Terry Teachout's Blog, page 42

TT: The real thing—almost

The Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which to review the Shakespeare's Globe productions of Twelfth Night and Richard III that are currently playing in repertory on Broadway. Here's an excerpt.

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In 1997 Shakespeare's Globe, a London theater that duplicates as closely as possible the playhouse where the King's Men, the troupe of which Shakespeare was a member, performed between 1599 and 1613, was opened on the site of the original Globe Theatre. Now the Globe has set up shop in Broadway's Belasco Theatre to present "Richard III" and "Twelfth Night" in repertory, staging them in a manner that is as authentic as can be contrived in a proscenium house. The uncluttered playing area is fitted out with frame-breaking stage boxes and (mostly) lit with candles, the costumes are hand-crafted 17th-century replicas designed with awe-inspiring verisimilitude by Jenny Tiramani and Claire van Kampen's Elizabethan-style incidental music is played on Renaissance instruments. Above all, the women's roles, as was the custom in Shakespeare's time, are performed by men--among them Mark Rylance, who plays Olivia in "Twelfth Night."

Needless to say, Mr. Rylance, one of the top classical actors of our time, is the draw for this ambitious undertaking. That said, it's the productions themselves, both of which were directed by Tim Carroll, that will likely be the real draw...

Having just seen Taylor Mac's astonishingly creative drag performance in Lear deBessonet's Public Theater production of Bertolt Brecht's "Good Person of Szechwan," I expected something more out of Mr. Rylance than standard-issue camp. On occasion he supplies it, in particular when he wistfully confesses that for a woman of a certain age, "youth is bought more oft than begg'd or borrow'd." For the most part, though, I found his acting to be over-obvious, at times blatantly so...

Mine, however, is a minority view--rarely have I seen so comprehensively crowd-pleasing a piece of comic acting--and even if you share my reservations about Mr. Rylance's Olivia, the rest of this "Twelfth Night" is so persuasive that you'll want to see it anyway. Not so "Richard III," in which Mr. Rylance is giving a performance of the title role that makes a sort of sense on paper but none at all in person: He has opted to play Shakespeare's hunchbacked monster of malignity as a milksoppy, simperingly adenoidal clown...

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Read the whole thing here .

The trailer for Twelfth Night and Richard III::

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

In New York City, drama critics don't usually attend opening-night performances of plays. We go to press previews instead, meaning that we rarely see Famous People in the audience--they generally come to the official first night. Alas, I have a celebrity disability, meaning that I almost never recognize them in the flesh. My companion for the evening, however, was a virtuoso celebrity-spotter, and everywhere she looked she saw famous faces...from the distant past. Jack Klugman, Arlene Dahl, Joan Collins, folks like that. (I kept waiting for her to point out Walter Winchell.)

Where were all the under-70 celebrities? Or do they even come to Broadway shows anymore?...

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am."

Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society

TT: Just because (in memoriam)

Sir Georg Solti conducts the London Philharmonic in a 1975 performance of "Nimrod," from Sir Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations:



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

TT: Almanac

"A scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good livery of honour."

William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

SOME ARTS INSTITUTIONS DESERVE TO FAIL

" According to management guru Peter Drucker, hiring an effective successor to a departing CEO is 'the ultimate test of any top management and the ultimate test of any institution.' When it comes to arts organizations, I'd say that the ultimate test is knowing when an institution is suffering from a case of creative and administrative sclerosis that is about to become terminal, then doing something about it..."

TT: See you on the radio (cont'd)

If you live in Kansas City and its environs, I'll be appearing today on KCUR's Up to Date to talk with Steve Kraske about Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington . The segment will start around 12:25 ET.

You can listen live in streaming audio by going here .

TT: All frosting, no cake

In today's Wall Street Journal I review two much-praised New York shows, Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream and Bruce Norris' Domesticated , neither of which pleased me. Here's an excerpt.

