Archives for March 27, 2015

Amy Herzog’s second coming

March 27, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the first installment of the Amy Herzog Festival currently being presented by Baltimore’s Center Stage, a revival of After the Revolution. Here’s an excerpt.

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What does a young playwright have to do in order to be thought important? At 36, Amy Herzog appears to be well on her way to filling the bill. Though she has yet to make it to Broadway or win a Pulitzer, Herzog has written four plays that have been produced in New York and are currently being performed from coast to coast. Now Baltimore’s Center Stage, one of America’s leading regional companies, is mounting an “Amy Herzog Festival” in which her most successful plays, “After the Revolution” and “4000 Miles,” will be presented in repertory in productions directed by Lila Neugebauer. It’s the first time that the two plays, which share a central character and a common theme, have been done together.

Such an occasion is a clear sign of potential top-tier stature—and “After the Revolution,” the 2010 play that initially brought Ms. Herzog wider attention, is worthy of the treatment that Center Stage is giving it. Of all the new plays that I’ve reviewed in this space, “After the Revolution” is one of the half-dozen that impressed me most on first viewing, and it’s just as good the second time around.

Life is forever handing juicy plots to writers, but what they do with them is something else again. Ms. Herzog found out in 1999 that Julius Joseph, her father’s stepfather, had been a Soviet spy during World War II. (His code name was “Cautious.”) What she did with that knowledge was spin it into a play about a fictional “red-diaper” family whose senior members all have long-standing ties to the Communist Party. Emma Joseph (Ashton Heyl), the central character, is a priggish young political activist who is stunned by the revelation that Joe Joseph, her late grandfather, who lost his job in the ‘50s because of his party membership and became a progressive martyr, spied for the Russians and lied to Congress about it. Worse yet, the rest of her family, including Vera (Lois Markle), Emma’s beloved grandmother, knew all along—and lied to her about it…..

What is most striking about “After the Revolution” is that Ms. Herzog has dissected the follies of the Josephs not with splenetic outrage but with cool, crisp detachment. Her dialogue glitters with the knowing wit of a sharp-eyed observer familiar with all the ins and outs of the cozy milieu about which she writes. And while no one gets off easy, least of all the chokingly earnest Emma, Ms. Herzog makes us laugh at her characters instead of stooping to preachiness—which adds to the climactic force with which she finds them all, Emma included, guilty of complacency in the first degree.

Ms. Neugebauer, who directed the Signature Theatre Company’s excellent 2014 revival of A.R. Gurney’s “The Wayside Motor Inn,” has staged “After the Revolution” with identical skill. Under her sensitive guidance, Center Stage’s first-rate cast appears to be not an ensemble but a flesh-and-blood family whose members are joined at the hip by love and frustration—and anger….

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Read the whole thing here.

Scenes from Playwrights Horizon’s 2010 New York premiere of After the Revolution:

Broadway’s forgotten jazzman

March 27, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about Cy Coleman, one of my favorite songwriters. Here’s an excerpt.

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Long after their passing, many of the key figures of the bygone era now known as the Golden Age of American Popular Song are still widely known by name—many, but not all. When you think of “I Got Rhythm,” you think of George Gershwin, but when you think of “Witchcraft,” you think of Frank Sinatra, whose finger-snapping 1957 record of that hipper-than-thou tune is featured on the soundtrack of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Yet Cy Coleman, who penned the music to “Witchcraft,” “Big Spender” and numerous other blue-chip standards, was one of the most consistently and deservedly successful songwriters of the postwar era. Between 1960 and his death in 2004, he wrote the scores for 11 musicals that made it to Broadway, where he worked with Lucille Ball, Sid Caesar, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Bob Fosse, Neil Simon and Gwen Verdon. Most of these shows had long, lucrative runs, and one, “On the Twentieth Century,” has just hit big in its first Broadway revival.

By all rights, then, Coleman ought to be as well remembered as Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. So why is his name little known save to connoisseurs of Broadway musicals and popular song? How could so excellent an artist have fallen into the memory hole?…

Born in New York in 1929, Coleman was a musical prodigy who underwent rigorous classical training but shrugged it off to play piano in high-end hotel lounges and supper clubs. He was, in fact, the only golden-age songwriter to have started out as a full-time jazz instrumentalist, an experience that shaped his composing style. “Witchcraft” is one of many tunes by Coleman that are built out of the short, swinging rhythmic phrases that jazzmen call “riffs,” and he also employed the complex harmonies of modern jazz….

Then as now, jazziness signified cultural sophistication, and most of Coleman’s hits featured the like-minded lyrics of Carolyn Leigh, who in “Witchcraft,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “I Walk a Little Faster” and “I’ve Got Your Number” wrote eloquently of the ins, outs, ups and downs of big-city romance: “Oh, yes, you’ll brag a lot,/Wave your own flag a lot,/But you’re unsure a lot,/You’re a lot like me.” Coleman’s heavily syncopated tunes fit her sexy sentiments like a bespoke sharkskin suit….

Coleman’s musical sophistication made it possible for him to jump from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, where he proved equally adept at writing theatrical songs that propel the plot of a musical instead of telling self-contained stories. He made the switch just in time, a few years before rock shoved aside golden-age pop to become the lingua franca of American popular music. Though Coleman did all he could to come to terms with the new music, he neither liked nor understood it….

Broadway, which also had no use for rock, kept Coleman afloat and made him rich—but at a high price. He increasingly turned away from jazz, opting instead to become a stylistic chameleon…

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Read the whole thing here.

The first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, a 1959 TV variety series hosted by Hugh Hefner. Cy Coleman, the first guest, sings and plays “Witchcraft,” accompanied by Charlie Shavers on trumpet: