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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 9, 2012

TT: James Lapine, alchemist

November 9, 2012 by Terry Teachout

I review the new Broadway revival of Annie in today’s Wall Street Journal. Very much to my surprise, I loved it. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
annie-palace-theatre.jpgAnnie is dead–but “Annie” lives. Two years after Harold Gray’s long-running comic strip about a plucky orphan child finally breathed its last, the perennially popular 1976 stage version of “Little Orphan Annie” is back on Broadway for the third time. For anyone surprised that the musical responsible for inflicting “Tomorrow” on the world has proved to have that kind of staying power, here’s an even bigger surprise: This revival of “Annie” is fabulous. Creatively staged by James Lapine, Stephen Sondheim’s longtime collaborator, and smartly cast from top to bottom, it makes a convincing case for a musical widely regarded by cynical adults as suitable only for consumption by the very, very young. Even if you’re a child-hating curmudgeon, you’ll come home grinning in spite of yourself.
What makes this “Annie” so special is that Mr. Lapine, who claims never to have seen the show prior to directing this production, decided to approach it not as an exercise in neon-lit nostalgia but as a hard-headed fable about life in the Great Depression. His Annie (Lilla Crawford) has a side-of-the-mouth Brooklyn-style accent, while Miss Hannigan (Katie Finneran), who runs the orphanage-sweatshop on whose doorstep Annie’s parents left her, is a nasty, drunken slut. And while the second act remains relentlessly optimistic–it couldn’t very well be anything else–Mr. Lapine has also succeeded in endowing the relationship between Annie and Daddy Warbucks (Anthony Warlow), the tough-guy tycoon who adopts her, with wholly credible emotion.
That last twist is the most striking aspect of Mr. Lapine’s staging, and his stars deserve great credit for bringing it to fruition. The eleven-year-old Ms. Crawford’s voice is (if I may resort to euphemism) penetrating, but she has more than enough acting talent to compensate for the undeniable fact that she sings REALLY LOUD. As for Mr. Warlow, an Australian musical-theater performer with extensive operatic experience, he’s destined for stage stardom. Not only does he sing “Something Was Missing,” his solo number, with bewitching finesse–vocal connoisseurs will be dazzled by his skillful use of head voice–but he acts as well as he sings….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
An interview with James Lapine and Andy Blankenbuehler, the director and choreographer of Annie:

TT: Keeping it personal

November 9, 2012 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I look at how artists respond to great public events like Hurricane Sandy–and how amateurs sometimes do a better job. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Here’s a safe bet: The e-mailboxes of every editor at every publishing house in Manhattan are filling up with proposals for novels about Hurricane Sandy. And here’s a safer one: If any of them actually get written, they’ll be awful.
cont_2187e38989864e2fb4aa6bf884b03192.jpgArtists of all kinds have a weakness for Big Statements. But few of them are equal to a challenge the size of Sandy, which laid waste to much of the eastern seaboard. Consider the art created in response to 9/11. Was any of it good? Truth to tell, just about all of it is already forgotten, and rightly so. Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” classical composer John Adams’ “On the Transmigration of Souls,” singer-songwriter Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll,” sculptor Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman”: All now seem hopelessly inadequate to the task of embodying such an event, much less clarifying its human impact….
Who, then, will best tell posterity what it was like to be on the receiving end of Sandy? If I had to guess, I’d look to the innumerable photographers–most of them point-and-shoot amateurs–who have spent the last couple of weeks sharing images of the storm and its aftermath on Flickr and Instagram. Their snapshots are anything but slick. All they show is how things looked: Refrigerators in front yards, uprooted trees and caved-in roofs, flooded tunnels, darkened houses on the edge of collapse, and water everywhere. Naïve? Sure, but that’s what makes them so telling. Another way of describing them is unpretentious. Such photos are properly modest in the face of the nightmare that is a natural disaster. Instead of preaching a sermon, they invite you to look–and despair….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

November 9, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“‘The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.'”
T.H. White, The Once and Future King

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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