Terry Teachout's Blog, page 235

TT: Longer than Twitter, shorter than Kushner

In my "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal, I write in praise of shorter attention spans. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Take a look at any TV sitcom of the '50s and '60s and compare it to modern-day televised fare. It's startling to see how slow-moving those old shows were. The same thing is true of live theater. The leisurely expositions of yesteryear, it turns out, aren't necessary: You can count on contemporary audiences to get the point and see where you're headed, and they don't want to wait around for you to catch up with them.

Does this mean that the discursive masterworks of the past are no longer accessible? Yes and no. A great work of art that is organically long, like "The Marriage of Figaro" or "Remembrance of Things Past," will never lack for audiences. But just as most of Shakespeare's plays can and should be cut in performance, so should today's artists always keep in mind that most of us are too busy to watch as they circle the airport, looking for a place to land.

"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures," the new Tony Kushner play that opened in New York last week, is three hours and 40 minutes long--a half-hour longer than the Donmar Warehouse production of Shakespeare's "King Lear" that is currently playing in Brooklyn. Even if "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" were 15% better than "Lear," Mr. Kushner's play would still have profited from being stripped of its lengthy digressions and superfluous subplots, most of which serve only to obscure the play's good parts.

Anyone who doubts the virtues of brevity should dip into Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introduction" series, in which celebrated experts write with extreme concision about their areas of expertise. Each volume in the series is about 140 pages long and runs to roughly 35,000 words of text. (Most serious biographies, by contrast, run to between 150,000 and 200,000 words.)

How much can you say about a big subject in 35,000 words? Plenty, if you're Harvey C. Mansfield writing about Alexis de Tocqueville or Kenneth Minogue writing about politics . These "Very Short Introductions" are models of their kind, crisp, clear and animated by a strong point of view. They are terse but not anonymous: Both men express themselves not in the blandly corporate tones of an encyclopedia entry but in their own distinctive voices....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Improving on Shaw

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I rave about the New York transfer of A Minister's Wife and say a few tepid words about the much-ballyhooed King Lear currently playing at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

The most important new musical since "The Light in the Piazza" has come to New York. "A Minister's Wife," in which Austin Pendleton, Joshua Schmidt and Jan Levy Tranen took a classic play by George Bernard Shaw and made it better, opened two years ago at Chicago's Writers' Theatre, one of America's half-dozen top regional companies. Now this exquisite musical version of "Candida" has transferred to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center Theater's smaller downstairs house, in a production staged with immaculate grace by Michael Halberstam, who conceived the show and directed its original Chicago production. To say that you mustn't miss it is to grossly understate the case.

Comparisons with "My Fair Lady," the other Shaw musical, are interesting but irrelevant: "My Fair Lady" is a Broadway operetta, while "A Minister's Wife" balances on a knife-edge between post-Sondheim musical comedy and full-fledged opera. A one-act show performed on a single set by five singing actors and accompanied by four virtuoso instrumentalists, it takes one of Shaw's talkiest plays, a study of what in 1894 would have been called a "modern" marriage, and transfuses it with the hot blood of pure lyricism....

This has been a frightful year for new musicals, which makes the arrival of "A Minister's Wife" all the more satisfying. Needless to say, it's not for everyone, and especially not for those who judge a musical solely by its decibel level and sequin tonnage. If you belong in that category, stuff your wallet full of cash and head for Times Square. If, on the other hand, you believe that a musical can be as smart, poignant and provocative as a first-rate play, then "A Minister's Wife" will thrill you to the marrow....

You can't get into the Donmar Warehouse's production of "King Lear," whose entire run at Brooklyn's BAM Harvey Theater is sold out. Don't sweat it, though: This "Lear," directed by Michael Grandage, is very good but by no means great, and Derek Jacobi's performance of the towering title role is interesting, which is a polite way of saying odd. Mr. Jacobi's take on the mad monarch is essentially comic, a now-flamboyant, now-whiny medley of hoots and squeaks such as might be emitted by a gifted character actor trying to play a role that's two sizes too large for him. The production itself is direct to the point of baldness....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: See me, hear me

I'm one of the panelists on this week's episode of Working in the Theatre, a discussion called "Theatre Journalism: Online and Off" that will be telecast by CUNY-TV on Sunday at five p.m. ET. Joining me are Scott Heller, the theater editor of the New York Times, and stagebloggers Chris Caggiano , David Loehr , and Jan Simpson . The host is Howard Sherman. I really enjoyed taping this program, and I hope the results are as much fun to watch as they were to make.

For more information, or to download a podcast of the show, go here .

Here's a snippet in which I talk about artblogging and the old media:

TT: Snooky Young, R.I.P.

Trumpeter Snooky Young sings and plays "Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It)" with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra:

TT: Almanac

"There is a natural connection between the teaching profession and a taste for totaliarian government; prolonged association with the immature--fanatical urchins competing for caps and blazers of distinguishing colours--the dangerous pleasure of over-simple exposition, the scars of the endless losing battle for order and uniformity which rages in every classroom, dispose even the most independent minds to shirt-dipping and saluting."

Evelyn Waugh, "For Schoolboys Only"

TT: Just because

A rare kinescope (in two parts) of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten performing Britten's Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo on Japanese television in 1956:

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 Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 23, 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)

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

• By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (comedy, PG-13, extended through June 12, reviewed here)

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

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The School for Lies (verse comedy, PG-13, impossible for children, closes May 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, closes May 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN LOS ANGELES:

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, Los Angeles remounting of Broadway production with original cast, adult subject matter, Broadway run reviewed here)

TT: Partial portrait

Today's Google Doodle is an animated tribute to Martha Graham:



The Washington Post has a posting about Ryan Woodword, the animator, on its "Comic Riffs" blog. The author of the posting quotes from an essay that I wrote about Graham for Time in 1998. If you'd like to read the whole thing--which isn't quite so laudatory as the quote suggests--go here .

TT: Arthur Laurents, R.I.P.

Everybody's having his or her say about Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and who died the other day at the age of ninety-three. Much of what's being said about him is a bit on the sanctimonious side, which is mildly amusing. The truth is that Laurents was one of the most detested people in the theater business, a genuinely nasty man about whom more than a few of his famous ex-friends had nothing good to say, just as he had nothing good to say about them. I suspect that his nastiness was rooted in the fact that he never succeeded in writing anything of lasting interest other than Gypsy and West Side Story, and resented his better-known collaborators for having made possible his own success, such as it was.

For my part, I wrote nothing about Laurents' death because I'd already said my piece about him in a Wall Street Journal review of Original Story By , his 2000 autobiography. Laurents spewed venom all over a long list of people, Jerome Robbins in particular, in Original Story By, which explains the last paragraph of my review:

Jerome Robbins was one of the twentieth century's greatest choreographers, while Arthur Laurents will in the not-so-long run be remembered solely for having collaborated with his artistic betters, Robbins very much included. Small wonder, then, that Original Story By leaves a rancid taste in the mouth. For all its irresistible readability, too much of it stinks of smugness and spite--and envy.

So it did, and does.

TT: Slaves of the past

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I review the last two openings of the current New York season, Lynn Nottage's By the Way, Meet Vera Stark and Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures . The first is good, the second long. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Fame caught up with Lynn Nottage when she won a Pulitzer for "Ruined," but by then she was already known in the world of theater as a writer of real quality. One of her most noteworthy talents is the ability to write "political" plays in which the focus is not on abstract ideas but on ordinary people whose lives have been shaped--or twisted--by those ideas. "By the Way, Meet Vera Stark," a portrait of a black film actress of the '30s, is a choice example of her method. In the hands of a less accomplished artist, it could easily have become a droning study of Discrimination in Action. Instead, Ms. Nottage has given us a sharp-toothed comedy that makes its points through indirection rather than with self-righteous indignation. As ingeniously constructed as it is amusing, "Vera Stark" is a worthy successor to "Ruined," and though Second Stage's production doesn't do justice to the play's multi-layered subtleties, you should see it anyway.

In the first act, set in 1933, we meet the title character, a spunky young black woman (Sanaa Lathan) who works as a maid for a white film star (Stephanie J. Block) but longs to break into the movies herself. When Gloria, Vera's employer, gets a shot at the lead role in a high-calorie weeper called "The Belle of New Orleans" that also has a small but choice part for a slave, Vera contrives through elaborately silly means to audition for the part. Then we flash forward to 2003 and learn that she not only got it but became one of the most successful black actresses in Hollywood--though she was never allowed to play anything other than slaves and maids. The second act is set at an academic colloquium called "Rediscovering Vera Stark" in which three pseudo-hip film-studies professors (Daniel Breaker, Kimberly Hébert Gregory and Karen Olivo) wrangle over the meaning of Vera's career and show a clip of a 1973 talk-show appearance in which she and Gloria are reunited for the first time in years.

This too-tight précis only hints at the barbed irony with which Ms. Nottage sketches the proliferating complexities of Vera's life. Desperate to become a star, she learns that Hollywood stardom is a better-paid form of enslavement in which stereotypes are the shackles....

If you think that Tony Kushner is a genius, then you're likely to be surprised and disappointed by "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures," which is a garrulous, rambling mess. If, on the other hand, you think that Mr. Kushner is a flawed artist who's never learned how to make fully effective use of his gifts, then you're more likely to see "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" as all of a piece with his earlier plays. Like "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul" before it, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide" is too long--three hours and 40 minutes, to be exact--and too diffuse to be easily endured by anyone lacking the patience of a secular saint....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .