About Last Night

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I file the first of two reports from Ontario’s Shaw Festival. This week I discuss a rare North American revival of J.B. Priestley’s When We Are Married and a new production of George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Here’s an excerpt.

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When a popular playwright stops being performed, there’s usually a reason—though not always a good one. Take J.B. Priestley, whose comedies and dramas were immensely successful in England in the ‘30s and ‘40s and continue to be performed there with fair frequency, but are almost completely forgotten in the U.S. Indeed, Remy Bumppo Theatre Company’s galvanizing 2013 Chicago revival of “An Inspector Calls” was the first time I’d ever seen a live performance of a Priestley play. Now Canada’s Shaw Festival is mounting “When We Are Married,” his biggest hit, and it turns out to be a consummately crafted 1938 farce that’s as funny as anything by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart and even more stageworthy than “An Inspector Calls.” So why haven’t you heard of it?

The answer is two-fold. Not only is “When We Are Married” a “well-made” three-act play of the kind that went out of style in the ‘50s, but it requires, like the Kaufman-Hart comedies, a large cast—eight men, seven women—making it prohibitively hard for cash-strapped companies to mount. But it’s still well within the reach of community theaters and the bigger summer festivals, and the Shaw Festival’s production, staged with exhilaratingly exact comic timing by Joseph Ziegler and performed by the strongest ensemble cast I’ve seen so far this year, is ideal in every way.

“When We Are Married” is a farce about three long-married, impenetrably smug bourgeois couples who pride themselves on being “respectable folk” but discover midway through the first act—as do their cheeky servants—that they’re not quite as “respectable” as they supposed. All manner of humiliating hell immediately breaks loose…

You can always count on seeing the plays of George Bernard Shaw produced at the Shaw Festival with great skill and imagination. Morris Panych, who did a splendid job with Somerset Maugham’s “Our Betters” last summer, has done equally well and even more imaginatively by “Arms and the Man,” Shaw’s 1894 “anti-romantic comedy” (his phrase) about Captain Bluntschli (Graeme Somerville), a thoroughly cynical Swiss mercenary who falls in love with Raina (Kate Besworth), a fluttery young maiden from Bulgaria who believes, unlike her beau, that war is great and glorious….

Shaw’s purpose in writing “Arms and the Man” was to use his sharp wit to poke holes in the “heroic ideals” to which Raina naïvely subscribes. Accordingly, Mr. Panych has staged the play as a deliberately artificial comedy of manners, and he and Ken MacDonald, the set designer, have also had the ingenious conceit of setting the action inside a giant cuckoo clock…

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To read my review of When We Are Married, go here.

To read my review of Arms and the Man, go here.

“Personalities: J.B. Priestley,” a 1944 British Pathé newsreel feature:

“Britain at Bay,” a 1940 British war propaganda film written and narrated by J.B. Priestley and based on one of his BBC “Postscript” broadcast talks:

“He was not so anxious to prove himself right, as to be so.”

Anthony Trollope, The Warden

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:
• Bullets Over Broadway (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 24, reviewed here)
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, nearly all performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

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

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• The Liar (verse comedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 31, reviewed here)
• Othello (Shakespearean tragedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)
• Two Gentlemen of Verona (Shakespearean comedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, closes Aug, 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• When We Were Young and Unafraid (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• The Dance of Death (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:
• Juno (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Days Like Today (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:
• The Devil’s Disciple (serious comedy, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Of Mice and Men (drama, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

“It is easy to love one’s enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.”

Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage

P.G. Wodehouse, filmed and interviewed by the BBC at various times in the later part of his life. The final interview took place shortly before his death in 1975:

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

“Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

From 2004, why I don’t like to talk about the books I’m seen reading in restaurants:

Even as a child, my reading habits were fairly advanced, and I got kidded mercilessly for toting around such triple-decker novels as Moby-Dick and Les Miserables. The teasing of my peers had an aggressive edge (“Hey, man, Teachout reads the encyclopedia!”), whereas my elders were merely puzzled, but the net result was to make me self-conscious whenever anyone asked what I was reading. Nearly four decades later, that question still makes me tighten up a bit, fully expecting to be razzed, and though it rarely happens nowadays, the resulting exchanges nonetheless tend to leave me feeling like a lifetime member of the awkward squad….

Read the whole thing here.

“My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington

My late mother’s favorite actor, the charming and greatly loved star of Maverick and The Rockford Files, died on Saturday at the magnificent age of eighty-six. His Variety obituary reveals, among other admirable things, that he’d been married to the same woman since 1956. (Incidentally, they tied the knot sixteen days after they met.)

I admired Garner’s acting without reserve, and said so here in 2003. I also liked The Garner Files, his 2011 memoir, which I praised here. He didn’t make very many movies, preferring the small screen, but the finest of them are memorable, including The Americanization of Emily, The Great Escape, and Twilight, the last of which he contrived to steal right out from under Paul Newman and Gene Hackman. Best of all, though, was Burt Kennedy’s Support Your Local Sheriff, a splendidly witty 1969 spoof western that has aged much more gracefully than the now-dated Blazing Saddles.

I plan to watch one of them this week in honor of the passing of a consummate craftsman who gave pleasure to millions of fans, myself among them.

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To see a complete list of the answering-machine messages heard in the opening scenes of each episode of The Rockford Files, go here.

The theatrical trailer for Support Your Local Sheriff:

I finally got a chance last week to see Nancy Buirski’s Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq, a documentary about the American ballerina that aired a few months ago on PBS and is now available on DVD. It’s an extraordinarily fine piece of work, in large part because it contains more than enough film of Le Clercq performing on stage and in the studio to give the viewer a clear sense of her uniquely photogenic quality.

I wrote at length about Le Clercq in All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine:

Long-legged and long-necked to the point of gawkiness, with delicately chiseled features and a gamine smile, Tanaquil Le Clercq, known to all as “Tanny,” was a Balanchine ballet come to life. “Like a lean Giacometti, she reflected modern art,” wrote Allegra Kent, who danced with her in Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15. Born in 1929, she was the first great dancer to have studied exclusively at the School of American Ballet, and by the time she made her professional debut in The Four Temperaments, she was fully formed. Tallchief [Maria Tallchief, Balanchine's third wife] enviously described her as “a coltish creature who still had to grow into her long, spindly legs. Those legs went on forever—it seemed as if her body could barely sustain them. She had the long, willowy look of a fashion model, dressed stylishly in long skirts and sweaters, and had a lovely presence….Tanny didn’t have a formal education, yet she was articulate, witty, and chic.” A few of her performances were filmed, and in them one can see “the scissor legs, the vehement energy, the regal spine, the expansive upper body, the wit, the chic, the joy in movement” to which her friend Holly Brubach paid tribute after Le Clercq’s death in 2000. Jerome Robbins fell in love with her at first sight, and for a while they were all but inseparable. Balanchine teamed them to memorably comic effect in Bourrée Fantasque, while Robbins immediately began making dances of his own for her. “All the ballets I ever did for the company,” he later confessed, “it was always for Tanny.”

But Balanchine’s eye had already started to wander—as had Tallchief’s. They agreed to separate after the London season (their marriage was subsequently annulled), and no sooner did NYCB return to Manhattan than Balanchine began seeing Le Clercq in public. “I just love you to talk to, to go around with, play games, laugh like hell, etc.,” she told Robbins in a letter. “However, I’m in love with George. Maybe it’s a case of he got here first.” Devastated by what he saw as her betrayal, Robbins made The Cage, a chillingly angry portrait of a tribe of insect-women who kill the men with whom they mate. And though Tallchief remained the prima ballerina of New York City ballet for a few years more, it was Le Clercq for whom Balanchine made La Valse (1951, music by Ravel), a darkly unsettling vignette about a beautiful young girl who encounters a black-clad man at a party. He offers her a pair of black gloves into which the girl heedlessly plunges her hands. Then they waltz together with mad abandon until she collapses and dies.

La Valse ranks among Balanchine’s most strikingly personal creations, one with which Le Clercq would forever after be identified. But it was a bizarre present to offer his latest muse, whom he married at the end of 1952: a ballet in which he envisioned her premature death. What happened to her in real life would be immeasurably more shocking….

Le Clercq contracted polio in 1956, when she was just twenty-six years old. She was one of the last people in America to develop that dread disease before Jonas Salk’s vaccine made it a thing of the past. It left her paralyzed from the waist down, and she never danced again. At first Balanchine nursed her devotedly, but in due course he began to see other women, and eventually he divorced her to pursue Suzanne Farrell.

It isn’t unusual for great artists—and Tanaquil Le Clercq was a very great artist, the foremost American classical dancer of her generation—to die young. What makes her story so intensely poignant is that unlike Mozart or Keats or Robert Johnson, she lived on after tragedy struck her. A beautiful, determined woman of wit and intelligence, she managed to make an independent life for herself, and was much loved by the many friends who talk about her in Afternoon of a Faun. But there was no getting around the terrible fact that she had been deprived in youth both of her occupation, at which she was supremely gifted, and the love of her life, to whom she had been passionately devoted. I find that more haunting than I can possibly say.

In a way, it is scarcely less tragic that Le Clercq was forced to stop dancing when she did. The great dance boom of the Sixties was only a few short years away, and the next generation of Balanchine dancers, Farrell most prominent among them, would have the opportunity to appear in films and telecasts that allow later generations to see for themselves why they were so greatly admired. Not so Le Clercq, who can only be seen in a handful of kinescopes, of which this one, a 1956 CBC telecast of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco that was released on DVD earlier this year, suggests what she was and why it mattered. So, too, does Afternoon of a Faun, which is one of the saddest and most beautiful documentaries I know.

I was born in the year that Le Clercq stopped dancing, and I never met her. But not long before she died in 2000, I happened to see her sitting in her wheelchair on the promenade of the New York State Theater, mere paces away from an enlarged photo on the wall that showed her dancing gaily with Robbins in Bourrée Fantasque. With her white hair and pale, wrinkled skin, she looked like a chic ghost. A few months later I attended her memorial service, and felt, like everyone else who came to the State Theater that dark day, that I had somehow lost a friend.

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Tanaquil Le Clercq and Nicholas Magallanes dance together in excerpts from Balanchine’s La Valse. This archival silent film is accompanied by a post-synchronized music track consisting of a piano arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s score:

The trailer for Afternoon of a Faun: