• 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 / 2008 / October / Archives for 17th

Archives for October 17, 2008

TT: Don’t shoot the playwright

October 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

I review three shows in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Two are on Broadway, All My Sons and To Be or Not to Be, and both are doubleplusungood. Not so the Cleveland Play House’s revival of Noises Off, which I liked enormously. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Everything that Arthur Miller was to become can be seen in embryo in “All My Sons,” his first hit, which ran for nine months on Broadway in 1947 and has now returned there in a revival graced–if that’s the word–by the presence of Katie Holmes. Earnest and hectoring, “All My Sons” is as much a secular sermon as a play, a school-of-Ibsen indictment of the moral emptiness of the American bourgeoisie, always a draw for guilt-wracked playgoers who enjoy being flagellated at $100 a pop. Unlike the plays that followed it, however, “All My Sons” is for the most part satisfyingly unpretentious, a next-to-no-nonsense wartime tragedy about a corrupt factory owner (John Lithgow) whose greed leads to the suicide of his soldier son, and it deserves better than this windy production, in which Simon McBurney commits first-degree directorial malpractice.
photo-cast.jpgMr. McBurney is the artistic director of Complicité, a British avant-garde theater troupe whose work I admire. Perhaps not surprisingly, he has used “All My Sons” as a vehicle for his multi-media prestidigitation: Newsreel-style rear projections, thunderous sound effects and spooky incidental music are seen and heard throughout the evening, while Tom Pye’s minimalist set looks as though it were designed for an opera by Philip Glass. But while this trickery might well have been impressive if deployed in the service of one of Complicité’s surreal spectacles, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the modest exercise in kitchen-sink naturalism that is “All My Sons,” and Miller’s script all but disappears under the weight of Mr. McBurney’s staging….
Like most of the pretty young screen things who have made Broadway debuts in recent seasons, Ms. Holmes is a creature of the camera who doesn’t know the first thing about stage acting. Anyone misguided enough to make her professional stage debut on Broadway opposite Mr. Lithgow and Ms. Wiest in an Arthur Miller play is, of course, asking for trouble, and Ms. Holmes gets it in spades….
Ernst Lubitsch never made a funnier movie than “To Be or Not to Be,” in which Jack Benny played a second-rate Polish actor who bamboozles the Nazis in spite of himself. Why, then, attempt to turn so well-made a work of cinematic art into a stage play? A musical, maybe, but Nick Whitby’s adaptation, which takes the script of the 1942 film and pumps it full of new punch lines and a semi-serious ending, makes no sense at all–not least because none of Mr. Whitby’s jokes is even slightly funny….
“Noises Off,” first seen on Broadway in 1983, consists of a rehearsal and two performances of “Nothing On,” a not-so-hot British sex comedy acted by a calamity-prone touring troupe. The gimmick of the show is that the set is turned around for the second act, allowing us to witness the disastrous backstage occurrences from the actors’ point of view. The result is a metafarce–a farce whose subject matter is farce itself. Neeedless to say, so complicated a conceit cannot possibly be made to work without pristinely immaculate craftsmanship, but “Noises Off” fills the bill. Once the nine doors of James Leonard Joy’s two-story set start slamming, the laughter starts swelling in a crescendo so protracted that it’s a wonder people don’t faint in the aisles from sheer exhaustion.
David H. Bell, the director of this production, is a specialist in musical comedy who doubles as a choreographer, which may help to explain the miraculous exactitude with which he has staged “Noises Off.” Every comic bomb goes off at the right split-second….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review here:

TT: Almanac

October 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“You critics are always writing about the meaning of music, the ethic, the Weltanschauung of the composer, and God knows what. The whole point of music is that it should sound well. Never mind what it signifies. Music should have wings and float and give delight.”
Sir Thomas Beecham (quoted in Neville Cardus, Autobiography

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

October 2008
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Sep   Nov »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Lookback: “Call me Bartleby”
  • Almanac: Thomas Fuller on memory
  • Just because: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays Ravel
  • Almanac: Jean Anouilh on beauty
  • The pandemic process

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