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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for September 4, 2009

TT: Seeing Shakespeare plain

September 4, 2009 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I saw American Players Theatre perform Henry V and The Winter’s Tale. Both productions were exceptionally fine. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
APT is a major classical repertory theater lightly disguised as an outdoor summer festival, and it has grown even more important with the opening of a 200-seat indoor house located a few steps away from the 1,148-seat hilltop amphitheatre in which the company has been performing since 1979. For all the attention being paid to the new Touchstone Theatre–about which I’ll have more to say next week–the Up-the-Hill Theatre remains APT’s base of operations, and the productions of “Henry V” and “The Winter’s Tale” that I saw there last week are models of their kind, played on near-bare stages with a bracing vigor that makes you wonder why anybody would think of performing Shakespeare any other way.
I last saw “Henry V” in Central Park six summers ago in a production by Mark Wing-Davey that sought with limited success to transform Shakespeare’s gripping portrait of the battle of Agincourt and its aftermath into an over-the-top-and-down-with-Bush pacifist comedy. Not so APT’s version, staged with dashing directness by James Bohnen, the artistic director of Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre….
Robert Morgan’s Edwardian-style costumes for “The Winter’s Tale” are more ambitious than the ones designed by Fabio Toblini for “Henry V,” but the overall approach of the production, staged by David Frank, APT’s artistic director, is very much in the company’s house style: The cast is mostly young, the staging spare and pointed, the poetry central at all times to the total effect….
“Arguably, this is the leading classical theater in the Midwest,” says Chris Jones, my opposite number at the Chicago Tribune. I’d put it another way: American Players Theatre is to the Midwest what Shakespeare & Company is to New England, a troupe that sets high artistic standards and maintains them with effortless consistency.
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: The war that never ends

September 4, 2009 by Terry Teachout

inglourious-basterds-poster.jpgQuentin Tarantino has gone and made himself a war movie–and it looks like Inglourious Basterds is going to be a hit, judging by the first two weeks’ worth of box-office receipts. So why did the creator of Pulp Fiction choose World War II as his subject? For that matter, why is anybody still making World War II movies sixty-four years after V-J Day? What is it about the Good War that continues to set it apart from all other wars in the eyes of Hollywood? I’ve taken a shot at answering that question in my latest “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.
To be sure, Tarantino swears that Inglourious Basterds is really “a spaghetti western, but using World War II iconography as opposed to cowboy iconography.” Maybe that’s true–and maybe there’s more to that distinctive iconography than meets the eye. To find out what makes World War II so cinematically special, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

September 4, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

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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