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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Without sequins

October 31, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Broadway shows, Sting’s The Last Ship and a revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. Neither is up to scratch. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

tn-500_jm0318rthecastofthelastshipphotobyjoanmarcus.jpg.pagespeed.ce.GKpXtzcU6FWith “The Last Ship,” Sting becomes the latest sexagenarian rock star to try his hand at writing a Broadway musical—and the latest to blow it. Not that he didn’t have help galore from John Logan and Brian Yorkey, who have weighed him down with a stinker of a book. Nevertheless, his own mistakes merit careful consideration, if only in the hope of preventing other novices from galumphing down the same road to artistic ruin.

First, though, the book. As soon as the phrase “An industry dies” is uttered some 15 seconds into “The Last Ship,” you know everything that will happen for the next two-and-a-half hours: (A) Obsolescent factory (in this case, a shipyard) goes belly-up. (B) Angry workers join hands to reopen it, thereby (C) regaining their manhood. It is, in other words, the Universal British Plot, in this case meaning “Kinky Boots” minus sequins.

When you start out with clichés, you usually end up with them, and Messrs. Logan (“Red”) and Yorkey (“If/Then”) let ‘em fly throughout….

The anodyne pop-rock music of “The Last Ship,” which began life as an album-length song cycle, sounds like an anthology of B-sides—no, better make that C-sides. As for the lyrics, they are, predictably enough, dramatically inert: None of them tells you anything you don’t already know about the characters or the plot, meaning that this “ship” loses its momentum, goes dead in the water and starts to sink whenever anyone strikes up a tune….

The Roundabout Theatre Company is giving “The Real Thing,” Tom Stoppard’s stingingly truthful portrait of modern marriage and its discontents, its third Broadway outing in as many decades. That’s not too often, but only if the revivals are out of the ordinary, and Sam Gold’s lackluster staging fails to rise to the occasion.

Real-Thing-Broadway-Play-Group-Sales-Tickets-2-102214It happens that “The Real Thing” was done extraordinarily well at Chicago’s Writers’ Theatre in a standard-setting 2011 production directed by Michael Halberstam and starring Carrie Coon, with whom, thanks to “Gone Girl” and “The Leftovers,” the rest of America is now catching up. Maggie Gyllenhaal is playing the same role in New York—it is, surprisingly, her Broadway debut—but she doesn’t make anything like the same who-is-this-amazing-woman impression as did Ms. Coon. Also in the cast are Ewan McGregor (another Broadway debutant) and Cynthia Nixon, both of whom, like Ms. Gyllenhall, give performances that are forced and over-emphatic. Moreover, the overall pacing of the show is sluggish: “The Real Thing” demands a light, deceptively casual-sounding touch, and doesn’t get it.

Could it be that the production is getting in the way of the actors? Mr. Gold is an intelligent, imaginative interventionist who at his frequent best sheds sharp raking light on the plays that he stages. Here, though, his “innovations,” such as they are, have the meretricious smack of arbitrary cleverness…

* * *

To read my review of The Last Ship, go here.

To read my review of The Real Thing, go here.

A scene from Writers’ Theatre’s 2011 revival of The Real Thing, starring Carrie Coon:

Almanac: Aldous Huxley on aestheticism

October 31, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Where beauty is worshiped for beauty’s sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.”

Aldous Huxley, “The Substitutes for Religion”

So you want to see a show?

October 30, 2014 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
BxwClM8CIAA3kJL• Love Letters (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 1, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)
• This Is Our Youth (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 4, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Indian Ink (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 30, reviewed here)

• American Buffalo (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Country House (drama, PG-13, closes Nov. 9, reviewed here)

Almanac: Oscar Wilde on the charm of youth

October 30, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Snapshot: Flatt and Scruggs perform “Salty Dog Blues”

October 29, 2014 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERALester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys perform “Salty Dog Blues” on an undated telecast. The other members of the band are Paul Warren on fiddle, Josh Graves on dobro, Curly Seckler on mandolin, and Jake Turlock on bass:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

Almanac: J.M. Barrie on charm

October 29, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have. Some women, the few, have charm for all; and most have charm for one. But some have charm for none.”

J.M. Barrie, What Every Woman Knows

Ten moments of pure musical joy

October 28, 2014 by Terry Teachout

10. The moment toward the end of the overture to Gypsy when the first trumpet in the pit band starts screaming on the strip music. Everybody in the audience on opening night in 1959 must have known right then that the show was going to be a hit.

9. The finale of Ravel’s A Minor Trio. It always makes me think of fireworks in the sky.

PICT02858. The way Nancy LaMott sings the line “New Jersey gives us glue” on her record of Rhode Island Is Famous for You.

7. The chorus of The Weight. Enough said?

6. The coda of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture. When the violins take off, so do I.

5. The “piccolo solo” from Vladimir Horowitz’s piano transcription of Stars and Stripes Forever. Even if you only play a little bit of piano, you know this is the coolest thing in the world. And no, he didn’t overdub it. He didn’t have to.

4. From The Who Live at Leeds, the power chords at the end of Pete Townshend’s guitar solo on Shakin’ All Over.

3. Every second of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture, from start to finish.

2. Freddie Green’s rhythm-guitar strumming on the original Count Basie-Joe Williams cover version of Every Day I Have the Blues. If it doesn’t make you pat your foot, check to make sure you’ve got one.

And here’s my number-one moment of pure musical joy:

1. The end of the fugue that is the climax of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. When the brass comes in playing Purcell’s theme in major instead of minor, I always tear up.

Lookback: on supplying (and declining to supply) dust-jacket blurbs

October 28, 2014 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2004:

Not that multiple requests for blurbs clutter my mailbox each morning, but I am asked to supply quotes fairly frequently, occasionally from friends and colleagues, more often from publicists and authors I don’t know. Every time I open such a letter, I remember the wise words of an editor of mine who once assured me in a moment of candor that blurbs don’t sell books. “You know who they’re really for?” she added. “Our own salespeople. We use blurbs to convince them that our books are worth selling.”

A sobering thought, that….

Read the whole thing here.

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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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