TT: Maria Callas gets the guests

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway revival of Master Class and a production of Rachel Crothers’ He and She by the East Lynne Theater Company of Cape May, New Jersey. Here’s an excerpt.
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Maria Callas, the most famous and admired opera singer of the 20th century, taught a series of master classes at New York’s Juilliard School in 1971, six years after she retired from the stage, and Terrence McNally, who in addition to being a much-produced playwright is a well-informed opera buff and occasional librettist, used them as the basis for a 1995 play called “Master Class” that hit big on Broadway and has since been revived frequently elsewhere. Now “Master Class” has returned to Broadway by way of Washington’s Kennedy Center, this time in a production starring Tyne Daly, who has admitted in numerous interviews to knowing nothing about opera, and staged by Stephen Wadsworth, a theatrical director who also has extensive opera-house experience. It’s a toothsome piece of melodrama, though you’ll likely enjoy it more if you don’t know much about opera, or about Callas.
It happens that Callas’ master classes were recorded–you can hear them on YouTube–and so the first thing that needs to be said about “Master Class” is that it has very little to do with what happened at Juilliard 40 years ago. Except for Callas’ last speech, which is drawn more or less verbatim from the tapes, Mr. McNally’s play is mostly made up out of whole cloth, and while the teaching scenes are generally pretty believable, he has elsewhere sugared the pill thickly with over-obvious humor of his own….
Not surprisingly, it’s in the teaching scenes that Mr. Wadsworth’s operatic know-how pays off richly: They give an uncanny sense of how a teacher conveys hard-won knowledge to a responsive pupil. Ms. Daly, of course, looks nothing like Callas, but she does contrive to look like a diva in “Master Class,” in part because she’s been made over with uncanny skill by Martin Pakledinaz and Angelina Avallone, the costume and makeup designers. Her acting, though it’s a bit broad, smolders with remembered heartbreak….
Rachel Crothers wrote 24 plays that were mounted on Broadway between 1906 and 1937, most of which she directed herself. Today she’s almost entirely forgotten, but the Mint Theater’s Off-Broadway productions of “Susan and God” and “A Little Journey” (which has just been extended through July 17) showed that Crothers was an author of considerable accomplishment. If you seek further proof of her gifts, head down to Cape May, the island resort town at the southern tip of New Jersey, where the East Lynne Theater Company is putting on a solidly satisfying revival of “He and She,” written in 1911 and last seen on Broadway in 1920.
“He and She” is a proto-feminist play of ideas about two married sculptors (played with sympathy and verisimilitude by Tom Byrn and Molly O’Neill) who enter the same competition. You can probably guess what happens next, but you’ll never guess what happens after that. Notwithstanding a slightly talky first act, Crothers makes their plight real, building to a denouement fraught with unexpected emotional complexity….
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Read the whole thing here.
To see Maria Callas interviewed by Lord Harewood in 1968, go here.
Terrence McNally talks about Master Class, with excerpts from Tyne Daly’s performance at Washington’s Kennedy Center: