Terry Teachout's Blog, page 52

TT: Just because

Raymond Burr's 1956 screen test for the Perry Mason TV series:



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

TT: Happiness is a dingy room

Paul Moravec and I flew to Louisville last Tuesday. Since then we've been immersed in rehearsals for the Kentucky Opera premiere of The King's Man, our third operatic collaboration, which is about to receive a staged workshop production that will share a double bill with a revival of Danse Russe, our second opera. To say that I'm having fun would be to wildly understate the case.

I learned when Paul and I wrote The Letter for the Santa Fe Opera in 2009 that there's nothing more exciting--or, on occasion, scary--than the complex process of helping to stage a show that you've written. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which has been mounted four times to date, drove home the lesson even more vigorously. Much to my surprise, it's turned out that I adore sitting in dingy rehearsal halls (all rehearsal halls, so far as I know, are dingy) and working with the artists who are collaborating on a production of one of my pieces. It's like restoring a painting: you may think you know what it's supposed to look like, but you're forever discovering details of which you'd previously been unaware.

I also learned that I love being around theater people. In addition to being smart and dedicated, they're trained to be in touch with their emotions, which makes them easy to know. It happens that I'm shy, at times painfully so, but I taught myself long ago how to act like an outgoing, extroverted person in order to function in the world. No doubt this explains why I get along so well with actors and singers, many of whom--surprise, surprise--do pretty much the same thing all day long.

If anything, I'm even more comfortable in the company of directors, designers, and stage managers. Like me, they're wallflowers at the party, backstage creatures who create and maintain the visible worlds that the actors inhabit. We speak the same language. The assistant stage manager for our show actually wore a Daria T-shirt to my first production meeting. As soon as I saw it, I said to myself, "I belong here."

This is the first time that Paul and I have worked with Kentucky Opera, and we're dazzled by the quality and seriousness of our new colleagues. That their collective energies should be directed toward the mounting of a piece whose words I wrote continues to strike me as utterly fantastic. Yes, I've done this before, but prior to 2008, when the Santa Fe Opera commissioned The Letter, it had never before occurred to me that I might try my hand at writing for the stage. Now I'm a full-fledged theater person in my own right. How preposterous--and how wonderful!

We open on Friday night. On Sunday I return to New York, and I'll fly down to Florida the next day to kick off the book tour for Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington , which goes on sale October 17. I doubt I need to tell you that I'm excited about the publication of Duke. Still, I can't deny that right now, I'd be content to spend the rest of my life showing up at Kentucky Opera's rehearsal hall each day, striving to make The King's Man and Danse Russe look and sound just a little bit better than they did the day before. That's my idea of a good time.

TT: Almanac

"Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots."

G.K. Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens

TT: George Kelly gets the old one-two

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on an important off-Broadway production, the Mint Theater Company's revival of Philip Goes Forth . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

George Kelly was nothing more than a name to me until four months ago, when Connecticut's Westport Country Playhouse produced "The Show-Off," the 1924 play for which he is remembered--barely--by students of American theater between the wars. I was expecting a modestly interesting historical exhibit. Instead "The Show-Off" turned out to be a serious comedy of unusual force and emotional complexity. It set me to wondering about Kelly's other plays, no less than nine of which made it to Broadway between 1922 and 1946. Might any of them be as good?

Now the Mint Theater Company, an Off-Broadway troupe that specializes in exhuming forgotten shows deserving of a second chance, has answered that question by reviving "Philip Goes Forth," which was last seen on Broadway in 1931. Given the quality of "The Show-Off" and the track record of the Mint, it seemed likely that "Philip Goes Forth," directed by Jerry Ruiz, would be worth seeing--and sure enough, it's a gem, mounted with the company's accustomed skill and resourcefulness.

Like "The Show-Off," "Philip Goes Forth" gets underway in a deceptively predictable-sounding manner. The scene is a fancy drawing room in a city that is, according to the stage directions, "500 miles from New York." The characters are Philip (Bernardo Cubría), an affable, earnest young gent, and his anxious Aunt Marion (Christine Toy Johnson). Philip, it seems, works for his father (Cliff Bemis), a no-nonsense businessman, but confesses to Aunt Marion ambitions of a radically different sort: He longs to move to New York and become a playwright....

Were all this not managed with the lightest of touches, you might well suspect Kelly of trading exclusively in clichés. But don't be fooled, for he has a stack of aces tucked up his sleeve. After the first intermission, Philip "goes forth" to Greenwich Village to seek fame and fortune, holing up in a down-at-the-heel boarding house run by a retired actress (Kathryn Kates) and inhabited by a gaggle of variously arty folk, including a full-fledged poetess (Rachel Moulton), a gloomy young composer (Brian Keith MacDonald) and yet another would-be playwright (Teddy Bergman). And that's where the aces start getting played, the first of which is that our hopeful young hero--not to put too fine a point on it--turns out to be utterly devoid of talent....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalised."

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

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:

• Annie (musical, G, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

• Natural Affection (drama, R, closes Oct. 26, reviewed here)

• The Old Friends (drama, PG-13, newly extended through Oct. 20, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Major Barbara (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 19, reviewed here)

• Our Betters (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, closes Nov. 3, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 20, reviewed here)

• Dickens in America (one-man play, G, too demanding for small children, closes Oct. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Oct. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Faith Healer (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Don Juan in Hell (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

THE LETTERED BERNSTEIN

" By the time Leonard Bernstein died in 1990, he was unquestionably America's best-known classical musician. Yet his achievements were viewed with persistent skepticism by critics and scholars. They acknowledged his wide-ranging talents--he was equally gifted as a conductor, a pianist, and a composer of music for both the concert hall and the musical-comedy stage--but his underlying seriousness was always in question..."

TT: Snapshot

Leonard Bernstein plays and conducts Ravel's Concerto in G, accompanied by the Orchestra of France:



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

TT: Almanac

"The simplification of anything is always sensational."

G.K. Chesterton, Varied Types

TT: Almanac

"The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas."

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics