Archives for October 12, 2012

The New York Times recently interviewed me about Satchmo at the Waldorf. Here’s part of the story, which will appear in print on Sunday:

Who knew Louis Armstrong had such a mouth on him? And we don’t mean embouchure.
With “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” which opened Oct. 3 at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven (after an earlier run in Lenox, Mass.), the critic Terry Teachout becomes a playwright. And as such, he seems to have a lot in common with David Mamet. That is, his dialogue flows with four-letter words like Beaujolais at a French cafe. The primary offender and main character is Armstrong himself, jazz trumpeter, singer and postwar America’s first nonwhite sweetheart….
Armstrong’s duality fascinates Mr. Teachout, a jazz aficionado who was born in Missouri and lived in Kansas City in his 20s. “The public Armstrong and the private Armstrong are very different,” he said. But, he emphasized, “they’re both true.”
“When he went out onstage and smiled that big smile and sang ‘Dolly,’ he wasn’t lying,” he continued. “He was a fundamentally largehearted man. But he was also a genius and also a complicated man….”

Read the whole thing here.

• In the New Haven Register: ‘Satchmo’ at Long Wharf Theatre does Louis Armstrong proud
• In the Hartford Courant: ‘Satchmo at the Waldorf’ A Solid, Engaging Portrait
• In CT Theater News and Reviews: “Satchmo” Beguiles and Engages
• In the New Haven Review: Satchmo at the Long Wharf
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Excerpts from a live performance of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring John Douglas Thompson:

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new production of Cyrano de Bergerac and the New York revival of Charlie Victor Romeo. Here’s an excerpt.
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Whenever a verse play opens on Broadway, and it’s not by Shakespeare, chances are that it’s “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Indeed, Edmond Rostand’s 1897 swashbuckler about the jumbo-snouted soldier who longs in vain for the love of a fair young maiden was produced there as recently as 2007. So why is the Roundabout Theatre Company putting on “Cyrano” five years later–especially since Kevin Kline played the title role last time around? Because Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony for his outrageous drag turn in the 2010 revival of “La Cage aux Folles,” wanted to do it, and the Roundabout, not surprisingly, was glad to oblige him.
Can “Cyrano” stand to be revived so soon after Mr. Kline did it so well? Probably. Though it’s not a masterpiece in the normal sense of the word, M. Rostand brought off the rarest of theatrical feats: He invented an icon. Even if you’ve never seen or read the play, you probably know who Cyrano was and what he looked like. What’s more, “Cyrano de Bergerac” is a deluxe piece of stage hokum, one whose sincere romanticism–you feel for Cyrano from start to finish–is all but impossible to resist when delivered with the playful panache exemplified by its flamboyant hero. John Simon famously said of “Cyrano” that it is “not a great play, merely a perfect one.” That’s exactly right. It is to verse drama what “Stagecoach” is to Westerns or “Love Affair” is to 10-hankie weepers.
Mr. Hodge gets what “Cyrano” is all about, and in its quiet moments his performance is deeply moving–but there aren’t enough of them. Not only is Jamie Lloyd’s staging as noisy as a concert by a band of jackhammers, but the Roundabout’s production makes use of a boisterous new rhyming translation by Ranjit Bolt that updates the play’s language to inconsistent effect….
“Charlie Victor Romeo,” in which Collective: Unconscious, a Manhattan-based experimental theater group, takes the transcripts of black-box recordings of six mid-air crises and turns them into an evening of you-are-there playlets, is back in New York after eight years on the road. It remains the scariest show in town, a shockingly compelling portrait of what happens in the cockpit of an airplane when everything starts to go wrong. Documentary plays tend to be both over-earnest and painfully ponderous, but “Charlie Victor Romeo” (the title of which is military alphabetic code for “cockpit voice recorder”) moves so fast that you’ll feel as though you’d looked the wrong way and stepped into a mile-deep pothole….
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Read the whole thing here.
An excerpt from Charlie Victor Romeo:

This week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which would normally have run today, will instead appear in next Tuesday’s paper in order to coincide with an important anniversary. Come back then!

“Always be glad you’re not at the dentist.”
Groucho Marx (quoted in Robert Dwan, As Long as They’re Laughing!: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life)