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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 20, 2014

Right score, wrong book

June 20, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two New York shows, Holler if Ya Hear Me and Much Ado About Nothing. Here’s an excerpt.

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Thirty-five years after the release of “Rapper’s Delight,” the first full-fledged rap record, Broadway finally has its very own hip-hop jukebox musical. “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” whose score consists of 21 songs by Tupac Shakur, is (says the publicist) “a non-biographical story about friendship, family, revenge, change and hope.” The presumptive reason why it’s “non-biographical” is because the producers don’t own the rights to Mr. Shakur’s life story. Whether they sought to acquire those rights isn’t known, but “Holler if Ya Hear Me” would likely have been more interesting if they had.

tn-500_screenshot2014-06-06at3.15.12pm.jpg.pagespeed.ce.6Rxb4orFkqIn addition to being a popular rapper, Mr. Shakur was—to put it mildly—a piece of work. Born in 1971 to a pair of Black Panthers, he made his stage debut at 12 in a Harlem production of “A Raisin in the Sun,” cut his first solo album in 1991 (Dan Quayle denounced it), made his first movie in 1992, did time for “first-degree sexual assault” in 1995 and was killed in a drive-by shooting in 1996. His murderers were never found.

That’s a story I’d pay to see. Not so Todd Kreidler’s book for “Holler if Ya Hear Me,” a thrice-told tale of ghetto life that’s full of carbon-copied dialogue (“I always wanted you to be good—good in ways I wasn’t”) and ends with a violent denouement close enough to “West Side Story” to be actionable. This may explain why Kenny Leon’s staging of the show’s dialogue scenes is so slackly paced: He had nothing to work with.

The songs are another matter altogether, though it should be said up front that Daryl Waters, who is credited with “music supervision, orchestrations and arrangements,” has in fact transformed many of Mr. Shakur’s spoken monologues into something more like traditional theatrical songs, adding melodically fleshed-out choral parts and laying the lyrics on top of sophisticated, jazz-flavored accompaniments played by a first-class pit band. The idea, I assume, was to make the score more immediately accessible to Broadway audiences. It works, too: “Holler” is one of the best-sounding new musicals to come to Broadway in quite some time. That said, the hardest-hitting songs, like the title tune, are usually the ones that most closely resemble Mr. Shakur’s plainer recorded performances….

Jack O’Brien, lately of “The Nance,” has made his Shakespeare in the Park debut with an undemanding, thoroughly amiable staging of “Much Ado About Nothing” in which Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater play Beatrice and Benedick, both of whom affect to hold marriage in contempt but succumb (after much friendly skullduggery) to its charms. Appropriately enough, Mr. O’Brien has given us an al fresco reworking of Shakespeare’s play in which the action is updated to Sicily circa 1900. It’s an eminently logical transposition, and John Lee Beatty, the set designer, has made it even more plausible by erecting on the stage of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater a sun-kissed villa whose accoutrements include a working fountain, a climbable orange tree and a vegetable patch…

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To read my review of Holler if Ya Hear Me, go here.

To read my review of Much Ado About Nothing, go here.

America first

June 20, 2014 by Terry Teachout

CRI_151227In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I outline my plan for a compulsory year-long nationwide high-school course called “The American Experience in Art.” In lieu of an excerpt from the column, here are the works on my proposed syllabus:

• Two full-length novels, Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

• One short novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

• Two plays, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

• A selection of poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes

• One group of paintings, Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, studied in conjunction with a selection of recordings by Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington

• One dance, Martha Graham’s Appalachian Spring (music by Aaron Copland)

• One musical, Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (choreography by Jerome Robbins, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim)

• Three films, John Ford’s The Searchers, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (music by Bernard Herrmann) and William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

A 1959 performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company of Appalachian Spring:

Almanac: Viktor Frankl on the meaning of life

June 20, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

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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