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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Just an old-fashioned con man

August 31, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is half New York, half not. From East Haddam, Connecticut, I report on a rare revival of High Button Shoes by Goodspeed Musicals. Off Broadway, it’s Charles Mee’s Iphigenia 2.0. How’s that for an incongruous pairing? Anyway, here goes nothing:

Long before Phil Silvers was Sgt. Bilko, he was stopping the show as Harrison Floy, the old-time con man who is the star of “High Button Shoes,” one of the biggest musical-comedy hits of 1947. It ran for 727 performances, brought choreographer Jerome Robbins his first Tony–and then, like so many other well-received musicals, disappeared into the theatrical memory hole. Except for two numbers restaged by Robbins 42 years later for “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway,” “High Button Shoes” has never been revived in New York. Goodspeed Musicals, which regularly exhumes forgotten shows, put it on in 1982, but that appears to be the only time the show has been produced anywhere since its original Broadway run. Now Goodspeed is giving “High Button Shoes” a second outing at its handsome headquarters, an immaculately preserved 1876 opera house overlooking the Connecticut River. I drove up there the other day to satisfy my longstanding curiosity about a long-forgotten musical and discovered, to my delight, that “High Button Shoes” is not for antiquarians only….
I’m not in the habit of praising stridently political drama, but I know a good thing when I see one, and Charles Mee’s “Iphigenia 2.0,” a contemporary rewrite of Euripides’ “Iphigenia in Aulis” in which the audience is tacitly invited to reflect on the hubris and downfall of George W. Bush, is an avant-garde spectacular that is more than sufficiently exciting to overcome any objections you may have to onstage sermonizing.

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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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