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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 25, 2011

DVD

March 25, 2011 by ldemanski

Topsy-Turvy (Criterion Collection, out Mar. 29). Mike Leigh’s 1999 film about Gilbert, Sullivan, and the making of The Mikado, newly remastered and reissued by the Criterion Collection with all the usual goodies, is the best backstage movie ever made, as well as a surpassingly fine exercise in cinematic time travel. To watch it is to feel closer to the tone and texture of Victorian life than you ever thought possible. Intelligent, provocative, hugely entertaining…what’s not to like? (TT).

BOOK

March 25, 2011 by ldemanski

Simon Nowell-Smith, The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. The subtitle says it, but conveys nothing of the elegance and resourcefulness with which Nowell-Smith put together this 1947 anthology of first-hand anecdotes and impressions–all of them carefully verified. To see James through the widely varied eyes of Arnold Bennett, E.F. Benson, G.K. Chesterton, Desmond MacCarthy, H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, and dozens of other contemporaries is to see him with the utmost immediacy, and the results are far more readable, even for pure pleasure, than any volume of this kind has any right to be (TT).

TT: Everybody but Mohammed

March 25, 2011 by ldemanski

I review The Book of Mormon and Ghetto Klown in today’s Wall Street Journal. Neither show passed muster with me. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
South-Park-Mormons.jpgTrey Parker and Matt Stone, the naughty boys of “South Park,” have teamed up with Robert Lopez, one of the co-creators of “Avenue Q,” and the results of their collaboration are pretty much what you’d expect: slick and smutty. “The Book of Mormon” is the first musical to open on Broadway since “La Cage aux Folles” that has the smell of a send-in-the-tourists hit. Casey Nicholaw (“The Drowsy Chaperone”) has staged the musical numbers with cheery energy and the cast, especially Nikki M. James, is terrific. But don’t let anybody try to tell you that “The Book of Mormon” is suitable for anyone other than 12-year-old boys who have yet to graduate from fart jokes to “Glee.” A couple of reasonably effective production numbers notwithstanding, it’s flabby, amateurish and very, very safe.
The plot is exiguous. Two shiny-faced young Mormons (Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells) are sent to Uganda to evangelize the natives, promptly discover that life in Africa is more complicated than they thought, and prevail by being geeky and lucky. This is, in other words, a one-joke show, the joke being that Mormons are unworldly nerds who think that “bullpoop” is a deletable expletive. Most of the other jokes in the show are derivative of this one and are just as obvious, including the Obligatory Song About a Closeted Gay Mormon: “Being gay is bad, but lying is worse/So just realize you’ve got a curable curse!” This being a “South Park” spinoff, we also get several other songs which operate on the mistaken assumption that four-letter words are automatically funny when sung, plus an assortment of AIDS-in-Africa “jokes” that are to black comedy what pies in the face are to screwball comedy.
The creators of “South Park” like to call themselves “equal-opportunity offenders,” but if you think there’s anything risky about “The Book of Mormon,” you’re kidding yourself. Making fun of Mormons in front of a Broadway crowd is like shooting trout in a demitasse cup….
John Leguizamo has turned to straight autobiography in “Ghetto Klown,” his fifth one-man show. No, his parents didn’t understand him. Yes, he became an actor and started getting work in Hollywood, albeit in stereotypical wisecracking-Latino-with-an-Uzi roles. Yes, he started writing one-man stage shows in order to understand himself. Yes, his screen career went into the tank, in part because of his undisciplined behavior and general mouthiness. No, his first marriage didn’t work out. Yes, his second marriage did, which gave him the courage to write “Ghetto Klown” and return to the stage after an eight-year hiatus…but enough already! Mr. Leguizamo is an energetic and resourceful performer and “Ghetto Klown” has its moments. The problem is that you’ve heard them all before…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

March 25, 2011 by ldemanski

“Nature goes her own way, and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order.”
Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann

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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