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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 29, 2011

TT: Just like new

July 29, 2011 by ldemanski

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two more Shakespeare & Company productions, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Is it possible for a play to be so well known that there’s no longer anything new to do with it or say about it? If so, then “Romeo and Juliet” would fill the bill with room to spare. No Shakespeare play is more widely performed or frequently adapted. It’s been filmed, parodied and turned into operas and ballets. Semi-literate people can reel off its best-known lines without thinking twice. Factor in “West Side Story” and you’ve got a recipe for saturation-level cultural omnipresence, the kind that can set a drama critic’s eyeballs to rolling.
All true–and all blessedly irrelevant to Shakespeare & Company’s “Romeo and Juliet,” a production so unhackneyed and emotionally immediate that you’ll feel as though you’re seeing that most ubiquitous of masterpieces through a first-timer’s eyes. What’s more, Daniela Varon has brought off this miracle without ladling the rancid sauce of cleverness over Shakespeare’s text. Instead she’s given us a trick-free “R & J” devoid of the slightest hint of directorial manipulation, staged with passionate simplicity and performed by a cast whose youthful spark makes it possible to take the familiar plight of the star-crossed lovers at face value….
RomeoJulietSCO11KSPRA_426.JPGIt’s by no means an original idea to stage “Romeo and Juliet” with exceptionally young-looking players, but Ms. Varon has gone the whole hog: Susannah Millonzi, her Juliet, is tween-slight and sullenly tomboyish, while David Gelles looks as though he’d taken time off from starring in a high-school romcom to play Romeo. Once again, though, there’s nothing tricky about this approach, especially in the case of Ms. Millonzi, who burns at both ends with an intensity hot enough to make you sweat….
A production as good as this one is by definition hard to follow, and even more so when you’re following it with another play that’s almost as familiar. But no apologies need be made for Tony Simotes’ “As You Like It,” a light and lovely romp charged with festive midsummer energy. Mr. Simotes, the company’s artistic director, has chosen to set Shakespeare’s great comedy of mistaken identity and romantic reconciliation in Paris in the Twenties, and Arthur Oliver, the costume designer, takes the ball and gallops down the field, dressing the cast in a riotously colorful medley of outfits that make you wish you could put on one of your own and join in the fun….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

July 29, 2011 by ldemanski

“Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger.”
Enoch Powell, Still to Decide

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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