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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 25, 2006

TT: (Sniffle)

August 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I’m still sick. Arrgh.


Have a nice weekend. One of us ought to.


P.S. Check out the new Top Fives. (I may be sick, but I’m not dead.)

TT: Yucked-up Brecht

August 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I wrote about two plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is Mother Courage and Her Children, directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Meryl Streep:

The New York stage has been infested by movie and TV stars this year, with wildly variable results: Ralph Fiennes was memorable, Julia Roberts and David Schwimmer memorably awful, while Cate Blanchett was a bit extreme but flamboyantly watchable. Now at bat is Meryl Streep, the star of the Public Theater’s outdoor production of “Mother Courage and Her Children.” Unlike Ms. Roberts, she knows her way around a theater, but her performance is a mess–though she’s probably not at fault….


Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece is set during the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought between 1618 and 1648. The Public, however, is performing it in a new “translation” (it’s really an adaptation) by Tony Kushner, who has put a thick coat of comic varnish on the blunt ironies of the original German text in order to make them more palatable to modern viewers. While some of his renderings are nicely pointed–he translates “Necessity knows no law” as “Necessity trumps the commandments”–the overall effect is too slick, and it doesn’t help that he’s littered the script with such anachronistic Americanisms as “It’s a go,” “Point taken” and “Butt out.”


I’m not opposed in principle to modernized versions of the classics, and Mr. Kushner’s gloss on “Mother Courage” might have been more effective in a less showbizzy staging, but Mr. Wolfe has glitzed it up to an enervatingly spectacular degree. I’m not exaggerating–this big-budget production contains fire, rain, snow, an onstage Jeep and flying by Foy, the “Peter Pan” people. Presumably Mr. Wolfe is also responsible, at least in part, for Ms. Streep’s bizarre decision to deliver her lines in the side-of-the-mouth manner of a take-my-wife-please comedian….

The second is the Berkshire Theatre Festival‘s revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles:

Like most of Wasserstein’s plays, “The Heidi Chronicles” is a soft-centered pseudosatire that pulls its punches, most of which are thrown at feminism, to which the play’s female characters subscribe unreservedly (if not unquestioningly) in spite of the fact that the play’s ostensible subject is the unhappiness it brings them. Instead of probing this apparent contradiction with the take-no-prisoners candor of the true satirist, Wasserstein settles for poking safe fun at such easy targets as consciousness-raising groups. As for the glib children of urban privilege with which “The Heidi Chronicles” is exclusively peopled, they all talk like escapees from the set of “Annie Hall” and appear never to have met anyone who disagreed with them about anything….

No free link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my review. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)

TT: Almanac

August 25, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“Very roughly, the drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion; what is left is theater. Drama is immensely durable; after a thousand critical disputes, it is still there, undiminished, ready for the next wranglers. Theater is magical and evanescent; examine it closely and it turns into tricks of lighting, or the grace of a particular gesture, or the tone of a voice–and these are not its substance, but the rubbish that is left when magic has departed. Theater is the response, the echo, which drama awakens within us when we see it on the stage.”


Robertson Davies, A Voice from the Attic

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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