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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 19, 2010

TT: Formerly famous faces

March 19, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Strikeout: I pan three plays, Looped, Zero Hour, and When the Rain Stops Falling, in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Broadway being what it is these days, I can’t help but wonder exactly what the producers of “Looped” see as their target market. Tallulah Bankhead, the whiskey-voiced, omnivorously promiscuous subject of Matthew Lombardo’s new play, used to be something of a theatrical icon, though she was always better known for her one-liners (some of which she actually said) than her stage performances. But Bankhead’s failure to make any first-rate films means that she is now known to few people under the age of 40–better make that 60–and it’s hard to see why anyone who doesn’t know who she was would pay to see an unfunny dramedy that seeks to exploit her faded fame.
“Looped” is loosely based on a real-life occurrence in the pitiful second half of Bankhead’s career. In 1965 she supposedly spent eight hours attempting to overdub a single line of dialogue in her last feature film, a bottom-of-the-bottom-of-the-barrel camp horror “classic” called “Die! Die! My Darling!” Out of that ignominous episode, Mr. Lombardo has woven a three-person play in which Bankhead (Valerie Harper) bumps up against a Hollywood film editor (Brian Hutchison) and sound engineer (Michael Mulheren) who attempt with minimal success to get her to speak her line coherently. In between takes she gets plastered, foams at the mouth with prefab wisecracks, tells the story of her life and induces the film editor to confess his Deep Dark Secret. Yes, he’s gay, and believe me, I’m not telling you anything that you won’t figure out several weeks before Mr. Lombardo spills the beans….
Unlike Tallulah Bankhead, Zero Mostel is reasonably well remembered, if not in the way he would have preferred. His much-larger-than-life performance in Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” a movie that he claimed to loathe, has kept his memory green, and a fair amount of his essence also comes through on the original-cast album of “Fiddler on the Roof” and in the uneven film version of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” But while “Zero Hour,” written and performed by Jim Brochu and staged by none other than Piper Laurie, is a highly effective evocation of the public Mostel–Mr. Brochu looks and acts just like an Al Hirschfeld caricature–it doesn’t add up to a full-fledged play….
I’m not quite sure that I’d pay to see David Cromer direct the Manhattan phone book, but I’d give it serious thought. Alas, “When the Rain Stops Falling,” Andrew Bovell’s droningly drab multigenerational saga of a comprehensively unhappy Anglo-Australian family, is more than a little bit phone-booky, Mr. Cromer’s best efforts notwithstanding. This is the kind of show whose program includes a family tree–the action bounces back and forth between 1959 and 2039–and you don’t get extra credit for guessing that somebody got molested somewhere up the line….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Bringing art back to PBS

March 19, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, gave a litle-noticed speech to Town Hall Los Angeles in January in which she acknowledged what everybody already knows, which is that fine-arts programming on public TV is–to put it mildly–in decline. She also announced plans to beef it up, none of which struck me as particularly impressive, so I decided to get into the act by making a few pointed suggestions of my own. That’s the subject of my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, in which, among other things, I tell what I’d do if I were (A) put in charge of arts programming at PBS and (B) given a pile of money to spend as I saw fit.
If you want to know more, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

March 19, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

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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