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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 7, 2011

TT: Sauce for the gander

October 7, 2011 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I write about a Chicago show, Writers’ Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and an off-Broadway show, the Atlantic Theatre Company’s premiere of Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling. The first is better–by far. Here’s an excerpt.
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The-Real-Thing-by-Tom-Stoppard-Writers-Theatre-001.jpgTom Stoppard is known for writing plays of ideas that are sufficiently witty to sugar the pill of their eggheady subject matter. “The Real Thing,” though it contains far more than its fair share of glittering wit and bristling complications, is a play of a different sort, a study of a modern marriage built atop the wreckage of unfaithfulness that threatens to be destroyed by the same destructive force that brought it into being. Small wonder that three decades after it opened in London, “The Real Thing” remains Mr. Stoppard’s best-loved play. Not surprisingly, it gets done fairly often, but I doubt that “The Real Thing” will soon receive a better production than the one now playing at Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre. Staged with heartfelt clarity by Michael Halberstam, the company’s artistic director, this is the kind of show that reminds you of why you go to the theater in the first place, and makes you wonder why anybody settles for anything less….
Mr. Halberstam, whom New York audiences know as the director of “A Minister’s Wife,” has given us an unusually intimate staging of “The Real Thing” that profits no end from being performed in Writers’ Theatre’s 108-seat house. Punch lines that would need to be nailed to the back wall of a Broadway-sized theater can instead be tossed off with deceptive casualness, allowing the audience to concentrate not on Mr. Stoppard’s jokes but on the increasingly hurtful truths that his characters tell one another….
The ever-trendy Adam Rapp is at it again with “Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling,” a play that is as trite as it is smug. The setting is “an opulent Connecticut home” and the subject is the soulnessness of the upper middle classes, whose members, Mr. Rapp assures us, are empty shells of brittle good manners whose only hope of redemption is to have wild sex and/or to be led by their black servants down the path to politico-spiritual enlightenment….
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Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

October 7, 2011 by Terry Teachout

“When you have loved as she has loved, you grow old beautifully.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Circle

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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