Terry Teachout's Blog, page 84

TT: Not forgotten

Evelyn Teachout, my beloved mother, died a year ago. This is what I wrote about her the next day.

Today and always, Mrs. T and I bless her memory.

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I'm taking the week off. Except for the usual theater-related items, daily almanac entries, and other regular postings, I won't be blogging again until May 13.

TT: And all shall have prizes

The New York Drama Critics' Circle, of which I am a member, voted on its annual awards today. Here are the winners:

• Best play: Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Christopher Durang)

• Best musical: Matilda (Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly)

• Special citations: Soho Rep, New York City Center's Encores! series, and John Lee Beatty

For more information about the awards--including the votes of the individual members of the NYDCC--go here .

TT: Funny as a straitjacket

I just made a quick reviewing trip to Chicago, and in today's Wall Street Journal I report favorably on the two shows that I saw there, Alan Ayckbourn's Woman in Mind and the original version of Pal Joey . Here's an excerpt.

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America's regional theaters are catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, and it's not hard to see why. Yes, virtually all of his 77 plays are uproariously funny comedies--but most of them are also deeply melancholy, at times joltingly so. Do an Ayckbourn and you get crowd-pleasing laughs and bonus points for seriousness. It makes good sense, then, that Eclipse Theatre Company, which specializes in three-show seasons devoted to the work of a single playwright, should be giving him the deluxe treatment this year, and that the first show of the season, "Woman in Mind," is one of the many plays by Mr. Ayckbourn in which comedy and tragedy are so tightly coiled that you can't pull them apart.

As the lights goes up, you see a middle-aged woman (Sally Eames) being treated by a mild-mannered doctor (Larry Baldacci) who is speaking to her not in English but in gibberish ("Pie squeaking jinglish cow"), making it impossible for her to understand what he's saying. Susan, we learn, just received an accidental blow to the head that has left her temporarily disoriented. Soon, though, she snaps back into focus, and the members of her cheerful, loving family, who appear to have stepped out of a tennis-anyone garden-party comedy, arrive on the scene and start fawning over her. If you didn't know any better, you might well suspect that you were in for a boringly conventional evening. But Mr. Ayckbourn likes nothing better than to deal from the bottom of the deck, and little is as it seems in "Woman in Mind," least of all Susan's goody-goody husband, daughter and son-in-law-to-be....

What follows is a hard-edged comedy that is simultaneously funny and horrific. It is also extraordinarily well performed, especially by Ms. Eames, who plays her part not as a tour de force of comic ingenuity but as a stingingly true-to-life study of a woman who can no longer bear the pain of her disappointments....

"Pal Joey" is on of the all-time great Broadway musicals, a portrait of life on the bottom rungs of show biz in which Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart teamed up to immensely potent effect with John O'Hara ("Appointment in Samarra"), who wrote the book. Yet it's rarely seen nowadays, and the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2008 Broadway revival was a monstrosity in which Richard Greenberg rewrote O'Hara's no-nonsense book to coy and campy effect. Now Chicago's Porchlight Music Theatre has given the original 1940 version a lively small-scale revival which proves that the creators of "Pal Joey" knew exactly what they were doing....


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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals."

H.L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces

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, reviewed here)

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

• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, reviewed here)

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

• Orphans (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes July 7, 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)

• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes May 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Talley's Folly (drama, PG-13, closes May 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake."

H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

AMY HERZOG: A CHEKHOV IN TRAINING

" Playwriting in America ihas tended to be a man's game. Many American women have written individual hit plays, but only three--Lillian Hellman, Wendy Wasserstein, and the long-forgotten Rachel Crothers--scored multiple successes on Broadway in the 20th century, and their track records there have yet to be rivaled..."

TT: It plumb slipped my mind

When you write as much as I do, you sometimes forget about having written certain pieces. Even so, I was flabbergasted when it was recently drawn to my attention that I'd written a piece about Howard Hawks'

TT: Snapshot

Henri Matisse makes a cutout:



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

TT: Almanac

"The presence of death makes itself felt in the sadness of beauty."

Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious: Studies in the Psycho-Analysis of Art