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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 7, 2011

TT: Just because

January 7, 2011 by ldemanski

Hadda Brooks sings “I Hadn’t Anyone Till You” in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place”:

TT: Tune in tomorrow

January 7, 2011 by ldemanski

I’ll be making my debut tomorrow night on CUNY-TV’s Theater Talk, accompanied by fellow drama critics John Simon and Jacques le Sourd. We’ll be talking with Michael Riedel of the New York Post about the best and worst Broadway shows of 2010. Bombs will be thrown!
For more information, or to view the episode on line, go here.

TT: The kids are all wrong

January 7, 2011 by ldemanski

I spent the first night of 2011 seeing a very bad off-Broadway revival of Dracula for The Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt from today’s review.
* * *
How is it that vampires and zombies (not to mention serial killers, their postmodern cousins) are so hot nowadays? No doubt our undiminished interest in the blood-suckers and flesh-eaters among us says something profound, disturbing and transgressive about American culture, but I’m damned if I know what it is, perhaps because I hopped off that particular train when “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” closed up shop. I have yet to see a single installment of “Twilight,” “True Blood” or “The Vampire Diaries,” nor do I plan to do so anytime soon. I did, however, snag a ticket to the new Off-Broadway “Dracula,” partly because the ever-excellent George Hearn is playing Van Helsing, Buffy’s spiritual great-grandfather, and partly because Thora Birch, who was so fine in “Ghost World” and “American Beauty,” was supposed to play Lucy Seward, the chief recipient of the sanguinary favors of the Transylvanian count (Michel Altieri).
Ms. Birch, however, got canned when the show was in rehearsal and has since been replaced by Emily Bridges, her understudy. Now that I’ve seen the play she left behind, I incline to think that she got lucky, for this “Dracula” is a limply staged, unconvincingly acted mess….
You won’t have any trouble figuring out the high concept of this production: Except for Mr. Hearn and Timothy Jerome, who plays Lucy’s father, everyone in the case is very young and mostly very pretty. The goal, I assume, is to appeal to the teen-and-tween set, but the producers have neglected to hire any familiar faces and favored looks over experience. As a result, some of the performances are ludicrously amateurish. I won’t name any names–Paul Alexander, the show’s near-unknown, painfully ungifted director, may be the guilty party here–but I heard the chilling sound of unintended laughter at several points in the second act….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
A scene from the 1979 film version of Dracula, starring Frank Langella:

TT: Head of the Nice Guys Club

January 7, 2011 by ldemanski

Ira%20and%20Fred.jpegLike everybody else with a more than passing interest in musical comedy, I read Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat with the closest attention. I’m surprised that none of the book’s many reviewers, so far as I can tell, seems to have mentioned the obvious fact (obvious to me, anyway) that it was inspired by Ira Gershwin’s Lyrics on Several Occasions.
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I compare the two books. The differences between them are exceedingly revealing! Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
One of the reasons why “Finishing the Hat,” Stephen Sondheim’s annotated volume of his song lyrics, has attracted so much attention is because he takes potshots at certain of his colleagues, most notably Noël Coward and Lorenz Hart, the second of whom he calls “the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists.” Some people have been upset by his candor, but I confess to relishing it–though not because I necessarily agree with anything he has to say about the parties in question. Most creative artists of Mr. Sondheim’s stature, after all, have strong opinions about their peers, and such opinions, whether positive or negative, don’t have to be right to be interesting. To learn that Renoir believed Degas to be the only great sculptor since the 13th century, or that Benjamin Britten loathed the music of Beethoven and Brahms, is to learn something important about Renoir and Britten.
It may be, of course, that one of the things we learn from “Finishing the Hat” is that Mr. Sondheim isn’t a very nice person. I wouldn’t know–I’ve never met him–but I doubt that it matters much in the long run whether he’s nice or not. Still, I wouldn’t go nearly so far as Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for such classic films as “Citizen Kane” and “Psycho” and who once told an astonished interviewer that he had no use whatsoever for nice guys….
To which I need only respond with two words: Ira Gershwin.
George Gershwin’s older brother and longtime collaborator was known on Broadway and in Hollywood for being an unusually agreeable person. In “No Minor Chords,” his 1991 memoir, André Previn recalled that Gershwin was “so unfailingly kind-hearted and soft-spoken that his cronies dubbed him President of the Nice Guys Club.” He was also one of the very best lyricists in the business, and in 1959 he published his own annotated volume of his lyrics called “Lyrics on Several Occasions.”…
As the structure of “Finishing the Hat” suggests, Mr. Sondheim is closely familiar with “Lyrics on Several Occasions,” so much so that he uses the book as a stick with which to beat its author: “Gershwin talks about his lyrics with an ease I miss in most of the examples.” I know what Mr. Sondheim means–up to a point….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

January 7, 2011 by ldemanski

“Some people take, some people get took. And they know they’re getting took and there’s nothing they can do about it.”
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, screenplay for The Apartment

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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