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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 18, 2014

Two for the show

July 18, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I return to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival to catch up with its other two summer shows, The Liar and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Here’s an excerpt.

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The acid test of a new comedy is how well it works the second time you see it. On first viewing, you’re too busy laughing to give any thought to its staying power, much less to the many ways in which the staging and performances are enhancing the effectiveness of the script. It’s for that reason that I made a point of catching the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Liar,” David Ives’ rhyming “translaptation” of Pierre Corneille’s 1643 verse play about a can-you-top-this serial exaggerator (played by Jason O’Connell) who is incapable of telling the unadorned truth. When I first saw it at Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre, I came away willing to bet that it was the funniest play ever written, give or take “Noises Off.” Now that I’ve seen “The Liar” done by a different cast, I’m sure of it.

safe_image.phpMr. O’Connell has the perfect sense of timing that’s needed in order to sustain Mr. Ives’ comic tirades all the way to the payoff. A burly stand-up comedian turned classical actor who is blessed with a broad, expressive face, he’s equally adept at speaking verse and doing pratfalls….

Eric Tucker is best known as the artistic director of Bedlam, the vest-pocket drama company whose shoestring-simple four-person productions of “Hamlet” and “Saint Joan” last season made him one of the most talked-about stage directors in New York. Now he’s making his Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival debut with “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in which he proves to be identically and gratifyingly adept at what you might call lowbrow-highbrow comedy.

Hudson Valley goes in for high-concept stagings of Shakespeare’s comedies, and Mr. Tucker has obliged by turning “Two Gentlemen” into a “Your Show of Shows”-style parody of an Italian beach-blanket movie, with everybody dressed in the gaudiest possible Sunday-comics primary colors (bravo, Rebecca Lustig, for your million-kilowatt costumes) and accompanied by super-hip incidental music that ranges from Lana Del Rey to will.i.am. Mr. Tucker’s knack for physical comedy is so sure that the audience even kept on laughing when a thunderstorm drowned out the actors’ dialogue….

* * *

To read my review of The Liar, go here.

To read my review of Two Gentlemen of Verona, go here.

UPDATE: I mistakenly credited Christopher V. Edwards with the staging of The Liar in today’s review. In fact, the show was directed by Russell Treyz. Edwards staged the Othello that I reviewed last Friday. My humble apologies.

Trouble for the fat lady

July 18, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the current situation at the Metropolitan Opera—and, more generally, the state of opera in America today. Here’s an excerpt.

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MetButton1Classical music’s number-one news story is the plight of the Metropolitan Opera, whose general manager, Peter Gelb, is facing the possibility of a crippling strike. For that reason, what he said in a recent interview deserves to be quoted at length: “Grand opera is in itself a kind of a dinosaur of an art form….The question is not whether I think I’m doing a good job or not in trying to keep the [Metropolitan Opera] alive. It’s whether I’m doing a good job or not in the face of a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form.”

Is that buck-passing defeatism, or a fair appraisal of the state of American opera?

Consider what Mr. Gelb said in a later interview, this one with the BBC. Asked about the long-term effects on audience development of the Met’s much-ballyhooed movie-house simulcasts, he replied that “75% of [the audience members] are over 65, and 30% of them are over 75….How can we possibly hope to create new audiences for this art form if we are not introducing them or educating them?” At the Met, such questions still make sense. It is, after all, a 3,800-seat house whose average ticket price is a whopping $156, whose new productions are often pointlessly glitzy and whose choice of repertoire is conservative to the point of stodginess. Of the 26 works scheduled for this coming season, only three were written after World War I.

But many critics believe that American opera elsewhere is entering a new golden age. “American—and new American—opera has become commonplace all over the land,” says Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times. “The art form is not standing still. It’s growing, uncontrollably, by leaps and messy bounds.” And other opera executives have distanced themselves from Mr. Gelb’s pessimistic remarks. One of them, Keith Cerny, general director of the Dallas Opera, says that his company’s simulcasts, which are beamed into a football stadium, are reaching a much younger audience: “Only around 20% of [the Dallas Opera’s] simulcast audience is 65 or older….and 60% is younger than 55.” As for Houston Grand Opera, it sold 92% of its available seats last season, and is about to post its fourth consecutive balanced budget.

I don’t know anybody in the opera business who isn’t worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. Many of them inevitably see old-fashioned grand opera as hopelessly unhip. But anyone who gives it a try nowadays is in for a surprise. A growing number of American companies, including Dallas and Houston, are jumping on the new-and-unfamiliar-opera bandwagon, and doing so without busting their budgets….

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Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Anthony Trollope’s rule for success in journalism

July 18, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything.”

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

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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