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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 27, 2014

More than a sermon

June 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a new play, Sarah Treem’s When We Were Young and Unafraid, and a revival, Barrington Stage’s Kiss Me, Kate. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Sarah Treem is the very model of a modern millennial playwright. She makes her living as a TV scriptwriter and showrunner (“House of Cards,” “In Treatment”) and salves her soul after hours by writing plays that, in her phrase, “put ideas on stage.” Sure enough, her latest effort, “When We Were Young and Unafraid,” a play about a shelter for battered women, is nothing if not idea-driven, and the familiar ideas are all straight out of the feminist playbook. That way lies predictability, which is the death of drama. On the other hand, her characters are—with one exception—fully recognizable human beings capable of saying and doing the unexpected, and the cast, led by Zoe Kazan and Cherry Jones and directed by Pam MacKinnon, performs “When We Were Young” with gratifying skill. The resulting tension makes for a show that is sometimes predictable but never dull….

BqazUG1IMAAbXmQMs. Kazan, the most gifted stage actor of her generation, gives another of the richly involving performances that we’ve come to take for granted from her, playing a pitifully awkward girl-woman who knows no other way to relate to men than to have sex with them…

“Kiss Me, Kate” belongs close to the top of any short list of great Broadway musicals, yet it doesn’t get performed nearly as often as it should. Fortunately, it’s now being done extremely well by Massachusetts’ Barrington Stage Company, whose 2013 revival of “On the Town” is Broadway-bound. That fact speaks well for the company’s ability to mount a full-scale musical-comedy production. So does this “Kiss Me, Kate,” directed by Joe Calarco, which is as good as any revival of the show that I’ve seen in the past decade….

* * *

To read my review of When We Were Young and Unafraid, go here.

To read my review of Kiss Me, Kate, go here.

The trailer for Kiss Me, Kate:

All over but the shouting

June 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

tn-500_satchmocurtwm20147556You only have four more chances to see the off-Broadway production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my one-person-three-character play about Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis, in which John Douglas Thompson is giving what pretty much everybody seems to agree is the performance of a lifetime (though maybe I should say performances, since it’s a triple role!).

John will be on stage at the Westside Theatre tonight at eight, Saturday at two-thirty and eight, and Sunday at three. I’m returning to New York from the road specifically to see John’s last show on Sunday afternoon.

To order tickets or for more information, go here. Don’t dally—we expect one or more of the final performances to sell out.

Almanac: John P. Marquand on the critic who creates

June 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“He was thinking that he was caught there in a sort of justice of his own contriving. He was thinking that he knew too much. There was no way of stilling the analytical sense which he had developed from examining other people’s work, and now that part of his mind was examining his own work remorselessly. It was an exquisite sort of retribution. He could see exactly what that other part of him, the submerged creative side of him, had been trying to do. The self-revelation of it was painful, but he had to face it. It was not that it was bad—he found himself wishing that it might have been frankly bad. Instead there was a veneer of accomplishment about it, a perfunctory sort of smartness, which made it worse. There was a veneer over the dialogue, a certain specious cleverness, but there was no conviction or emotion. The play he was reading had the plausibility and the coldness of a mechanical toy pirouetting on the sidewalk at Christmas time.”

John P. Marquand, So Little Time

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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