Terry Teachout's Blog, page 86

TT: Almanac

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers."

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

TT: Unsubscribe and be damned

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I report on a conversation I recently had with a stage director who blew the whistle on why regional-theater programming is growing less interesting. Here's an excerpt.

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Not long ago I spoke to the artistic director of a well-regarded theater company somewhere in America that's feeling the pinch. No names: I'll call her Ms. X for the sake of convenience, though "she" may or may not be a woman. In addition to running the company, Ms. X is a stage director of high seriousness, one whose work I've praised in the past. Yet her company is inching away from the kind of programming that led me to start reviewing its shows in the first place. I didn't ask why--we were talking about something else--but Ms. X volunteered an explanation, and though I wasn't taking notes, this is more or less what she said to me:

"I'm in the ticket-selling business. If I don't sell tickets, we shut down. We used to do it by selling subscriptions. That gave us money up front, and it also made it easier for me to do serious work, because people were buying a five-show package, and they trusted me to give them a well-chosen, wide-ranging package each year. We'd do a comedy, a new play or two, a classical revival, maybe a couple of modern classics. August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, that kind of thing. Sometimes they didn't like all five. Maybe they never did. But they still went home feeling like they'd gotten a balanced diet, they'd done their duty to theater. And that used to matter to people. It really did. They thought that seeing good shows made you a better person.

"Then the subscription model fell apart, for a lot of reasons. Some subscribers got too busy, or too old, to commit in advance to five shows on specific dates. Some of them couldn't afford to buy all five in one pop anymore. And young people never have gotten in the habit of subscribing to anything. On demand, that's their motto. Anyway, it all added up to the same thing: We had to start selling individual shows instead of a package. When that happened, everything changed. Instead of trusting us to give them something good, people started playing it safe, and we had to play safe with them. We didn't have any choice...."

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"The theater is the only branch of art much cared for by people of wealth; like canasta, it does away with the bother of talk after dinner."

Mary McCarthy, "Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue" (1950)

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)

• 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 June 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

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

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, closes May 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

TT: See me, hear me

If you're in or near the Kansas City area on Friday afternoon, I'll be giving a lecture at William Jewell College, my alma mater, at one p.m. The title is "From Critic to Creator: How a Drama Critic Changed Hats." I'll be speaking in Gano Memorial Chapel, on whose stage I gave my last public performances as an actor nearly four decades ago.

William Jewell College is located in Liberty, Missouri, just north of Kansas City. For more information about the lecture, which is open to the public, go here .

TT: Found poem

I'm currently fussing over the interior design of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. This morning I sent an e-mail to Emily Wunderlich of Gotham Books in which I explained where to place the illustrations, which will be interspersed throughout the text. Instead of using page numbers, which will not be set in stone until the entire book is set up in type, I identified the relevant paragraphs by quoting their opening words.

The resulting list amounts to a "found poem" about Ellington. I thought it might amuse you to see it.

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Ellington's surface qualities were exploited


None of it showed


J.E. was born in North Carolina


Another way in which Ellington enriched


Many of his superstitions centered on death


After wrapping up a two-week run


What they cannot show us is how the band


When it came to sex, though


"Raymond? He has perfect taste"


The band itself continued to perform


Unlike Strayhorn's break with Ellington


A Drum Is a Woman was to be a poetic allegory


Sargeant, a longtime admirer


President Nixon addressed the crowd


So he stayed on the road


From then on he made no secret

TT: Toward eternity

In today's Wall Street Journal I hail the opening of the Broadway revival of The Trip to Bountiful . Here's an excerpt.

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Horton Foote's "The Trip to Bountiful" is one of the half-dozen greatest American plays, yet its greatness has yet to be generally acknowledged. The reasons why aren't hard to grasp. Like all of Mr. Foote's plays, it's a soft-spoken character study, the tale of a tired old woman from Texas who hasn't seen her home town in 20 years, longs to do so once more before she dies and decides one day to go there. Nothing else happens, nor do the characters say anything especially memorable. They merely show you how ordinary people live their lives. The poetry--and "The Trip to Bountiful" is profoundly poetic--is between the lines. Yet no one with a receptive soul can fail to appreciate the play's myriad beauties, and Michael Wilson's new revival, in which Cicely Tyson returns to Broadway for the first time since 1983, is unforgettably excellent. I've never been more deeply moved by a theatrical production of any kind....

Ms. Tyson is, of course, the star of the show, but she never indulges in the kind of notice-me exaggeration to which "stars" too often stoop. Indeed, what is most striking about her performance is its total lack of sentimentality. She speaks her lines in a cracked, vinegary old-lady voice in which no trace of self-pity can be heard, trusting to Mr. Foote to do the rest. If you've ever felt the fear of watching an increasingly frail parent try to keep on living her life the way she always has...well, you'll feel it all over again as you watch Ms. Tyson on the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. That's the measure of the truth of her acting.

Part of what makes this production so fine is the unanimity with which Ms. Tyson's colleagues support her magnificent performance....

Most of the parts in this production of "The Trip to Bountiful," which takes place in Texas circa 1953, are played by black actors. "Non-traditional" casting, as it's known in the theater business, can be both gratuitous and distracting, but at its best it's capable of shedding fresh light on a familiar play. It works wonderfully well here, in part because it's never stressed....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Snapshot

Jack Paar interviews Mary McCarthy on The Jack Paar Show in 1963. The McCarthy segment starts nine minutes into the clip. Her segment is preceded by an interview with Milt Kamen:



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

TT: Almanac

"In violence, we forget who we are."

Mary McCarthy, "Characters in Fiction"

TT: At the atheists' ball

Once again The Wall Street Journal has given me two extra slots this week to report on the many shows that are currently opening on Broadway. Today I report on The Testament of Mary and Alan Cumming's Macbeth , neither of which did much for me. Here's an excerpt.

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If you're a lapsed Catholic, preferably Irish, who now believes that Christianity is the principal source of evil in the modern world, then I encourage you to see "The Testament of Mary," a modern-dress solo stage version of the 2012 novella by Colm Tóibín in which Jesus' mother (played by Fiona Shaw) proclaims to all and sundry that her son was (A) crazy and (B) not the Messiah. It's your kind of play, and then some. If, on the other hand, you're a Christian of the old-fashioned sort, you'll likely go home praying for fire, or at least a plague of locusts, to descend upon the Walter Kerr Theatre and its blasphemous occupants.

But what about everybody else? Assuming that you don't have a horse in this particular race, how does "The Testament of Mary" come across when considered not as an anti-religious statement but as a piece of pure drama? Perhaps not surprisingly, it proves to be predictable in the extreme. The members of the audience, whose unswerving secularity is comfortably taken for granted by Mr. Tóibín and his collaborators, are invited to snigger along with Mary at her son and his disciples, and snigger they do, over and over again....

Ms. Shaw is, of course, a great actor--I have deeply etched memories of the avant-garde "Medea" that she brought to Broadway in 2002--but she mostly settles for generalized mannerism in "The Testament of Mary," though her performance is both specific and memorable whenever she modulates out of the key of outrage and slips into something less obvious....

Alan Cumming's near-solo version of "Macbeth," which is set in an insane asylum, bears a number of palpable similarities to "The Testament of Mary." It, too, is a high-concept show about madness--Mr. Cumming plays a lunatic who seems to think that he's all of the characters in the play--accompanied by unending horror-show electronic music. Like Ms. Shaw, he spends the evening thrashing around the stage in a state of anguish, and he, too, strips to the buff and takes a bath in full view of the audience.

While I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Cumming, his high, reedy voice is a less-than-ideal instrument for the speaking of Shakespearean verse, especially when you're expected to listen to it for an hour and 40 minutes. Nor is his acting sufficiently varied in tone, involving though it is from moment to moment...

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Read the whole thing here .