In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I write about Hartford Stage’s revival of The Crucible and the Broadway transfer of the Kennedy Center production of Follies. Here’s an excerpt.
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Time has been unexpectedly kind to “The Crucible.” Arthur Miller’s history play about the Salem witch trials was written at the height of the McCarthy era, and most of the critics who saw it back then found the parallels that Miller drew between Salem in 1693 and Washington, D.C., in 1953 to be grossly heavy-handed. Nor was their displeasure politically motivated. Kenneth Tynan, whose own politics were far to the left of center, wrote that “The Crucible” “has the over-simplifications of poster art.” He was right, too: “The Crucible” is an either/or moral melodrama whose characters are as flat as picket signs. But it is also, like Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes,” a consummately effective piece of theater that carries the emotional charge of a really good B movie. Moreover, the passage of time has made it possible for “The Crucible” to be staged not as a connect-the-dots allegory about McCarthyism but as a cautionary tale of what can happen whenever zealots of any kind—fascists, Communists, religious fanatics, PC enforcers—reach out for the levers of power.
In his riveting Hartford Stage revival of “The Crucible,” Gordon Edelstein has shrewdly cut the play loose from its familiar 17th-century moorings. Ilona Somogyi’s costumes and Eugene Lee’s bare-bones set suggest that the play is taking place early in the 20th century, possibly in the Bible Belt around the time of the Scopes trial. On the other hand, Michael Chybowski has lit the courtroom with fluorescent fixtures that are as modern-looking as a flat-screen TV. The effect is deliberately disorienting, and no sooner is the audience thrown off balance than Mr. Edelstein moves in for the kill. From the slap-in-the-face coup de théâtre that launches the play to the death march that drives it to a thunderous close, this “Crucible” will send your pulse rate shooting through the roof….
This is a banner year for “Follies,” the 1971 Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman musical in which the splintered hopes of two middle-aged married couples are flung against the gaudy backdrop of an old-fashioned bring-on-the-girls revue. Not only is Gary Griffin about to stage a major revival of “Follies” for Chicago Shakespeare, but Eric Schaeffer’s superlative Kennedy Center production, which had a deservedly successful run earlier this year in Washington, has just moved to Broadway with its formidable virtues fully intact. Jan Maxwell, Bernadette Peters, Danny Burstein and Ron Raines, the stars of the Kennedy Center cast, are all present and accounted for. Though Ms. Peters is in fragile voice, her acting is touchingly intense, and her colleagues, Mr. Burstein in particular, give powerhouse performances that couldn’t be bettered….
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Read the whole thing here.
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
