Terry Teachout's Blog, page 266

TT: 'Tis the season (I)

Mel Tormé and Judy Garland sing Tormé's "The Christmas Song" on The Judy Garland Christmas Show, originally aired on CBS in 1963:

TT: Winging our way

By the time most of you get around to reading this posting, Mrs. T and I will be on our way to Chicago, where we're spending the next two days hanging out with Our Girl (whom we love dearly) and seeing Steppenwolf Theatre Company's much-discussed revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which stars Tracy Letts, the author of Killer Joe and August: Osage County, who is also a highly distinguished actor in his own right). On Wednesday we head down to Smalltown, U.S.A., where Christmas and my family are to be found.

I'll do my best to keep you posted on what we're up to this week, but if I don't, there'll still be the usual videos, almanac entries and theater-related postings to keep you occupied.

In the meantime, enjoy the holidays--we will!

TT: Stuffing the stockings

National Review Online recently asked me to make some Christmas-gift suggestions. To see my picks, go here and scroll down.

TT: Almanac

"Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst."

Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad : A Personal Remembrance

TT: Taking another shot at Candide

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on Mary Zimmerman's new production of Candide --not very enthusiastically, I fear. Here's an excerpt.

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Of all the great musicals, "Candide" poses the biggest problems to anyone who tries to stage it. It's universally agreed that Leonard Bernstein's brilliant operetta-style score is altogether worthy of Voltaire's ferocious satire of 18th-century optimism, but the original 1956 Broadway production closed after 73 performances, mainly because of the heavy-handedness of Lillian Hellman's book, and since then the show has been revised and rewritten repeatedly in an attempt to make it work. Now Mary Zimmerman, whose "Metamorphoses" hit big in 2002, has taken up the challenge, concocting a new version of "Candide" co-produced by Chicago's Goodman Theatre and the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., where I saw it last week. I wish I could say that Ms. Zimmerman has finally cracked the "Candide" code, but her version, despite many memorable moments, fails once again to solve the problem of creating a convincing context for Bernstein's miraculously effervescent music.

Ms. Zimmerman, like the vast majority of her predecessors, takes as a starting point Harold Prince's successful 1974 Broadway revival of "Candide," for which Hugh Wheeler wrote an all-new book that was undeniably effective but dismayingly vulgar. Eight years later Mr. Prince put together a longer "opera-house version" of the show for the New York City Opera, and in 1989 Bernstein himself recorded an even longer "final revised version" of the score with which subsequent directors have continued to tinker. This time around, Ms. Zimmerman has scrapped Wheeler's dialogue, replacing much of it with speeches drawn directly from Voltaire's novella, and has crammed in more of Bernstein's revised score than any previous non-operatic stage version.

The result is a musical that runs for three hours and feels slow, especially in the second act, which sags badly in the middle. It doesn't help that Ms. Zimmerman, like Wheeler before her, relies on a string of third-person narrators to advance the episodic plot, a device that slows the action to something in between a crawl and a waddle. The hectic staging--the actors are forever pushing around props and set pieces--fails to paper over the sluggish pacing...

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Read the whole thing here .

DANCE

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo (Joyce, 175 Eighth Ave., closes Jan. 2). The Trocks are an all-male ballet company whose "women" dance in drag. Sometimes they do the classics more or less straight, sometimes they dance brilliantly witty parodies, and sometimes they do out-of-left-field works like Merce Cunningham's Patterns in Space, which is on the first of the two programs that they're dancing during their current New York season. No matter what they're doing, the results are at once uproariously funny and mysteriously illuminating. To spend an evening with the Trocks is to think twice--or more--about what ballet is and how it works. Very strongly recommended, even to those who (like me) are usually allergic to drag acts (TT).

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, extended through Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

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

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• 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)

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

CLOSING SOON IN MADISON, N.J.:

• I Capture the Castle (comedy, G/PG-13, suitable for unusually precocious children, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, suitable for children, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end."

Rebecca West, The Thinking Reed

TT: Almanac

"The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes."

Mary Renault, The Charioteer

TT: Snapshot

An extremely rare kinescope of the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV adaptation of The Fantasticks, directed by George Schaefer and starring Bert Lahr, Ricardo Montalban, and Stanley Holloway, originally telecast by NBC on Oct. 18, 1964 and never shown again. This print also includes the original commercials:



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