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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 12, 2011

TT: The good old bad old days

August 12, 2011 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on the new off-Broadway production of Rent. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Fifteen years ago, Jonathan Larson’s “Rent” was the hippest musical on Broadway–which wasn’t saying much. Virtually all of the musicals that opened there in the ’90s were totally forgettable and are deservedly forgotten. “Rent,” on the other hand, is well remembered, partly because it stayed open until 2008 and partly because it was the most influential show of the post-Sondheim era, a rock musical that contrived to put AIDS, drug addiction, drag queenery and homo- and bisexuality onstage without simultaneously putting off the tourist trade. Nor does its 5,123-performance Broadway run appear to have exhausted the marketability of “Rent.” A new Off-Broadway production has just opened at New World Stages, the complex to which “Avenue Q” transferred two years ago after its own long run on Broadway.
tumblr_lox5tvNThy1qbrhvdo1_250.jpgDespite the fact that Michael Greif, the show’s first director, has restaged it, this “Rent” is not a remounting but a true revival, featuring an all-new cast and freshly designed sets by Mark Wendland whose metal scaffolding echoes the fire-escape motif of Oliver Smith’s now-legendary décor for “West Side Story.” At the same time, no attempt has been made to update the show, and its overall effect is essentially the same. All that’s changed is the people in the audience: They’re still young, but precisely because they’re so youthful, Mr. Larson’s affectionate portrait of bohemian New York in the early ’90s clearly comes across to them not as an exercise in nostalgia for the good old bad old days but as a theme-park recreation of a world they never knew. They might as well be watching “Woodstock”–or “West Side Story,” for that matter.
And what of the show itself? If you were following the theater scene in 1996, you’ll remember the wild hoopla that greeted the opening of “Rent,” which snagged the best-musical Tony and even won a Pulitzer Prize. No doubt the fact that Mr. Larson died the day after the dress rehearsal for the original Off-Broadway production had something to do with the show’s enthusiastic reception, but to revisit “Rent” a decade and a half after the fact is to suspect that its drag-queens-are-people-too subject matter was the real source of its popularity. Viewed in the harsh light of hindsight, “Rent” is by turns chirpy and sentimental…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

August 12, 2011 by Terry Teachout

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

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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