About Last Night

In my two drama columns for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a pair of regional revivals, Walnut Street Theatre’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in Philadelphia and Shakespeare & Company’s God of Carnage in Lenox, Massachusetts. Here are excerpts from both reviews.

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Fifty-five years after it opened on Broadway, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” remains the funniest musical ever written. The Larry Gelbart-Burt Shevelove book about hanky-panky in ancient Rome is so well wrought that it could almost be successfully performed without Stephen Sondheim’s score, though Mr. Sondheim’s elegantly turned songs add immeasurably to the total effect. In addition, “A Funny Thing Happened” is also a time capsule, a vade mecum of baggy-pants vaudeville comedy elevated to the highest possible level of theatricality. It’s possible to put a fresh spin on the show, as Jessica Stone did in her wonderful 2015 all-male Two River Theater revival, but it isn’t necessary, and there’s much to be said for doing it the old-fashioned way, so long as you have a cast and director who speak the all-but-lost language of Catskills-style kill-or-be-killed comedy—which is where Frank Ferrante comes in.

Mr. Ferrante, the director and star of Walnut Street Theatre’s revival of “A Funny Thing Happened,” got his start playing Groucho Marx in a 1986 off-Broadway revue written by Arthur, Groucho’s son. Though he’s only 54, he looks and sounds just like the kind of comedian you might have seen working at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel three-quarters of a century ago. Every time he opens his mouth and spits out punch lines, you can smell the cigar smoke halfway up the aisle. Mr. Ferrante plays Pseudolus, the scheming Roman slave whose role was created on Broadway by Zero Mostel, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job.

Not only is Mr. Ferrante a marvelous performer, but he’s also staged “A Funny Thing Happened” with explosive comic punch…

“God of Carnage,” Yasmina Reza’s comedy of bad manners about two New York couples whose children get into a bloody playground fight, has been making the regional rounds ever since the Broadway production closed in 2010. It’s easy to see why: Who wouldn’t want to do a tightly written, ferociously funny hit that calls for only four actors and one simple living-room set? I’d been wondering, though, how well Ms. Reza’s clever variation on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was holding up after seven years of hard use, so when Shakespeare & Company announced that it would be performing “God of Carnage,” I decided to go see for myself. I’m immensely pleased to report that Regge Life’s staging, performed in the company’s 186-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, is terrifically potent, and that the play itself, which skewers with lip-smacking gusto our collective pretensions of middle-class gentility, appears not to have aged a whit….

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To read my review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, go here.

To read my review of God of Carnage, go here.

Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony in a live performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, originally telecast by the BBC on November 27, 1966:

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

“In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence. What are your views? When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head. Greater than Charles [Dickens]; greater than Walter [Scott]—with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”

Rudyard Kipling, letter to C.R.L. Fletcher (April 10, 1915)

In this week’s “Sightings” column, which appeas in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I take a look at Edward Albee’s art collection, which is being auctioned off next week. Here’s an excerpt.

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If art is important to you, then you’ll probably have succumbed at one time or another to the comforting illusion that good taste is a virtue. No such luck. Not only has it been proved that listening to Mozart doesn’t really make you smarter, but the history books are full of bad men to whom the fine arts were vitally important (Adolf Hitler loved the operas of Wagner) and great ones to whom they meant nothing (Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song was “Home on the Range”).

In fact, genuine aesthetic taste isn’t a proxy for anything else, virtue least of all. In part it’s an expression of personality, but not a simple or obvious one, and it has a way of popping up in unexpected places. I recently read an airline-magazine interview with George W. Bush, who became an amateur artist after leaving the White House and who recently published “Portraits of Courage,” a folio of his paintings of U.S. veterans. “Now that you paint—and go to museums—who are you in awe of?” the interviewer asked. He immediately cited four modern artists, Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper, David Hockney and Fairfield Porter. Nobody focus-grouped that reply…

A few days after I read that interview, Sotheby’s announced that it is auctioning off a hundred-odd pieces from the art collection of Edward Albee. Unlike President Bush, the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was well known for his love of modern art, and his success as a playwright allowed him to do something about it. Mr. Albee’s collection, which is currently on view in Manhattan and goes on the block Sept. 26, is expected to bring in between $8 million and $12 million, all of which will benefit the Edward F. Albee Foundation, which funds residencies for artists and writers. That’s a tidy sum for a man who wrote plays in which the American dream is portrayed as a snare and a delusion.

I’m not here, however, to tease Mr. Albee’s ghost (well, maybe just a little). I’m more interested in this question: What, if anything, can we learn about him from the art that he hung on his walls?…

One thing that’s clear is that the collection, like President Bush’s top-four list, reflects its owner’s taste, not that of a high-priced art consultant. Rather than “buying signatures” or hewing to the dictates of fashion, Mr. Albee collected artists who were respected but comparatively little known to the public at large….

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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.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all 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)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, many shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)
• The Madness of George III (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Cyrano de Bergerac (verse drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)
• A Flea in Her Ear (farce, PG-13/R, closes Oct. 7, reviewed here)
• The Maids (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MADISON, N.J.:
• What the Butler Saw (farce, R, closes Oct. 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING WEDNESDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

“In life, there is no end to getting well.”

Cary Grant (quoted in Becoming Cary Grant)

Dana Andrews appears as the guest on I’ve Got a Secret, originally telecast by CBS on June 4, 1958. Garry Moore is the host and the panelists are Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Henry Morgan, and Betsy Palmer:

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

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (trans. Donald A. Yates)

From 2004:

I can’t count the hours I spent haunting big-city libraries as a young man. During the decade I spent working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken I had access to the closed stacks of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and I checked out books by the bagful.

Alas, I no longer go to Baltimore each week, nor do I have access to the stacks of a university library, and the branch of the New York Public Library located in my neighborhood is roughly the size of the one in Smalltown, U.S.A., on which I cut my teeth forty years ago. When I need information, I now look first to the Web, then to my personal library, which is small but choice. Should those alternatives fail to satisfy me, I walk two blocks to a very large Barnes & Noble and explore its shelves. If that doesn’t do it, I do without, or order a used copy of the book in question from amazon.com.

I wonder how common my experience is….

Read the whole thing here.

“The critics of each generation confine themselves to maintaining the direct opposite of the truths admitted by their predecessors.”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way