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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 21, 2006

TT: Death of a debutante

April 21, 2006 by Terry Teachout

It’s Friday! This week’s Wall Street Journal drama column contains my thoughts on three newly opened Broadway shows, Three Days of Rain, Awake and Sing!, and The Threepenny Opera:

“Three Days of Rain” is one of those trick plays in which (A) the members of the cast play two parts apiece, themselves and their parents, and (B) the action runs backward in time. In the second act, set in 1960, we meet Ned and Theo (Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper), a pair of budding young starchitects about to build their first house, and Lina (Julia Roberts), the Woman They Both Love. In the first act, set in 1995, we watch their grown children quarreling over who gets the now-famous Janeway House. This being a Richard Greenberg play, they all spend the evening foaming at the mouth with glib one-liners that aren’t half as clever as the author thinks (“My mother would be with us too, of course, but she’s, um, like, well, she’s sort of like Zelda Fitzgerald’s less stable sister”), while we spend it trying to guess which one of them will turn out to be gay.


Mr. Greenberg’s plays bore me silly, but they sure are popular: “Three Days of Rain” is the second of three to be produced in New York this season. This one puts Ms. Roberts on stage for the better part of two and a half hours, which is asking too much of someone who’s never done any live theater, much less a Broadway show. She’s not bad in the first act, in which she plays a haggard Boston matron with two kids and a dull husband, but as for the second…well, you can still see the smoke wafting upward from the crash site….


Seventy-one years ago this February, the Group Theatre, a preternaturally earnest ensemble of Stanislavsky-worshipping leftists, set up shop at the Belasco Theatre, where they presented a new play by an up-and-comer named Clifford Odets. On Monday “Awake and Sing!” returned to the Belasco in its first Broadway revival since 1984, just in time for the Odets centenary, in a flawed but sumptuously well-acted production whose defects do not conceal the play’s enduring excellence….


The Roundabout Theatre Company has just opened a production of “The Threepenny Opera” aimed at theatergoers who’d rather be seeing “Cabaret.” Alan Cumming, who played the emcee in the Roundabout’s much-admired 1998 revival of “Cabaret,” is back again, this time as Mack the Knife, the toughest thug in Soho, who has been magically transformed into a bisexual punk whose “girlfriends” include a drag queen (Brian Charles Rooney). Most of his colleagues are dressed in leather, and the d

TT: Almanac

April 21, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.”


John Updike, Self-Consciousness

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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