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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 22, 2011

TT: Down and out in London and New York

April 22, 2011 by ldemanski

Let the bad times roll: I review two more Broadway stinkers, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and the stage version of Sister Act, in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
“Jerusalem” is pretentious almost without limit, a three-hour save-our-England tract in which the uplift is slathered with a thick brown sauce composed of two parts coarse humor and one part pseudo-poetry. In addition, “Jerusalem” features a performance by Mark Rylance (“La Bête,” “Boeing-Boeing”) that is every bit as good as the critical buzz that accompanied it to Broadway from London’s West End. Connoisseurs of great acting won’t want to miss him–but those with normal attention spans will be hard pressed to make it all the way to the finish line.
Mark-Rylance-in-Jerusalem-001.jpgMr. Rylance plays Johnny “Rooster” Byron, a booze-sodden drug dealer and teller of tall tales who would be known in England as “Falstaffian” or “Rabelaisian” and in America as “trailer trash.” He lives in a moldering Airstream parked in a forest on the edge of a real-estate development whose occupants, not at all surprisingly, are trying to have him evicted. Rooster is the unofficial godfather of a merry band of working-class louts whom he lovingly describes, in one of his more printable turns of phrase, as “educationally subnormal outcasts.” They flock to the enchanted forest to drink his drink, snort his coke, have casual sex and forget their Lives of Loud Desperation, about which they are inclined to give lengthy speeches when sober.
What we have here is, in short, the theatrical counterpart of what is known to literary scholars as a “condition-of-England novel,” a genre long beloved of those who prefer politics to art. Mr. Butterworth has upped the ante still further by adding a stiff dose of middle-class self-loathing à la George Orwell, who famously declared in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that “if there is hope, it lies in the proles!” That deluded sentence could well stand as the epigraph of “Jerusalem.” Like Orwell’s “proles,” Rooster Byron (get it?) is in touch with the instinctual life of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. This, of course, makes him infinitely more authentic than the prim homeowners who want to give him the push….
The season isn’t over yet, but I’m already guessing that “Sister Act” will walk away with the Bottom of the Barrel Prize for 2011. While the original 1992 screen version of “Sister Act” wasn’t the worst movie ever made, the musical-comedy version that arrived on Broadway after successful runs in Pasadena and London is a wretched piece of rhinestone-spangled junk….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Just because (I)

April 22, 2011 by ldemanski

Pierre Boulez conducts Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring:

TT: Just because (II)

April 22, 2011 by ldemanski

Michael Colgrass talks about recording The Rite of Spring with Igor Stravinsky on the podium:

TT: Almanac

April 22, 2011 by ldemanski

“Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.”
Wyndham Lewis, “Inferior Religions”

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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