Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
A scene from the second act of the original 1966 TV production of Paul Zindel’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, directed by Glenn Jordan and starring Eileen Heckart, Barbara Dana, and Elizabeth Berger. This performance was originally telecast as an episode of PBS’ New York Television Theatre on October 3, 1966:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Like the aerial bomber, the bureaucrat does not see his kill.”
Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945
From 2008:
My friend Rick Brookhiser recently posed this memeworthy notion: “It would make an exercise to say what are your least favorite works by artists you mostly, or sometimes, love.” So it would, and I’ve been thinking it over ever since. Here’s my Top (or Bottom) Five…
Read the whole thing here.
“You know growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.”
Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings
Glenn Miller’s big band performs “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, in Sun Valley Serenade, written by Robert Ellis and Helen Logan, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, and released in 1941. Also featured are Tex Beneke, the Modernaires, Dorothy Dandridge, the Nicholas Brothers, and Milton Berle. The musical portions of this sequence were originally recorded in multi-track stereo but released in mono. Paul Gilgannon has synchronized the surviving stereo soundtrack with the film, and this version is seen and heard here for the first time:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do.”
Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a rare revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth in Washington, D.C. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Theatre for a New Audience’s 2017 revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” was cause for rejoicing among a generation of New York playgoers who, like me, had never before had the opportunity to see a professional production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 tragicomedy about the history of the world. “The Skin of Our Teeth” calls for a huge ensemble of actors—40, according to the program for the Broadway premiere—which puts it out of reach of virtually all of today’s cash-strapped drama companies. That Theatre for a New Audience still managed to bring a first-rate version to the stage was a not-so-minor miracle, one I didn’t expect to see repeated any time soon.
Imagine my surprise, then, when Constellation Theatre Company, a scrappy but well-regarded troupe whose specialty is “epic stories in an intimate space,” announced that it was reviving Wilder’s play with a cast of 13 at Source, a 100-seat black-box theater in Washington, D.C. I knew at once that I had to go, and to say I wasn’t disappointed is the happiest of understatements. Constellation’s production isn’t perfect—it couldn’t have been, since big, baggy plays like “The Skin of Our Teeth” don’t lend themselves to gem-like stagings—but Mary Hall Surface’s high-spirited version is festive, imaginative, and completely involving.
The Antrobuses, on whom the action is centered, appear to be Wilder’s version of a middle-class sitcom-type family (husband, housewife, two cute kids and a sexy maid). Within a few minutes, though, we learn that they’re all 5,000 years old and that the the play begins in the Ice Age, after which we move forward in time with vertiginous speed, first to the Great Flood and then to World War II. What we have here, in short, is a parable, a symbolic tale of how humankind copes with disaster. But “The Skin of Our Teeth” is also a screwball tragedy, one in which events of the gravest import are portrayed with a farce-flavored lightness of touch.
Moreover, Wilder’s tragic vision, here as in “Our Town,” is fundamentally optimistic, though never naïvely so….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for The Skin of Our Teeth:
Cary Grant presents Noël Coward with a special Tony Award in 1970:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I do humor, not comedy. If I’m funny at all, I try to be slow funny. I tend to look at everything from the side, and I’m more interested in character than flash, because flash hits quick and leaves quick. It takes a little longer to know a character, but character builds and builds, and it’s funnier.”
James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files: A Memoir
The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
In this month’s episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I take a closer look at the problem of sexual harassment in American theater. Says the Three on the Aisle web page:
The hosts had discussed sexual harassment in theatre on our third episode, but driven by recent news, they circle back to the matter in this fifth installment. For Teachout, the firing of Long Wharf Theater artistic director Gordon Edelstein hit close to home: Edelstein had directed productions of Teachout’s play Satchmo at the Waldorf and was slated to direct it again at Houston’s Alley Theatre (which has problems of its own, with artistic director Gregory Boyd retiring abruptly days before allegations of harassment, sexual and otherwise, surfaced publicly). Marks, Teachout, and Vincentelli bring up interconnected issues, including the perennial lack of female directors and playwrights in the Alley’s slate; the need for proper channels to handle grievances; and whether it’s possible to continue admiring the art of a tainted man….
In the second segment, we discuss after-show talkbacks, which are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous part of the American theatrical experience (one of us dislikes them intensely, while the other two are generally pro-talkback). Then we wrap things up with a podcast-ending segment in which each of us talks about shows that we’ve seen and liked—or hated— in recent weeks.
To listen, download the fifth episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.
In case you missed any of the first four episodes, you’ll find them all here.