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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Mutual detraction

October 24, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two new plays, Billy & Ray and Disgraced. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay for “Double Indemnity” together in 1943, then spent the rest of their lives griping about one another. Chandler found Wilder’s breezy, bossy, self-assured manner so grating that he briefly quit the picture, later claiming that working with the younger man “was an agonizing experience and has probably shortened my life.” As for Wilder, he was equally exasperated by Chandler’s touch-me-not gentility, and since he outlived his co-author by four decades, he got the last word: “Apparently he had resigned because, while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through, I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said please.”

B0K3bkPCUAApuXJ.jpg-largeNow Mike Bencivenga has transformed their edgy but productive collaboration into an Off-Broadway play called “Billy & Ray,” and he’s persuaded Garry Marshall, who is best known for such big- and small-screen projects as “Pretty Woman” and “Laverne and Shirley,” to direct. It’s a neat idea on paper, but Mr. Bencivenga has come up with a glib, sitcom-flavored show that works well enough on stage—much of the second act is actually quite involving—but will still strike those who already know how “Double Indemnity” got written as something of a lost opportunity….

Ayad Akhtar’s “Disgraced,” which won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, has arrived on Broadway after successful runs in Chicago and at Lincoln Center Theatre. It’s about Amir (Hari Dhillon), a deracinated Pakistani émigré who renounces Islam as “a backward way of thinking,” moves to New York, marries a white painter with an acutely inflamed case of liberal guilt (Gretchen Mol) and becomes a hotshot litigator at a Jewish law firm, at which point he suddenly realizes that his Muslim roots go far deeper than his wife and colleagues ever suspected.

This is a genuinely provocative premise for an issue-driven play, and Mr. Akhtar deserves much credit for grappling honestly and forthrightly with what in other hands could easily have become a mealy-mouthed exercise in can’t-we-all-get-along difference-splitting. Unfortunately, his dramaturgy isn’t as impressive as his nerve. Not only do his characters spend far too much of the evening making speeches to one another, but every “surprise” is telegraphed so far in advance of its eventual arrival that you find yourself getting actively impatient for the reveals….

* * *

To read my review of Billy & Ray, go here.

To read my review of Disgraced, go here.

My favorite speech from Billy Wilder’s 1944 film version of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, featuring Edward G. Robinson:

Closing our browsers

October 24, 2014 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider how the shift from bookstore to online book buying is changing American culture. Here’s an excerpt.

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On a recent trip to Chicago, I spent an hour wandering through the Seminary Co-Op, the University of Chicago’s much-loved independent bookstore, which claims to have more than 100,000 titles in stock at any given moment. I bought three books during my visit. One of them, Stephen Parker’s “Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life,” had been on my literary radar screen since August, when I read the Times Literary Supplement’s review. Not so the others, Todd Decker’s “Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz,” which came out in 2011, and “Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert,” a monograph by Catherine Tackley that was published two years ago. I make a point of keeping up with new books about film, dance and jazz, but somehow I hadn’t heard of either one.

CT  met-book-parade 1120 mhWhat’s the point of this anecdote? Just this: It was solely because I visited the Seminary Co-Op that I bought those two books. Yet it had been at least two years, if not more, since I’d set foot in a large brick-and-mortar bookstore. Nor can I remember the last time that I went into a record store of any size. Like a fast-growing number of Americans, I now do virtually all of my book and record buying online. It’s cheaper and infinitely more convenient to click a few keys and be done with it.

That’s the good part. Here’s the bad part: Nowadays I buy a book or record only because I’m specifically looking for it. But when I went to the Seminary Co-Op, I browsed purely for the sake of browsing, and in so doing made two happy discoveries. Had I not stumbled across “Music Makes Me” and “Benny Goodman’s Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert” purely by chance, I doubt I would ever have learned of their existence, much less bought and read them.

In 2006 I noted in this space that online stores like Amazon were “seeking to replace the personal touch…with ‘preference engines’ that automatically generate computerized lists of ‘other items you might enjoy’ each time you make a purchase.” Eight years later, I can report that these marketing tools haven’t made the slightest bit of difference in my own life. So far as I can recall, I’ve never bought an “other item you might enjoy” from Amazon, not even once.

For me, then, preference engines have not replaced browsing. But neither has anything else. As a result, I no longer browse. What’s more, I suspect that my experience is widely shared. Browsing, it appears, will soon be as dead as dial phones. That constitutes a huge cultural shift, one whose unintended consequences are not yet clear. Still, I’m sure that they’re going to be significant, and if I had to guess, I’d say they’ll be harmful….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: George S. Patton on how to delegate

October 24, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

George S. Patton, War as I Knew It

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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