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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: The little musical that should

March 23, 2012 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I join the chorus of critical praise for the Broadway transfer of Once, followed by a few short, sharp words about Jesus Christ Superstar. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
The deck is stacked against “Once.” Though the posters call it a musical, this starless stage version of the 2006 indie-flick sleeper is actually a play with songs, and it has moved from a 198-seat downtown performance space to a 1,078-seat Broadway house. That’s way too big for a plot-driven single-set show whose appeal is rooted in its directness and charm. To do “Once” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is like doing “The Fantasticks” in Madison Square Garden.
ONCE%20PHOTO.jpgNever mind all that. Go anyway.
“Once” is the most touching new musical to come to Broadway since “The Light in the Piazza” opened there in 2005, and it deserves to be a hit. Sure, it belongs Off Broadway, but if you don’t see it now, you won’t get to see Cristin Milioti, who is giving the kind of performance that in a just world would do for her what “Venus in Fur” did for Nina Arianda. What she does in “Once” would be worth seeing even if the show were less good than it is….
Ms. Milioti, who made a splash two years ago in the U.S. premiere of Polly Stenham’s “That Face,” is something else again, a slight, huge-eyed young woman who grabs and holds your attention from the moment she walks on the stage. While nothing she does is exaggerated, she somehow gives the impression of standing in an invisible spotlight, which is a pretty fair working definition of star quality. Her singing is fragile but fetching, her Czech accent completely convincing, and she’s even a halfway decent piano player….
“Jesus Christ Superstar,” in which Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice set the Passion to ersatz rock and roll, has one thing in common with “Once”: It’s not a musical. Billed as a “rock opera” when it was first recorded in 1970, it’s really, like the Who’s “Tommy,” an oratorio, an evening-long sequence of musical numbers with no connecting dialogue or recitative. To stage it is thus an exercise in dramatic futility, and since the songs are synthetic Top-40 gimcracks that already sounded dated when they were new, the only way to make “Jesus Christ Superstar” “work” in the theater is to hose on the gloss, shovel on the glitz and buff until banal, which is just what Des McAnuff, the director of the new Broadway revival, has done….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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