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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

What theater is for

September 11, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two out-of-town shows, a Chicago revival of The Price and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere of Head Over Heels. Here’s an excerpt.

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For all his fame, Arthur Miller was never all that commercially successful. Only two of his plays, “Death of a Salesman” and “The Price,” ran for more than a year on Broadway, and “The Price,” though it was telecast on NBC in 1971 and continues to receive occasional high-profile revivals, isn’t nearly as well known as “Salesman.” So when Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company announced that it was staging “The Price” and that the cast would include Mike Nussbaum, I knew I had to be there. Mr. Nussbaum (who is, believe it or not, 91 years old) isn’t widely known outside his home town, but he’s one of America’s best character actors. I’ve seen him in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim, and he’s always knocked me flat. This time, however, he’s outdone himself—though not at the expense of the production, which is so unremittingly taut that I found it all but impossible to look away from the stage long enough to scribble notes on what I was seeing. Maybe that’s the definition of a really good show: one that Mr. Nussbaum can’t steal because everybody else in the cast is as good as he is….

ThePrice_1A658-1024x731Part of what makes “The Price” so good is that Miller somehow managed to steer clear of the bloviatory sermonizing of his other plays, “Salesman” in particular. He claimed long after the fact that it was really an allegory of America’s involvement in Vietnam, but if so, he covered his symbolic tracks so carefully that it’s hard to see what he meant. Far from being obviously political, “The Price” is a life study of the power of unacknowledged pride to corrode family ties, and though the last 15 minutes are a bit stagy, that doesn’t make them any less riveting.

Louis Contey, who directed TimeLine’s marvelously low-keyed 2010 production of “Frost/Nixon,” has worked no less subtle wonders with “The Price.” I’ve never seen four actors listen so closely to their onstage colleagues: They seem to hang on one another’s words, thereby drawing you into the sticky web of mistrust in which their characters are trapped….

Jeff Whitty’s “Head Over Heels” is a new jukebox musical in which the punkish power-pop songs of the Go-Go’s (“We Got the Beat”) are made to serve as musical accompaniment to an extremely free verse adaptation of “Arcadia,” Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, whose sexy plot has a startlingly modern feel. I relished the ingeniousness with which Mr. Whitty has slotted the songs into the unfolding dramatic action, and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s production is frisky and genial. Not so, alas, the book, unless you go in for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire iambic-pentameter humor…

* * *

To read my review of The Price, go here.

To read my review of Head Over Heels, go here.

A scene from TimeLine Theatre’s production of The Price:

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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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