• 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 / 2009 / October / Archives for 9th

Archives for October 9, 2009

BOOK

October 9, 2009 by Terry Teachout

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, $15.95 paper). What was England like in the chilly, near-penniless days after World War II? Most of us only know “austerity Britain” from its wry, distanced portrayals in the Ealing comedies, but David Kynaston has now given us a complex and persuasive portrait of life under postwar British socialism, a masterly piece of social history that succeeds in giving the American reader a clear understanding of how the English people responded to the daunting challenge of getting by on not nearly enough. Wholly engrossing, no matter what your political point of view may be (TT).

TT: Little black Hamlet

October 9, 2009 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new Broadway shows that are already drawing large audiences, Jude Law’s Hamlet and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of The Royal Family. I had sharply mixed feelings about both shows. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Few Broadway producers would dream of putting cash into a homegrown Shakespeare staging: They’d rather buy British, and they won’t even do that without a Hollywood-issued flop-insurance policy.
6a00c2251ea318549d01101854a993860f-500pi.jpgSo what are the backers of Mr. Law’s “Hamlet” getting for their money? A perfectly respectable, perfectly predictable modern-dress version whose been-there-seen-this minimalist décor, created by Christopher Oram, is the theatrical equivalent of a little black dress: Everybody has one and they all look alike. The whole cast, in fact, is dressed in black (except for Ophelia, who is black). Black leather jackets, black pea jackets, black shirts and ties…you get the idea. The set is an abstract castle whose sole ornament is a pair of proscenium-high doors that slide open and shut at frequent intervals, much like the elevators in a high-rise office building, and the mist-filled stage is illuminated by narrow shafts of chilly bluish-white light.
It would be inordinately difficult to make anything surprising happen in this enervatingly familiar space. Michael Grandage, who directed the Donmar Warehouse premiere of “Frost/Nixon” that came to Broadway two years ago, barely even tries….
Mr. Law, a well-trained actor with extensive stage experience, gives a performance that struck me as a polished first draft…
George S. Kaufman was the Neil Simon of his day, a commercial craftsman whose comedies used to be immensely popular but are now mostly forgotten, “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “You Can’t Take It With You” excepted. The Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of “The Royal Family,” written in 1927 by Kaufman and Edna Ferber, the authoress of such blockbuster novels as “Show Boat” and “Giant,” is only the third Kaufman revival to open on Broadway in the past quarter-century. Why are his plays seen so rarely? Partly because they call for big casts–it takes 16 actors to perform “The Royal Family”–but mostly because contemporary audiences suckled on TV expect stage comedies to move faster than they did in the ’20s and ’30s. The Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of “The Royal Family” runs for two hours and 45 minutes, and by the time the third act (yes, there’s a third act) got going, I felt like the lady sitting a couple of rows behind me who cried “My God, this is a long play!” louder than she realized….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

October 9, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“The affirmative of affirmatives is love.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Success”

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 2009
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« 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