Terry Teachout's Blog, page 175

TT: Just because

Maria Callas and Sir Thomas Beecham chat with Edward R. Murrow in 1959 on the CBS program Small World. Callas is speaking from Milan, Beecham from Nice:



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

TT: A man of his word

Well, not always: I did post a little last week in response to an unexpected stimulus and an irresistible urge. Mostly, though, I worked on Satchmo at the Waldorf and Mood Indigo, and I expect to do the same after I get back from Texas on Wednesday. So don't expect anything much in the way of full-length postings this week (except for the usual videos, almanac entries and theater-related stuff).

In lieu of same, I finally cleaned out the Top Five module of the right-hand column and supplied you with an all-new set of fresh picks. Enjoy.

TT: See me, hear me (cont'd)

If you live in or near Waco, Texas, I'm making two public appearances this week at Baylor University:

• Today I'll be speaking about the state of American culture at Mabee Theater. The theater is in the Hooper-Schaefer Fine Arts Center and my presentation starts at four p.m.

• On Tuesday I'll be speaking about Louis Armstrong and his legacy in the Alexander Reading Room of Alexander Residence Hall. Again, my presentation starts at four p.m.

Both of these events will be jointly hosted by the Honors College and the Department of Theatre Arts and are free and open to the public.

For more information, go here .

* * *

I'll also be paying a visit to a a class in which Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is being discussed. This video, in which Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, and John Glover, who appeared in the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2009 revival of Godot talk about the play, is for the students:

EXHIBITION

Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting (Frick Collection, 1 E. 70, up through May 13). A miniature show of nine full-length portraits, all of them stunningly persuasive, painted between 1874 and 1883 by a painter who could be too easy and likable but is here shown to be the master he (sometimes) was (TT).

BOOK

David Goodis, Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s (Library of America, $35, out Mar. 29). All but forgotten today save for the films made out of his books--François Truffaut turned Down There into Shoot the Piano Player --Goodis was a pulp novelist of nightmarish compulsion, and his work, whether or not it merits enshrinement by the Library of America, remains immensely readable. If you've been missing Richard Stark more than usually of late, this collection, which opens with Dark Passage, the 1946 novel on which the Bogart-Bacall thriller was based, will ease your pain (TT).

DVD

Anatomy of a Murder (Criterion Collection, two DVDs). Otto Preminger was the most uneven of major film directors, but he hit the target with awesome force in this tough-minded 1959 screen version of the best-selling novel about a self-doubting lawyer (James Stewart) who tries to save an army officer (Ben Gazzara) from doing time for a murder that he may or may not have committed. The "supporting" cast, which includes George C. Scott, Lee Remick, Arthur O'Connell, and Eve Arden, is fully equal in quality to the front-liners, but it's the total effect of Anatomy of a Murder that you'll remember. Never has the American legal system been portrayed with such searching honesty--or such cinematic éclat. The score is by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, the titles by Saul Bass. As usual, the Criterion Collection provides both a flawless transfer and a second disc crammed full of watchable extras (TT).

CD

Duke Ellington, At the Crystal Gardens, Salem, Oregon, 1952 (Hep, two CDs). This album captures the Ellington band in public performance at an awkward juncture in its long life: Clark Terry had recently come aboard, and Johnny Hodges and Sonny Greer had been replaced by Willie Smith and Louis Bellson. It was a tough time for the Duke, but he made the most of it, and this set, privately recorded in excellent sound at a West Coast dance date, reveals the band to have been in colossally fine form. The fare includes The Tattooed Bride, one of Ellington's most effective large-scale pieces. Outstanding liner notes by Andrew Homzy (TT).

PLAY

Galileo (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13, closes Mar. 18). Bertolt Brecht's play, performed in Charles Laughton's superbly speakable translation and intimately staged by Brian Kulick with Shakespearean speed and direction. F. Murray Abraham is lean and sardonic in the title role--he looks almost like an El Greco saint--and Adrianne Lobel's set, which turns the theater into a planetarium, is perfect (TT).

CHARLES LAUGHTON'S LATE BOUNTY

" Except for Except for The Night of the Hunter, Mr. Laughton's post-Galileo career is no longer widely remembered save by scholars. But enough of it survives on sound recordings and kinescopes to prove that F. Scott Fitzgerald was all wet when he claimed that 'there are no second acts in American lives.' Charles Laughton, who moved from England to America to seek fame and fortune and came perilously close to losing his soul along the way, had a second act that redeemed all that came before it..."

TT: How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm?

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival of Beyond the Horizon . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Eugene O'Neill was the Theodore Dreiser of American theater--and there are plenty of people who won't take that as a compliment. Like the author of "Sister Carrie," he wrote of the sorrows of desperate men with a rough-hewn ineloquence that is not to all tastes. Though his gifts were that of the naturalist, he wrongly took himself to be a poet, and his attempts to use the techniques of Greek tragedy to comment on the American scene give much of his work an overwrought quality that many contemporary viewers find offputting. But when O'Neill got things right, he got them very right indeed, enough so that his best plays, for all their myriad defects of craft, remain compelling.

This is a good season to test the truth of that claim, since four of O'Neill's most important but least frequently produced plays are being presented by a quartet of the country's leading drama companies over the next few months. In Chicago, the Goodman Theatre is doing "The Iceman Cometh." In Washington, D.C., Arena Stage is putting on "Ah, Wilderness!" and the Shakespeare Theatre Company is mounting the near-forgotten "Strange Interlude." Here in New York, the Irish Repertory Theater, which has served O'Neill admirably throughout its 24-season history, has just opened a rare revival of "Beyond the Horizon," the 1918 tragedy that won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.

I won't try to tell you that O'Neill's first full-length play is a masterpiece. In the proper hands, though, "Beyond the Horizon" can still be powerfully moving, and this production, well staged by Ciarán O'Reilly (who previously directed the Irish Rep's unforgettable 2009 revival of O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones") and performed with sympathy and restraint by an excellent cast, makes an unexpectedly strong case for a play that hasn't been seen in New York for close to a decade....

I've learned in recent years that many O'Neill plays that come across as overblown when performed on a proscenium stage also gain in tautness and concentration by being staged in an intimate performance space like the Irish Rep's 140-seat Off-Broadway theater. That's exactly what happens here. No one in Mr. O'Reilly's cast is tempted to exaggerate by the necessity of playing to a crowd, and all nine actors steer clear of the parallel temptation to lapse into stage-Irish charm. The tone they strike is modern, and it works....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .