Terry Teachout's Blog, page 90

GALLERY

Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets (Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth Ave., opens Saturday, up through June 14). Still going strong at 88, Freilicher was greatly loved by the poets of the New York School, in particular John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and this show explores her complex relationship with the writers who work she inspired. If you warm to the paintings of Bonnard--or Fairfield Porter--you won't want to miss "Painter Among Poets" (TT).

CD

Heifetz, Primrose, and Feuermann Play String Duos and Trios (Biddulph). Jascha Heifetz, who needs no introduction, made a fair number of chamber-music recordings in the Forties with Emanuel Feuermann, the greatest cellist who ever lived, and William Primrose, one of the greatest violists. This 1993 collection (out of print but easy to obtain) contains their dazzling 78 versions of Dohnanyi's C Major Serenade and Mozart's E Flat Divertimento, plus duos for violin and viola by Handel-Halvorsen and Mozart. No matter how long you live, you'll never hear finer string playing (TT).

NOVEL

Elmore Leonard, LaBrava . As a longtime fan of the much-admired crime novelist who hit the cable-TV jackpot with Justified , I not infrequently get asked which of Leonard's books to read first. I suggest this one, a 1983 thriller about a Secret Service agent turned fine-art photographer who relocates to Miami Beach and gets mixedup with a superannuated film-noir star who is clearly meant to remind you of Jane Greer . It's smart, dryly witty, soundly plotted, and immensely entertaining (TT).

PLAY

Talley's Folly (Roundabout/Laura Pels, 111 W. 46, closes May 12). An uncommonly fine revival of Lanford Wilson's most popular and (I think) best play, a lovely two-hander about a no-longer couple looking for love in what they fear may be the wrong place. Danny Burstein is predictably good, Sarah Paulson startlingly excellent, and Michael Wilson's staging is scrupulously and rewardingly attentive to the script (TT).

DAVID IVES: A CELEBRATION

" Twenty years ago a bill of one-act comedies by a nearly unknown playwright named David Ives opened off-Broadway. One-act plays are not often professionally staged in New York, and when they are, they rarely draw crowds. But Ives's All in the Timing ran for more than 600 performances. Part of what made its success so noteworthy was Ives's decidedly intellectual and complex brand of humor. Yet to this day, the plays are performed widely throughout the English-speaking world..."

TT: The who-cares test

In today's Wall Street Journal I have nothing very good to say about two new Broadway shows, Lucky Guy and Kinky Boots . Here's an excerpt.

* * *

If you lived in New York in the Nineties, you might remember Mike McAlary, a tabloid columnist who mostly wrote about the police and their activities. Back then he was something of a local celebrity, but today scarcely anybody not employed by a newspaper has heard of him, even though he won a Pulitzer Prize and published four books prior to his death in 1998.

So...would you pay a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play about McAlary? Especially if it wasn't any good?

The answer to this question is necessarily complicated by the fact that "Lucky Guy" stars Tom Hanks and was written by Nora Ephron, who died last year. But it's still slack and amateurish, and unless you have an all-consuming interest in what the newspaper business was like at the tail end of the 20th century, it's hard to see how "Lucky Guy" comes anywhere near passing the who-cares test.

The working title of "Lucky Guy" was "Stories About McAlary," which goes a long way toward explaining what went wrong with the final product. McAlary was the kind of by-any-means-necessary reporter who dragged his self-made legend behind him like a U-Haul, and Ms. Ephron has glued a dozen or so juicy anecdotes together in chronological order, unfortunately neglecting to dramatize them. Her characters spend more time talking to the audience than they do to each other, and everything they say is obvious...

In "Kinky Boots," Harvey Fierstein and Cyndi Lauper have concocted an imitation heart-warming British working-class musical with a gay angle and a maudlin finale. It is, I suppose, progress of a sort that we need no longer import such phony shows--we can now make them ourselves....

* * *

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"What a loathsome sub-species dramatic critics are."

P.G. Wodehouse, letter to Denis Mackaill, July 2, 1957

TT: Roger Ebert, R.I.P.

Wilfrid Sheed nailed Roger Ebert, intentionally or not, in Max Jamison, in which he spoke in passing of a movie critic who was "the kind of man who said, 'Whatever became of Anna May Wong?' and meant every word of it. He had the true-blue, twelve-year-old Captain Ranger heart of a veteran film reviewer."

Ebert, who died yesterday, was at bottom mainly interested in pop culture, something that I suspect is true of most people who write regularly about film, the ultimate mass medium. But he was genuinely responsive to high art as well, and if he was more a reviewer than a critic, he almost always had sensible things to say about the films that he saw. After you read his reviews, you knew pretty much what to expect if you went to see them for yourself, which is no small achievement.

He was, in short, the very best kind of middlebrow, an earnest enthusiast who took his work seriously. Though he never gave me the thrill of illumination that I get from reading Otis Ferguson or David Thomson or (sometimes) Pauline Kael, I rarely failed to profit from seeing what he had to say, and I profited in a diferent way from watching him die by inches in public, carrying himself to the very end with a courage and dignity that were admirable in every way. We should all be so brave when our time comes.

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, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Hands on a Hardbody (musical, G/PG-13, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 28, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Apr. 28, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

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

• The Revisionist (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 27, reviewed here)

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

• Women of Will (Shakespearean lecture-recital, G/PG-13, closes June 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• You Can't Take It With You (comedy, G, closes Apr. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Passion (musical, PG-13, closes Apr. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LOS ANGELES:

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, closes Apr. 14, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Belleville (drama, R, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

• Happy Birthday (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, performed in rotating repertory, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"The theatre owes us, the workers, nothing. It owes its audience stories and truth, and now we give it careerism and the very visible steps of our ascent. We need to once again ask to be made worthy of our arts and not demand our place within them."

Elia Kazan (interview with James Grissom, 1993, courtesy of Terry O'Brien )