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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 27, 2008

TT: Refreshment

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Look to the right and you’ll find (at last!) a fair amount of new content in the “Top Five” and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column, with still more on the way.
Enjoy.

BOOK

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Erin Hogan, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (University of Chicago, $20). A city-dwelling, solitude-hating connoisseur of modern art hops in her compact car, drives west in search of Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” and a half-dozen other pieces of monumental land art, and finds…herself. Even if (like me) you don’t have any use for minimalism, you’ll be charmed by Hogan’s wryly self-deprecating account of her desert pilgrimage, in the course of which she learned that being alone isn’t so bad after all (TT).

DANCE

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Pilobolus (Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave., June 30-July 26). Summer is here, meaning that Pilobolus Dance Theatre has set up shop in Chelsea for its annual month-long summer season of modern dance, gymnastics, head-twisting trompe-l’oeil effects, and (mostly) comic surrealism. Three mixed bills, one of which pairs Day Two, the company’s signature piece, with a new work designed by master puppeteer Basil Twist (TT).

[Read more…]

MUSICAL

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

She Loves Me (Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, Mass., closes July 12). Nicholas Martin’s Boston revival of the 1962 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical version of The Shop Around the Corner has transferred to the Williamstown Theatre Festival for a three-week run. Catch it if you can. She Loves Me is the most sweetly romantic musical imaginable, give or take The Fantasticks, and this lovely production does it full justice. Kate Baldwin is letter-perfect (right down to her high C) in the role created by Barbara Cook (TT).

FILM

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

The Trouble With Harry. Most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies are funny–that’s part of what makes them so jolting–but this one is a not-so-straight black comedy about a group of people in a small Vermont town who stumble across a corpse in the woods and can’t decide what to do with it. Shirley MacLaine made her screen debut in this 1955 film, and the rest of the ensemble cast includes such familiar faces as John Forsythe, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, and Jerry Mathers–yes, that Jerry Mathers. Eisenhower-era audiences didn’t buy the premise of John Michael Hayes’ screenplay, and even now The Trouble with Harry is probably the least well known of Hitchcock’s middle-period major-studio pictures. Might its fey, off-center humor make it ripe for revival today? See for yourself, and be sure to note Bernard Herrmann’s droll score (his first for Hitchcock) and the gorgeously autumnal cinematography of Robert Burks (TT).

CD

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 OKeh Recordings (Columbia/Legacy). Born in a tiny, isolated Mississippi town in 1892, Hurt taught himself how to pick the guitar in a smoothly syncopated style that had nothing to do with the rawer playing of the Delta bluesmen elsewhere in the state. OKeh cut thirteen solo sides of his singing and playing, after which he vanished into the shadows until he became the first of the Mississippi acoustic bluesmen to be rediscovered and re-recorded, not long before his death in 1966. The albums he made in old age for Vanguard circulated far more widely, but his easygoing, deliciously danceable 78s, reissued on CD in 1996, are even better (TT).

TT: Getting it right the first time

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted in its entirety to the last of my reports from Chicago, a review of Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Few theatrical debuts have been so startling as that of Shelagh Delaney, who wrote herself into the history of British drama with her very first play. Not only was “A Taste of Honey” a hit in London in 1959 and on Broadway a year later, but the equally successful 1961 film version is now considered to be a high point of what came to be known as the “New Wave” of British cinema. Not too shabby for a girl who was 19 years old when “A Taste of Honey” opened in the West End–but never again managed to write anything else of any consequence.
taste_small_v01.jpgThat Ms. Delaney was unable to follow up on the success of her first play undoubtedly explains why it is so much better known in England than in this country, where “A Taste of Honey” is rarely seen. The Roundabout Theatre Company brought it to Broadway in 1981 with Amanda Plummer in the lead, but I don’t know of any major productions since then, and I’d never seen the play performed until I made a trip to Chicago the other day to catch Shattered Globe Theatre’s revival. Though I’d heard good things about the company, I feared that “A Taste of Honey” would be as dated as the angry-young-man plays of John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. Not so: “A Taste of Honey” could have been written last week, and Shattered Globe’s marvelous staging has all the burning immediacy of a world premiere….
For American playgoers, “A Taste of Honey” will likely recall Clifford Odets’ “Awake and Sing,” another play about working-class urban life whose author had a pitch-perfect ear for the way plain people talk. Odets endowed the kitchen-table conversation of his Lower East Side characters with a sharp-toothed, strangely poetic quality. Ms. Delaney’s pungent dialogue has something of the same quality, only transposed into a different key: “Go and lay the table. Do something. Turn yourself into a bloody termite and crawl into the wall or something, but make yourself scarce.” But unlike Odets, she is unsentimental to the point of hardness, and at play’s end she leaves us in no doubt whatsoever that the rest of Jo’s life will be bleak and comfortless.
Helen Sadler, who plays Jo, is a find, an actress full of fire and wit who plays Jo with a gawky, angry energy that keeps you looking her way at all times. While everyone else in the ensemble is strong, my guess is that it’s Ms. Sadler whose performance you’ll be talking about on the way home. Jeremy Wechsler’s staging is as direct and unmannered as the play itself, and Kevin Hagan has designed a tenement set so seedy-looking that I briefly considered checking myself for fleas at intermission….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

June 27, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“In my walks I would fain return to my senses.”
Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

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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