• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2012 / May / Archives for 2nd

Archives for May 2, 2012

TT: Angels and demons

May 2, 2012 by Terry Teachout

I’m filing two Wall Street Journal drama columns from Chicago this week. In today’s paper, I report on the Court Theatre’s revival of Angels in America and Next Theatre Company’s production of Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, in both cases with high enthusiasm. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
372.th.AngelsYando.jpgLike it or not, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is a landmark of postwar American theater. Opportunities to see it onstage are sufficiently rare that they should be seized with alacrity–especially in the case of the Court Theatre’s new production, which is a landmark in its own right. Charles Newell, the Court’s artistic director, has a knack for creating tightly focused small-scale productions of such sprawling works as “Porgy and Bess.” His galvanically staged version of “Angels in America” is very much in the same vein. Performed in the company’s 250-seat thrust-stage house, it puts Mr. Kushner’s desperate characters so close to the audience that their fear and trembling becomes as immediate as a whispered confession.
No small part of the credit for the potency of this production belongs to John Culbert, the scenic designer, who has shunned hospital-room naturalism in favor of an aggressively simple unit set (the centerpiece is a catafalque-like platform, the backdrop a grid of girders) that seems to float in the midst of infinite space. The sound design, by Joshua Horvath and Kevin O’Donnell, heightens to an alarming degree the atmosphere of encroaching disaster. Everything else is left to the imagination–and to Mr. Newell’s cast, led by Larry Yando as Roy Cohn. By turns horrifically gleeful and unexpectedly vulnerable, Mr. Yando’s Cohn steers clear of caricature, thus mitigating Mr. Kushner’s tendency to demonize his villains….
Christine-Stulik-as-Emma-After-the-Revolution_thumb.jpgWhat would you do if you found out that your grandfather had been a Soviet agent–and that your family had lied to you about it? In “After the Revolution,” the 2010 “prequel” to “4000 Miles,” Amy Herzog asks this question, and the answer she gives, although fictionalized, is intensely personal. That stands to reason, since something closely similar happened to Ms. Herzog, whose grandfather was revealed in 2000 to have spied for the Russians during World War II.
Ms. Herzog has turned this harrowing experience into an incisive, impressively honest play about life in a red-diaper family. As in “4000 Miles,” which is playing at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater through June 17, she manages with near-miraculous skill to embed personal drama in a political framework, adding sparkle to the action with deft touches of satire….
This staging, finely directed by Kimberly Senior, features a letter-perfect performance by Christine Stulik as Emma Joseph, the starchily self-righteous young political activist who is jolted to the marrow when she learns the ugly truth about her grandfather….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Snapshot

May 2, 2012 by Terry Teachout

Charles and Ray Eames are interviewed by Arlene Francis on NBC’s Home in 1956:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

May 2, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“The secret of success is never believing you are successful.”
Jeffrey Archer (quoted in Martyn Lewis, Reflections on Success)

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

May 2012
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Apr   Jun »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in