• 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 / September / Archives for 14th

Archives for September 14, 2007

TT: A showy Lear

September 14, 2007 by Terry Teachout

As promised, today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring productions of King Lear and The Seagull, now playing in Brooklyn, plus a report on the Theatre de la Jeune Leune production of Don Juan Giovanni, now playing at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre:

Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company have been barnstorming around the world all summer, performing “King Lear” and Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” as staged by Trevor Nunn, the man who brought us “Cats.” This month they’re in Brooklyn, and I saw both shows on consecutive nights earlier this week. One is good, the other near perfect–and I was surprised by which was which.
The buzz on “Lear” is true: The 68-year-old Mr. McKellen doffs his knickers in the storm scene, offering the audience a fully frontal view of his gray anatomy. The gratuitous gesture is all of a piece with the rest of this exciting but ill-sorted production, which wobbles between grand-manner melodrama (Lear’s Fool is hanged onstage just before the intermission) and scabby touches of directorial cuteness (a doddering Lear reads his first speech from a handful of three-by-five cards). I’m still trying to figure out the costumes, which looked like they’d been designed for the Siberia Light Opera Company’s production of “The Merry Widow.”
As Lear, Mr. McKellen is mannered and ranting until the storm scene, when he finds the center of the role and thereafter becomes compelling….
“The Seagull,” played by the same cast on the same unit set in a new English-language version prepared by Mr. Nunn in collaboration with the ensemble, is as consistent in tone as “Lear” is uncertain. Here everything is grippingly, unostentatiously right. Tone is everything in Chekhov’s sad comedies, peopled as they are by unfulfilled men and women whose melancholy plight is all the more affecting because it is so funny. In Mr. Nunn’s production, “The Seagull” is played decisively for laughs, and that’s the right call: If you take care of the comedy in Chekhov, the pathos will take care of itself. …
I saw Minneapolis’ Theatre de la Jeune Lune for the first time last fall and was entranced by its zany transformation of Molière’s “The Miser.” Now Dominique Serrand and Steven Epp are collaborating with the American Repertory Theatre on a pair of shows in which “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro” are similarly rethought and reworked….
Like Mr. Nunn’s “Lear,” “Don Juan Giovanni” is not above gratuitous shock effects–I saw no particular reason, for instance, why the Don’s manservant needed to relieve himself onstage–and I’m not sure how much sense the show will make to viewers unfamiliar with the original opera. But if you know your way around Mozart’s version, my guess is that you’ll be enthralled by what “Don Juan Giovanni” has to say about that most disturbing of masterpieces, and by the terrific flair with which it is said.

No free link, so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent arts coverage–on the spot. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

TT: No critics allowed

September 14, 2007 by Terry Teachout

I read a story in the Chicago Reader the other day (thanks for introducing me to this publication, OGIC!) that inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the question of whether the long-established custom of presenting theatrical previews–the pre-opening performances to which critics are not admitted–might be getting out of hand.
To find out more, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. I’m there. (Starting on Saturday, subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.)

TT: Almanac

September 14, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect that music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!”
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

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

September 2007
M T W T F S S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
« Aug   Oct »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • The pandemic process
  • Classics for free
  • Replay: Laurence Olivier in Uncle Vanya
  • Almanac: Chekhov on friendship between men and women
  • Almanac: Will and Ariel Durant on revolution

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