About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway repertory productions of two plays by August Strindberg. Here’s an excerpt.

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In “Tootsie,” Michael Dorsey, who can’t get cast as an actor because of his well-deserved reputation for being aggressively earnest and impossible to work with, swears to his skeptical agent that he’s “in this business to make money.” The agent’s reply: “Really? The Harlem Theatre for the Blind? Strindberg in the Park?” To get the joke, you have to know that August Strindberg, Sweden’s greatest playwright, has an equally well-deserved reputation of his own for being depressing beyond belief. That’s the main reason why professional productions of Strindberg’s 60-odd plays, written between 1869 and 1909, are rare to the point of nonexistence in this country—I’ve reviewed two in the past 16 years—and why Classic Stage Company’s decision to mount his two best-known plays in repertory is important by definition. Neither staging is ideal, but both are effective, and if you haven’t seen much of his work, this is an admirable way to get your card punched.

“The Dance of Death,” the only one of Strindberg’s plays that gets done with any frequency in the U.S., is being performed in Conor McPherson’s 2012 version, a small-scale modern-English adaptation of the first half of the play from which three characters have been excised, thus making it much easier (and less costly) to stage. In addition to cutting “The Dance of Death” in half, Mr. McPherson has sharpened its humor to the point where it plays almost like a comedy, albeit one of a peculiarly acrid sort, the kind in which a long-married couple (Cassie Beck and Richard Topol) spend an evening slashing away at one another with vicious glee…

Victoria Clark, the director, is better known as one of the top musical-comedy singers in town. She has staged “The Dance of Death” in the round, italicizing its comic moments, and David L. Arsenault’s set and Tricia Barsamian’s costumes keep the production solidly rooted in the 19^thcentury (the play was first performed in 1901). The performances are generally good…

I can’t quite say the same about “Mies Julie,” though not because of any inadequacies in the production, which is directed by Shariffa Ali with stingingly harsh vigor and acted with like impact by a cast led by Elise Kibler (who looks like she wandered in from a Tennessee Williams revival in which she played a naughty girl) and James Udom. The problem here is Yaël Farber’s 2012 adaptation of “Miss Julie,” which transplants Strindberg’s 1888 play to modern-day South Africa and covers it with a foot-thick frosting of up-to-the-second racial politics.

It’s not that you won’t get the point: Both versions tell the story of a young woman who lusts after one of her servants and is devastated by her desire. The catch is that “Miss Julie,” which was last seen in its original form on Broadway in 1962 (in Swedish, no less!), will likely be almost entirely unfamiliar to most of those who see this production….

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Read the whole thing here.

The John Wilson Orchestra plays a medley of cues composed by Scott Bradley for MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, performed live at the 2013 BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall. The cartoons from which these cues were drawn are “Smitten Kitten,” “Sufferin’ Cats,” “The Framed Cat,” “Cat Fishin’,” “Just Ducky,” “Jerry and Jumbo,” “The Cat Comes to Dinner,” and “Mouse for Sale”:

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

“Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith.”

G.K. Chesterton, Where All Roads Lead

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I look at an important new tendency in charitable giving. Here’s an excerpt.

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New York’s Museum of Modern Art closes for renovations in June. When the museum reopens on Oct. 21, it will have 30% more gallery space. The price tag for the expansion is $450 million, more than $200 million of which comes from the estate of David Rockefeller, MoMA’s most open-handed donor, who died in 2017 at the age of 101. To be sure, $200 million is chump change in the fantasyland of pop culture. (It cost $316 million to make “Avengers: Infinity War.”) But when it comes to the fine arts, that’s very serious money—the biggest single donation that MoMA has ever received.

From coast to coast, our national landscape is dotted with fine-arts institutions that exist because of people like Rockefeller….

Unfortunately, big-ticket philanthropy is in the middle of a protracted sea change that is already having a direct effect on the arts. Thirteen years ago, the Journal reported that younger new-money donors were increasingly choosing to give it not to fine-arts organizations but to humanitarian causes like AIDS research and education reform. In 2013, Bill Gates put his seal of moral approval on this new tendency by declaring in an interview with the Financial Times that donating money “to build a new wing for a museum rather than spend it on preventing illnesses that can lead to blindness” was, in his words, “slightly barbaric.”

When I wrote about Mr. Gates’ remarks in this space, I observed that I had yet to hear “any groundswell of support among the rich for Mr. Gates’ rigidly utilitarian view of charity.” Apparently I was a little tone-deaf. Nowadays, everybody in the arts is taking nervous note of what the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance described with alarm in a 2018 report called “Beyond the Check: A Roadmap for Engaging Individual Donors.” According to the GPCA, “younger donors” are “shifting away from arts and culture in their philanthropy.” Moreover, studies show that they’re less likely to make big-ticket gifts to any charitable cause—and when they do, such gifts are rarely arts-related….

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Read the whole thing here.

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.

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ON BROADWAY:

• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, closing Apr. 7, reviewed here)

• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Ferryman (drama, PG-13, Broadway transfer of London production, reviewed here)

• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Prom (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• True West (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 17, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

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IN PROVIDENCE, R.I.:

• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 3, reviewed here)

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CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Ah, Wilderness! (comedy, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

“Meg had spent the time in working as well as waiting, growing womanly in character, wise in housewifery arts, and prettier than ever; for love is a great beautifier.”

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, David Niven. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on October 21, 1956. At this time, Bishop Sheen was appearing on ABC in a highly rated weekly TV series called Life Is Worth Living:

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

“For the majority of English people there are only two religions, Roman Catholic, which is wrong, and the rest, which don’t matter.”

Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget

From 2009:

Many years ago I worked as a teller in a downtown Kansas City bank, a job that allowed me to pay the rent while simultaneously playing jazz and writing concert reviews for the Kansas City Star on the side. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that for some inexplicable reason, the people whom I knew in my “real” life as a writer and musician almost never came into the bank to do business. Had they done so, it would have broken my heart….

Read the whole thing here.

“It requires moral courage to grieve; it requires religious courage to rejoice.”

Søren Kierkegaard, journal entry, July 19, 1840