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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 2, 2009

TT: It won’t play in Peoria

October 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

n652497192_6408.jpgMuch has been written about Roman Polanski since his arrest in Zurich last week, but one aspect of the story that has struck me forcibly in the last couple of days is the widening fissure between Hollywood celebrities, most of whom have lined up more or less solidly behind Polanski, and the public at large, which appears unwilling to cut him any slack at all. Moreover, a growing number of decidedly unusual subjects, including Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, are choosing to break cultural ranks and condemn Polanski.
What triggered this split, and what is its significance? I’ll be talking about these questions–and supplying a bit of historical perspective–in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

TT: Serious entertainment, Chicago-style

October 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

I’m back on Broadway after a long absence, but you wouldn’t know it by this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I rave (albeit with some judicious reservations) about two new plays, A Steady Rain and Superior Donuts, that both originated in Chicago. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
tn-500_donuts31.jpgChicago has come to Broadway–with a great big bang. Two new plays by Chicago-based writers, Keith Huff’s “A Steady Rain” and Tracy Letts’ “Superior Donuts,” opened across the street from one another this week. Not only are both shows set to become box-office hits, but both are characteristic of Chicagoland theater at its gritty, no-nonsense best. The difference is that while “Superior Donuts” is a straight Chicago-to-New-York transfer of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, “A Steady Rain” is a made-for-Broadway remounting that features two movie stars, Daniel Craig (“Casino Royale”) and Hugh Jackman (“X-Men”), whose real-life accents are unmistakably un-American.
Why does this matter? Because Messrs. Craig and Jackman are playing a pair of beat cops from the south side of Chicago, the first slightly bent and the second crooked as a twice-bought pol, who talk the spiky talk of the streets where they grew up (“I known the guy since kinnygarten”). In a two-man play, especially one written by a sharp-eared Chicago author whose father-in-law and brother-in-law were policemen, American audiences have a right to expect the actors to sound like the characters they’re playing. Mr. Craig, a British actor with classical training and a wide variety of stage experience, manages this tricky task with cool aplomb, tunnelling so far inside his part that it’s easy to forget who’s playing it. Mr. Jackman does his damnedest to keep up, but Australian vowels occasionally peep through the nasal snarl of his ersatz Chicago accent, and though he gives a strong, satisfying performance, you’re always aware that it is a performance.
Not that this diminishes the gut-level impact of “A Steady Rain,” an irresistibly forceful exercise in noir-style tandem storytelling in which the hushed audience watches Mr. Jackman’s character hurtle headlong toward the abyss of self-destruction…
If “A Steady Rain” is the theatrical equivalent of a Scott Turow novel, then “Superior Donuts” is “You Can’t Take It With You” rewritten by David Mamet, a dark comedy about a workplace “family” of charmingly wacky characters who suddenly find themselves caught in the deadly undertow of reality. The setting is a rundown six-stool donut shop in uptown Chicago whose proprietor, Arthur Przybyszewski (played to perfection by Michael McKean), is a burnt-out hippie whose hard shell of cynicism is cracked open by a young black man (Jon Michael Hill) who fast-talks his way into a job behind the counter. Much of what happens thereafter is obvious, but not all–the audience at the preview I saw gasped twice, both times loudly, at a surprising plot twist–and Mr. Letts, who is best known on Broadway as the author of “August: Osage County,” takes scrupulous care to balance laughter and sorrow in exactly the right proportions….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

October 2, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Indefinitiveness is an element of true music–I mean of true musical expression. Give to it any undue decision–imbue it with any very determinate tone–and you deprive it, at once, of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential character. You dispel its luxury of dream. You dissolve the atmosphere of the mystic upon which it floats.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia

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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