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The Honorable Mr. McClean

February 6, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review an important Florida revival, Asolo Rep’s production of Maxwell Anderson’s Both Your Houses. Here’s an excerpt.

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For much of the 20th century, Maxwell Anderson was as hot as a playwright can be. Between 1923 and 1958, he wrote or collaborated on 29 plays and two musicals that made it to Broadway, a dozen of which were hits. Stage stars like Katharine Cornell, Rex Harrison, Helen Hayes, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne clamored to appear in his verse dramas, whose popular success led to a short-lived revival of the genre. He won a Pulitzer Prize, made the cover of Time and penned the lyrics to Kurt Weill’s “September Song,” which continues to be sung today. But Anderson’s over-earnest poeticizing became démodé long before his death in 1959, and none of his plays has ever been revived on Broadway.

abc_9884-300x202The only one to hold the stage today is the Pulitzer-winning “Both Your Houses,” a 1933 prose drama about corruption in Washington that has received a fair number of regional revivals, most recently by Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, which mounted it last October, and Florida’s Asolo Repertory Theatre, whose production has just opened. Never having seen a Maxwell Anderson play, I feared that this one would prove to be a dusty museum piece. I couldn’t have been further off target: “Both Your Houses” is a take-no-prisoners satire that crackles with fast-talking vitality, and Frank Galati’s slam-bang staging is as good as anything you’re likely to see on Broadway, or anywhere else, this season….

In Anderson’s play, a starry-eyed schoolteacher from Nevada with the too-good-to-be-true name of Alan McClean (Tom Coiner) wins a seat in the House, unaware that he was elected with the help of a cabal of unscrupulous contractors who expect him to unwittingly do their bidding by shoehorning a half-billion-dollar dam into the next appropriations bill….

What makes “Both Your Houses” so fresh, paradoxically enough, is its old-fashioned tone: It plays like a pre-Code Hollywood comedy full of plot twists and snappy comebacks. Most of the latter are delivered by Sol Fitzmaurice (Douglas Jones), a hard-drinking congressman of boundless cynicism (“By God, if there’s anything I hate more than store liquor, it’s an honest politician!”) who endeavors without success to school his fresh-faced friend in the profitable ways of politics. The women in the 16-person cast are just as hard-boiled—you half expect to see them chewing gum….

Mr. Galati, who also staged Asolo Rep’s flawless 2011 revival of “Twelve Angry Men,” clearly knows how to crack the whip in big-cast plays. Not only does he keep “Both Your Houses” charging forward, but he’s trimmed Anderson’s wordy script so skillfully that you’d never guess anything was missing. He also has at his disposal a redoubtable ensemble cast, with Mr. Jones, who stole the show in “Twelve Angry Men,” giving a raspy-voiced performance so deeply etched that you can all but feel his colleagues rising to the occasion….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from Remy Bumppo Theatre Company’s 2014 revival of Both Your Houses, directed by James Bohnen:

Almanac: J.K. Rowling on music

February 6, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘Ah, music,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘A magic far beyond all we do here!’”

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

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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