros," Terence Rattigan's "Ross," Shelagh Delaney's "A Taste of Honey," Herb Gardner's "A Thousand Clowns" and the original production of Gore Vidal's "The Best Man."

So what happened in the past half-century? Did playgoers get stupid? Is everybody staying home to watch TV? Maybe--but something else is going on. The best-remembered new play to hit Broadway in 1962 was Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It was budgeted at $47,000, the equivalent of $361,000 in today's dollars. By contrast, the 2009 Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" cost $3 million to produce....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"The critics? No, I have nothing but compassion for them. How can I hate the crippled, the mentally deficient, and the dead?"

Ronald Harwood, screenplay for The Dresser (courtesy of Mrs. T)