About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new issue-driven New York shows, The Prom and Natural Shocks. Here’s an excerpt.

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In the wake of the midterm elections, the pollsters are telling us that America is growing even more politically polarized, and that we’re less willing than ever before to listen to those with whom we disagree. If that’s so, what effect will this heightened polarization have on the world of theater, a one-party state whose citizens usually vote for the most progressive candidate?

For my part, I expect to see fewer political plays whose purpose is to persuade the unsure, and more that seek instead to lift the spirits of true believers, rather in the manner of an old-fashioned revival meeting. Fortunately, there’s more than one way to stimulate the faithful. Witness “The Prom,” the new Broadway musical about what happens when Emma (Caitlin Kinnunen), a small-town lesbian, tries to take Alyssa (Isabelle McCalla), her closeted girlfriend, to the senior prom. The results are a bit sanctimonous in spots, but most of “The Prom” is really, really funny—and much of it, to my happy surprise, is funny at the expense of the good guys….

It starts out not in middle America but on Broadway, where Barry Glickman (Brooks Ashmanskas) and Dee Dee Allen (Beth Leavel), a pair of preposterously self-centered stage stars, have just gotten the worst reviews of their lives for a musical in which the critics blitz them for being “aging narcissists.” In order to change the narrative, they resolve to become celebrity activists, teaming up with two other actors suffering from mid-career crises (Angie Schworer and Christopher Sieber) and flying to Edgewater, Indiana, to lend a hand to Emma and Alyssa. Instead, they make matters worse by condescending to the natives…

Mr. Ashmanskas, who specializes in Paul Lynde-type parts, gives a performance that is not merely campy but affecting….

Would that there were anything half so surprising about “Natural Shocks,” the new one-woman play by Lauren Gunderson, whose work is popular throughout America but rarely seen in New York. I was much taken with Ms. Gunderson’s “The Book of Will,” which I saw last summer at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, but this time around she’s given us an all-too-predictable 70-minute monologue by a battered wife (Pascale Armand) whose husband collects guns. Like “The Prom,” “Natural Shocks” is an example of what I call the theater of concurrence, whose practitioners take for granted that their audiences agree with them about everything and thus assert instead of arguing…

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Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from The Prom:

Edward R. Murrow interviews Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis on Person to Person. This segment was originally telecast by CBS on July 2, 1954:

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

“It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”

T.S. Eliot (quoted in the New York Post, September 22, 1963)

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I report on “Callas in Concert: The Hologram Tour,” which I saw last week in Connecticut. Here’s an excerpt.

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Maria Callas gave a concert last week at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. That’s what the sign outside the hall said, anyway, even though the greatest operatic soprano of the 20th century has been dead since 1977. Nevertheless, she’s currently touring Europe, the U.S. and South America, with stops in more than a dozen additional cities between now and March, and if the turnout in Storrs was any indication, plenty of people are going to buy tickets.

Fine—but to what?

Yes, Callas is definitely dead, and no, that wasn’t her on stage at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts, singing arias by Bellini, Bizet, Gounod, Ponchielli, Puccini and Verdi (including the popular “Habañera” from “Carmen”) with a 60-piece orchestra conducted by Eímear Noone. Nevertheless, “Callas in Concert” really happened, and those who saw it got their first taste of a technology that has the potential to revolutionize the concert business.

The “Callas Hologram Tour,” as it’s subtitled, is produced by BASE Hologram, an entertainment company that has also sent the late Roy Orbison “on tour” and is planning to do the same with Amy Winehouse next year. Using a modernized version of a 19th-century “magic” technique called Pepper’s Ghost, a video of Callas is projected onto a transparent screen in such a way as to make it appear that she is standing at center stage, flanked by two groups of orchestral musicians. While her full-color image is not in fact a real hologram, it closely resembles one. The 3-D “Callas” is translucent: You can see the orchestra players through her white gown as she walks past them. Otherwise, she looks startlingly, even disorientingly like a living person lit by a tightly focused pinspot….

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Read the whole thing here.

A trailer for “Callas in Concert: The Hologram Tour”:

Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony perform the Grieg Piano Concerto in London in 1988. The solo part is performed by a reproducing piano that is playing back a pair of piano rolls of the concerto that were cut by Percy Grainger, one of its most noted exponents, in 1921:

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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, 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, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Lifespan of a Fact (comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 13, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The Waverly Gallery (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 27, some shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Girl from the North Country (jukebox musical, PG-13, closes Dec. 23, reviewed here)
• Mother of the Maid (drama, PG-13, closes Dec. 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, too conceptually complicated for small children, closes Nov. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Uncle Vanya (drama, G, not suitable for children, reviewed here)

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.”

W.H. Auden, “The Poet and the City”

Arthur Rubinstein plays Chopin’s A Flat Polonaise, Op. 53, on Producers’ Showcase: Festival of Music. He is introduced by Charles Laughton. The director was Kirk Browning. This performance was originally telecast by NBC on January 30, 1956:

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

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

From 2008:

When I was a teenager and first became aware of criticism as a profession, Clive Barnes was one of its very biggest names. Born in 1927, Barnes had come to this country in 1965 to work for the New York Times. Right from the start, he was the kind of writer who got written about, in part because he had two arrows in his critical quiver: he covered dance and, theater, and did so with self-evident relish. At some point it occurred to me that I, too, might want to write about more than one subject, and I have no doubt that Barnes’ example was part of what inspired me to do so….

Read the whole thing here.

“Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.”

Clive Barnes, “Stage: Sinister Comedy; ‘Love Your Crooked Neighbor’ Opens” (New York Times, December 30, 1969)