• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2007 / May / Archives for 25th

Archives for May 25, 2007

TT: Less abundant lives

May 25, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I’ll be in and out of New York for much of the summer, and today’s Wall Street Journal drama column reflects my peregrinations. I went to New Haven to review Long Wharf Theatre’s Uncle Vanya after having seen the Irish Repertory Theatre revival of Gaslight in New York. I also paid my first visit to the Olney Theatre Center, a Maryland company that’s currently performing Georges Feydeau’s 13 Rue de l’Amour:

At the moment, the least frequently revived of Anton Chekhov’s four major plays seems to be “Uncle Vanya.” Long Wharf Theatre’s new version is the first important American production to have come to my attention since I started writing this column four years ago. Fortunately, it was worth the wait: Gordon Edelstein, the company’s artistic director, has given “Uncle Vanya” an exceptionally fine staging. Well cast, well designed, well lit and well translated, this lovely production conveys Chekhov’s special flavor with unostentatious grace….
“Uncle Vanya” has been translated and adapted many times, most recently by Brian Friel and David Mamet. Unfazed by precedent, Mr. Edelstein has done it over again in an attractively casual style that sits well on the tongue. Vanya’s searing last-act confession is a particularly choice example of Mr. Edelstein’s approach: “I dread each day. I want a different life. I want to wake up on a bright and beautiful morning and begin a new life, with my past gone like smoke.” His similarly plain-spoken staging keeps the play’s comic and tragic elements in perfect equipoise. The laughs come right on schedule–but so does the heartbreak….
Patrick Hamilton wrote plays and novels about very creepy people, most of which are better remembered as movies. “Gaslight,” the tale of a thoroughly nasty Victorian husband who tries to drive his terrified wife insane, opened on Broadway in 1941, ran for 1,295 performances and was then sold to Hollywood. Alas, George Cukor’s 1944 film version, which starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman, was so successful that Hamilton’s original play is now rarely performed save by amateurs and small regional companies. I didn’t see the Pearl Theatre Company’s 1999 Off Broadway revival, so I made a point of catching the Irish Repertory Theatre’s new production, which is, as usual with that superlative troupe, a knockout….
Now that so many affluent city dwellers are decamping for the suburbs and exurbs, who will keep them amused? The Olney Theatre Center, located more or less midway between Baltimore and Washington, is an ancient summer-stock house (it started life in 1938 as a roller rink) that used to be somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Then a suburb grew up around it, and the company retrofitted itself as a sprawlingly attractive three-stage complex that presents an ambitious year-round schedule of straight plays and musicals….

No free link. You can always buy a copy of today’s Journal at your neighborhood newsstand and look me up, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my drama column and other art-related stories. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

TT: Puff piece

May 25, 2007 by Terry Teachout

In this week’s “Sightings” column, published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I examine the decision of the Chicago City Council to ban public smoking in the Windy City, and its subsequent refusal to exempt actors appearing in plays whose scripts call for their characters to smoke. What effect will this ban have on theater in Chicago–and on the city’s artistic reputation elsewhere in America?
For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and turn to the “Pursuits” section.

TT: New leaves

May 25, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Yesterday’s new piece of music was Frank Bridge’s Piano Sonata, completed in 1924 and recorded for Continuum by Peter Jacobs in 1990.

TT: Almanac

May 25, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
G.K. Chesterton, “On Running After One’s Hat”

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

May 2007
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Apr   Jun »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Almanac: John Updike on bores
  • Snapshot: the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1962
  • Almanac: Saul Bellow on memory
  • Lookback: on the “realism” of TV
  • Almanac: Philip Roth on old age

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in