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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 12, 2011

TT: Lose the title, see the show

April 12, 2011 by ldemanski

Broadway is jumping, and for the rest of the month I’ll be filing two or three drama columns each week for The Wall Street Journal. In today’s paper I review The Motherf**ker With the Hat and Catch Me if You Can. The first–very much to my surprise, by the way–is a knockout, the second a dud. Here’s an excerpt.
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Theatergoers familiar with the work of Stephen Adly Guirgis know that the gigawatt expletive embedded in the title of his latest play is one of his favorite words–on stage, anyway. Whether the public at large will feel comfortable seeing it on a marquee is an open question. Broadway is a scary place to open a straight play, especially one whose name can’t be said out loud on network TV. It stands to reason that “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” (to give the play its official, double-asterisked title) should have done poorly in previews, the buzz-inducing presence of Chris Rock notwithstanding. But even though the title is too clever by half, Mr. Guirgis’ play is buzzworthy in its own right. It’s tight, smart and splendidly well-made, a tough-minded, unromantically romantic comedy that keeps you laughing, then sends you home thinking.
mofo11.jpg“Hat” (let’s leave it at that) is about two working-class couples who are too close for comfort. Jackie (Bobby Cannavale), a violent hothead who just got out of jail and is now trying to get clean and sober, is crazy about Veronica (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who has an equally short fuse but has yet to discover the joys of sobriety. Ralph D. (Mr. Rock), Jackie’s sponsor in Alcoholics Anonymous, is a fast-talking scamster whose long-suffering wife (Annabella Sciorra) knows what he’s up to and has had it up to here. When Jackie finds a strange man’s hat in the grungy apartment that he shares with Veronica, all hell breaks loose. To say more would be to give the game away, but rest assured that you won’t get even a half-step ahead of Mr. Guirgis, who deals a steady stream of surprising cards all evening long….
Time was when musicals got made into movies. Now it’s the other way around. A successful Hollywood film is now seen as one of the safest possible sources for a big-budget Broadway musical, since it brings to the stage–at least in theory–its own built-in audience of fans. Not that that stopped the producers of “9 to 5” from losing their shirts, but generally speaking, the theory is sound. Would that it made for better shows. “Catch Me if You Can” is a case in point, a glossy stage version of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 movie that is musically unmemorable and emotionally dead….
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Read the whole thing here.

TT: Just because

April 12, 2011 by ldemanski

Exposé of Sleight of Hand, a rare short film featuring card-trick expert John Scarne:

TT: Almanac

April 12, 2011 by ldemanski

“If you have to worry about originality or think about it, you’re not original.”
William Schuman, unpublished autobiographical manuscript

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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