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After "Spider-man," what? Julie Taymor, whose professional reputation was severely bruised two years ago when she was shoved out of the creative team that put together Broadway's best-looking mediocre musical, has now returned to the green pastures of high art with "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the inaugural offering of Theatre for a New Audience's Polonsky Shakespeare Center. As befits the opening of a brand-new theater, Ms. Taymor's production is a spectacular affair, not as budget-bustingly so as "Spider-man" but very much in its spare-no-expense vein. Actors fly through the air, disappear through trap doors, even grow 20 feet tall before your astonished eyes, all accompanied by the festively spooky Hollywood-style incidental music of Elliot Goldenthal, Ms. Taymor's creative partner and real-life husband. I've never seen a Shakespeare staging in which more things happened in less time, and I wanted very much to like the results, which are nothing if not likable--relentlessly so, if truth be told.

What stopped me from doing so was Ms. Taymor's near-exclusive emphasis on the visual. She has, as everyone who's seen "The Lion King" knows, a singular ability to create poetic stage pictures, and her "Midsummer Night's Dream" is full to overflowing of eye-popping images...

Therein lies the flaw in this production: It's all about what you see and never about what is said. Nearly every speech is decorated with a corresponding piece of stage trickery, and it doesn't take long before you lose sight of the play itself. It is, I suspect, no coincidence that none of the acting is memorable, or that Ms. Taymor stoops to cute Disneyish caricature whenever she pauses to characterize an individual player. Puck is Roger Rabbit, Oberon is Darth Vader, while the Rude Mechanicals come off like an updated version of the Seven Dwarves. The result is a staging that looks like a piece of performance art à la Cirque du Soleil and plays like a children's show....

"Domesticated," Bruce Norris' new play, is just like "Clybourne Park," which made him rich and famous. Only the subject matter has been changed, presumably to protect the author from well-founded charges of repetition: "Clybourne Park" is about race and "Domesticated" is about sex. Otherwise the two shows are essentially indistinguishable. Once again we are presented with a bad guy, in this case a politician with zipper disease (Jeff Goldblum, who is way too nebbishy) who commits an unforgivable sin (in a nutshell, he acts like Anthony Weiner, only worse). Once again Mr. Norris confuses the issue by briefly making the bad guy look sympathetic, after which he allows the good gal (Laurie Metcalf, who is formidable as Mr. Goldblum's furious wife) to unmask him as a monster of carnal appetite. Once again the climax of the play is a catfight that fails to conceal the arthritic pacing of the second act. And once again it all adds up to a comprehensively phony piece of deck-stacked pandering...

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Revisiting the Zero Option

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I look at the high-art attendance crisis and draw a ruthless conclusion. Here's an excerpt.

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Everyone who keeps up with the National Endowment for the Arts' Survey of Public Participation in the Arts data knows that high-culture attendance numbers have been shrinking across the board for well over. Opera, theater, dance, symphony orchestras, even big-city art museums: All are drawing smaller crowds. So what's the larger meaning of these figures? Three recent articles that view the problem from different perspectives come to similar conclusions:

• Says Jaime Weinman in the Canadian magazine Maclean's: "The lack of funding for orchestras and opera companies may already be raising the question of whether North America has too many of them--or whether, as with other institutions, there should be more streamlining and consolidations....The Baby Boomers who are becoming the new generation of old people have grown up with rock music, and may not be very likely to invest in classical music."

• Theater blogger Howard Sherman sees much the same thing happening in his area of expertise: "While in the first half of my life I watched the burgeoning of the resident theatre movement, which in turn seeded the growth of countless smaller local companies, my later years will see a contraction in overall production at the professional level; it's already begun, as a few companies seem to go under every year and have been for some time."

• Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, writes in the Huffington Post that we may be "witnessing a major transition in the arts from regional organizations to fewer mega-organizations with the sophistication to mount large-scale productions, to market them well and to raise large sums of money....Does this spell the end of the mid-sized regional arts organization? Will it be increasingly difficult to build an audience and a donor base for a $10 million arts organization? Will boards simply give up trying to fund ever-increasing budgets? Will many of these organizations shrink, or disappear entirely?"

Here's another question: Might it be possible that some of them should disappear?...

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Read the whole thing here .

UPDATE: In the first sentence of this column, not visible here, I originally referred to the Minnesota Orchestra as "strike-bound." The orchestra is, of course, locked out, not on strike. My mistake--I fell victim to a fit of absentmindedness. (The Journal has corrected the online version of the column.)

TT: Almanac

"When will I ever learn? When will I ever understand that what's astonishing about the number of men who remain faithful is not that it's so small but that there are any of them at all?"

Nora Ephron, Heartburn