Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
I’m taking the train to Philadelphia first thing Friday morning for an art-related day trip. Believe it or not, I’ve never seen the Barnes Foundation, and I figured I’d better go now while it’s still there. Expect a report on Monday, unless I decide to write it on Tuesday.
Have a nice weekend–I plan to. Over to you, OGIC….
It’s Friday, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is a report on my travels to New Haven (where I saw Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties) and Chicago (where I saw Lost Land at Steppenwolf and Romeo and Juliet at Chicago Shakespeare Theater). Two out of three is pretty damn good:
Producer A hires overambitious movie star B to appear on stage in classic play C. Examples: Denzel Washington in “Julius Caesar,” Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in “The Glass Menagerie.” Intended result: long lines at the box office. Unintended consequence: a grade-Z show. It’s called “stunt casting,” and it’s almost always artistic bad news. On the other hand, it’s no stunt when a TV star who also happens to be a seasoned stage performer decides to spend the annual hiatus in his shooting schedule doing some real acting. Sam Waterston of “Law & Order,” for instance, is currently appearing in Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” and he’s as good as can be….
It’s never a stunt when John Malkovich acts with Steppenwolf. To be sure, Mr. Malkovich is the creepiest of all possible film villains, but he’s also a longtime Steppenwolf ensemble member who always comes back to Chicago sooner or later to tread the boards of his old company. At present, alas, he’s in Stephen Jeffreys’ “Lost Land,” an overstuffed historical drama that isn’t worthy of him, much less of Martha Lavey, the company’s artistic director, who has temporarily abandoned the front office to give an incisive performance….
The only star in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s “Romeo and Juliet” is the playwright, who has been admirably served by Mark Lamos, his loyal and imaginative director….
No link–but don’t despair. Not only do they sell the Journal at newsstands for one (1) dollar, but you can also go here and subscribe to the Journal‘s online edition. Whip out your credit card, click a few keys on your computer, and within seconds you’ll be reveling in all the cool stuff in the Weekend Journal section–starting with the unexpurgated text of my review. What’s not to like?
A friend writes:
“Good God almighty! That woman is a sewer!” Ayn Rand’s heavily (and disapprovingly) annotated copy of Mary McCarthy’s
essay volume The Humanist in the Bathtub, which includes
the above comment by Rand on McCarthy, is up for auction
at Butterfields along with a lot of other books from Rand’s
library.
The estimate is $3,000-$5,000. Go here to see for yourself. It’s a total hoot.
By the way, don’t you love reading the marginalia of famous people? Somebody really ought to put together an anthology….
(1) Learn French.
(2) Write a biography of Peter Drucker.
(3) Play bass in a piano-guitar-bass trio.
(4) Ride a tandem bicycle through Central Park on a beautiful spring day (with an appropriate person, of course).
(5) Join the Mile High Club.
(6) Take a trip on the American Orient Express.
(7) Take a helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon.
(8) Watch an opera from the prompter’s box.
(9) Walk on my hands without breaking anything important in the process.
(10) This.
O.K., eleven:
(11) Visit the Museo Morandi.
‘They went to the theater and afterwards she listened as charmingly as any girl ever had to his dissection of the play. She didn’t complain about his surgical cruelty, but seemed, if anything, excited by it. As a middle-class girl, she was used to understatement followed at once by qualification: the only passion in her family being a nonstop concern for people’s feelings. Her parents would have hesitated to criticize Mickey Mouse (you haven’t heard his side).”
Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison