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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 20, 2011

TT: Is it real, or is it Kathleen Turner?

April 20, 2011 by ldemanski

I’ve hit a bad patch on Broadway. In today’s Wall Street Journal I pan High and Wonderland. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Was Kathleen Turner ever an actor? Maybe, but she’s not one anymore. All she does nowadays is waddle onstage and hawk the self-parody that long ago became her stock in trade. To say that Ms. Turner plays an alcoholic nun in Matthew Lombardo’s “High” comes close to giving away the whole game. Yes, Sister Jamison Connelly is a foul-mouthed, tough-talking dame with a heart of brass-plated gold, and yes, Ms. Turner’s Janie-One-Note performance is so thickly mannered as to suggest that the producers of “High” have engaged a Kathleen Turner robot instead of the real thing. She rattles off her lines in a hoarse, staccato baritone voice that sounds as if it had been brought into being through daily doses of Drano administered by mouth, and she never does anything that you can’t see coming several hundred miles away.
High460a.jpgNeither does Mr. Lombardo, a specialist in coarsely wrought small-cast vehicles for Hollywood refugees of a certain age. Last year it was “Looped,” in which Valerie Harper played Tallulah Bankhead. This year it’s “High,” a three-hander in which Ms. Turner attempts to save the body and soul of Cody (Evan Jonigkeit), a dope-addled street hustler whose self-destructive behavior is enabled by the solicitude of a well-meaning but foolish priest (Stephen Kunken). “High” is the sort of play in which a character (Ms. Turner, naturally) utters sentences like “Okay, God, here’s the deal,” then expects the audience not to giggle contemptuously in response….
The problem with Frank Wildhorn musicals is that they contain Frank Wildhorn songs. “Wonderland,” an updated stage version of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” is stuffed full of easy-listening pop ditties written in the out-the-other-ear style to which Mr. Wildhorn long ago accustomed his fans. As for Jack Murphy’s lyrics, suffice it to say that he lays his creative cards on the table in the very first number: “Larger smaller–keep it real/Change just happens, learn to deal.”
If you’ve spent any time at all watching the dreck dished up on contemporary children’s TV, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Mr. Wildhorn and his collaborators have done to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The time is right this second and the place is Queens. Alice (Janet Dacal) is a well-dressed, temporarily single working mom whose unemployed, temporarily unenlightened husband (Darren Ritchie) has left her because he’s embarrassed not to be the family breadwinner. Chloe (Carly Rose Sonenclar), their daughter, is an unnaturally mature-sounding 11-year-old Broadway diva who is incapable of uttering an unsarcastic word. Alice bumps her head in the elevator, lies down to take a nap and finds herself in Wonderland, a country whose inhabitants all speak the same tired argot, half smart-assery and half meta-humor…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Snapshot

April 20, 2011 by ldemanski

Paul Lynde, June Carroll, and Alice Ghostley in a very rare kinescope of excerpts from New Faces of 1952, originally telecast in 1960. The songs are “Guess Who I Saw Today” and “Boston Beguine”:

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

TT: Almanac

April 20, 2011 by ldemanski

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.”
Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics

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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