Archives for February 2011

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal I report on a Phildelphia show, the Arden Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten. Here’s an excerpt.
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Six decades after his death, Eugene O’Neill is still widely considered to be America’s greatest playwright–but productions of his major plays are growing fewer and farther between. Only four O’Neill revivals have been mounted on Broadway in the past decade, and major regional productions aren’t much more common. Hence Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre is swimming upstream by performing “A Moon for the Misbegotten,” O’Neill’s last completed play, which I haven’t seen since the 2007 Broadway version that starred Kevin Spacey and Eve Best. I liked it well enough then, but I liked it a lot more in Philadelphia.
Why has O’Neill gone out of fashion? Because his plays are usually long-winded and almost always devoid of poetry. His characters talk and talk (the original production of “Mourning Becomes Electra” ran for six hours) without ever getting around to saying anything memorable. I looked O’Neill up in “The Yale Book of Quotations” the other day and found just five entries, only four of which are from his plays and the most famous of which is remembered because it was the first line that Greta Garbo ever spoke on screen: “Gimme a whiskey–ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” That’s not what I call quotable, much less poetic.
“A Moon for the Misbegotten” suffers from both of these problems, and by all rights they ought to kill it stone dead. Not only does the play open with an hour and a half of wholly unnecessary exposition, but there’s not a quotable line in it–not even in the second half, which is when O’Neill finally steps on the gas pedal and gets moving. But what started out as a stage-Irish yukfest then turns into a deeply compassionate study of a drunken ex-actor (Eric Hissom) and a poor, unattractive farm girl (Grace Gonglewski) who are too proud to let themselves love one another, and almost before you know it you find yourself caught up in their plight.
Ms. Gonglewski is by all accounts one of Philadelphia’s top actors, and in “A Moon for the Misbegotten” you can see how she got that reputation. Performing in a subtly padded costume that makes her look much more broad-beamed than she is in real life, she plays the part of Josie Hogan with a force and authority worthy of the way that O’Neill describes her character in the play’s stage directions: “She is so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak…She is more powerful than any but an exceptionally strong man, able to do the manual labor of two ordinary men. But there is no mannish quality about her. She is all woman.” Ms. Best’s performance on Broadway was phenomenal, but Ms. Gonglewski doesn’t have to make any apologies: She comes on like a typhoon….
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Read the whole thing here.

If you’re curious, I explain at the end of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column why we didn’t review Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark this week. Here’s what I wrote:

Contrary to any impression you might have garnered from the reviews that appeared on Tuesday in other publications, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” is still in public previews, is still being rehearsed and is still undergoing changes, some of which may prove to be significant. The official opening date is Mar. 15. Critics will not be invited to see it until a few days prior to that date, after the show has assumed its final form and has been “frozen” by Julie Taymor, the director and co-author. In keeping with this long-standing professional courtesy, I have not seen “Spider-Man” and won’t do so until the show is officially frozen. My review will run on Mar. 16.

More next month….

“This country is merciless to good small talents. A writer who doesn’t take chances and swing for the fences (whether or not he has a prayer of reaching them) is less than a man.”
Wilfrid Sheed, review of Letters of E.B. White

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Black Tie (comedy, PG-13, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Molly Sweeney (drama, G, too serious for children, closes Mar. 13, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN MINNEAPOLIS:

• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (drama, PG-13/R, Minneapolis remounting of Phoenix production, adult subject matter and violence, closes Mar. 6, Phoenix run reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

Louis Armstrong and Rex Harrison sing Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz” in 1957:

(No, I didn’t know about this clip when I wrote Pops!)

“Jean’s undoing, in my view, was nothing as humdrum as booze or tobacco or malnourishment, but a deadly streak of passivity of a kind that sometimes goes with perfectionism, and which I think she loathed in herself.”
Wilfrid Sheed, “Miss Jean Stafford”

I review the premiere of A.R. Gurney’s new play, Black Tie, in the Greater New York section of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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Man cannot live by masterpieces alone, nor can any playwright, however gifted, hope to produce them every time he sits down at his desk. It is in the nature of things that there must also be well-made pieces of intelligent entertainment to keep our fancies tickled, and there must be enough of them to keep actors from standing on unemployment lines and critics from going mad with boredom. Therefore let us now praise A.R. Gurney, who writes a play or two each year, some of them inspired, others merely solid, but all guaranteed to send you home feeling that you wasted neither time nor money by seeing them. “Black Tie,” Mr. Gurney’s latest effort, falls into the second class, scoring 100% on the intelligent-entertainment checklist.
“Black Tie” is the latest of Mr. Gurney’s reports from the land of the upper-middle-class WASP. The scene is a decent but undistinguished hotel in the Adirondacks where Curtis (Gregg Edelman) is about to throw a rehearsal dinner for his soon-to-be-wed son (Ari Brand). As he dons evening dress and mulls over his speech, the ghost of Curtis’ own late father (Daniel Davis) materializes to cheer him on and brush up his vocabulary: “Gentlemen wear trousers. Gents wear pants.” It soon emerges that Curtis needs a lot of cheering, for his son is about to marry a woman of multicolored hue who disdains the gentleman’s code that Curtis learned from his genial but ever-so-proper father….
One of the things I admire about Mr. Gurney is his iron professionalism. While “Black Tie” is slight by comparison with “The Grand Manner,” his last play, or “Sylvia,” which was so engagingly revived last month by Florida Repertory Theatre, it’s much more than sufficiently amusing. It never surprised me, but it never bored me….
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The print version of the Journal‘s Greater New York section only appears in copies of the paper published in the New York area, but the complete contents of the section are available on line, and you can read my review by going here.

An extremely rare kinescope of a 1957 episode of the short-lived TV version of Vic and Sade, Paul Rhymer’s comic radio serial, which was heard on network radio from 1932 to 1946:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)