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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 26, 2009

OGIC: The ghosts have it

October 26, 2009 by cfrye

The terrific star of Chicago Shakespeare’s new Richard III, Wallace Acton, took a little getting used to in the role for me. He plays it with a pinched, mannered quality that goes against the tide of recent performances I’ve seen in which our hunchbacked schemer boasts a measure of treacherous sex appeal, gimping around with a certain swagger. Not this Richard (though his movement is remarkable, especially a tortured, twisting jump onto a table). Acton and director Barbara Gaines play Richard’s repellency straight and pure–it’s mitigated only by his silver tongue, and the effect is to magnify the power and charms of that language and rhetoric.
Their commitment to an unappealing Richard has dramatic payoffs too. When Anne is seduced and Elizabeth coerced by him–the “true love’s kiss” he commands her to bear to her daughter in Act 4, Scene 4 is forced on Elizabeth, at length–visceral shudders at the violation ripple through the audience. When Richard appears publicly as king, a couple of bludgeon-wielding heavies silently daring the townspeople not to acclaim him, some of the playgoers comply with halting applause.
In the playbill, Gaines says it struck her, rereading the play, “how every major character has a feeling, an intuition, that they then repress.” When the repressed returns, she and the scenic and special effects designers spare little in rolling out the red carpet for it. They have surprises in store that I won’t ruin here, but that make the final battle as riveting as possible, with an unexpected layer of complexity. I don’t know enough about the history of the play’s production to say whether the ghosts of Richard’s victims have ever made such an affecting and harrowing return, or whether they’ve played such a decisive role in how the last act unfolds. But they’re unforgettable in this production, a terror and a true moral center.
Richard III runs through November 22. The cast is great and the staging is sharp, juxtaposing period costumes with the occasional appearance of selected modern objects: a steel gurney, a plastic bag, all the most menacing props. There are small details to savor for their emotional resonance, for instance the widowed Queen Margaret’s entrance in a gown that’s a rotting version of the same one Queen Elizabeth is wearing.
If you’re in Chicago or can get here, don’t miss it.

TT: See (and hear) it now

October 26, 2009 by Terry Teachout

You can now see four video clips from The Letter by going here. Do so.

TT: Unique selling point

October 26, 2009 by Terry Teachout

bw-515d.jpgWhat makes Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong different from all previous Armstrong biographies? When talking about Pops with interviewers, I usually stress that I’m the first biographer to have had access to the 650 reel-to-reel tapes that Armstrong made during the last quarter-century of his life, many of which contain astonishingly candid recordings of his private after-hours conversations. I also try to work in the fact that I’m the first trained musician ever to have written a fully sourced biography of Armstrong.

In addition to these two things, though, there’s another important point that I sometimes forget to make. I’ve written about it in this space, but I think it’s worth repeating, both here and in the future.

To put it as simply as possible, I’ve sought to write a narrative biography of Louis Armstrong that is comparable in seriousness, scope, and literary quality to a “definitive” high-culture biography of a great novelist–or a great classical composer. Very few popular-music biographies have aspired to that kind of standard, but it seems obvious to me that Satchmo was a figure of comparable artistic and cultural significance, and deserves to be written about in the same way.

If anybody asks you why they should go out and buy a copy of Pops, that’s what you should tell them.

TT: Consumables

October 26, 2009 by Terry Teachout

• What I’m reading: Robin Kelley’s new biography of Thelonious Monk
filaments_light.jpg• What I’m listening to: Duke Ellington joue Billy Strayhorn, a two-CD anthology released in France in 2005
• What I’m seeing: Yvonne Jacquette: The Complete Woodcuts 1987-2009, up through November 28 at Mary Ryan Gallery
• This week’s shows: David Cromer’s production of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, the new Broadway revival of Finian’s Rainbow, Lynn Redgrave’s Nightingale, Theresa Rebeck’s The Understudy, and Goodspeed Musicals’ revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

TT: Almanac

October 26, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Seldom if ever again in life will you be afforded the chance to scrutinize such an array of losers in an environment that actually encourages their most pretentious inclinations!”
Daniel Clowes, “Art School Confidential”

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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