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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 20, 2015

Bedtime story (complete with snores)

November 20, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two New York productions, the Broadway premiere of Misery and an off-Broadway revival of Incident at Vichy. Here’s an excerpt.

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Now that the commodity musical is here to stay, the obvious next step is the commodity play. That’s “Misery” all over. Adapted by William Goldman from his screenplay for the 1990 film version of Stephen King’s best-selling novel, it’s strictly for those who liked the movie so much that they’re willing to pay to see it re-enacted onstage—so long as the cast includes a screen star. Enter Bruce Willis, who hasn’t set foot on a New York stage for three decades but needs no introduction to the kind of person who goes to Broadway plays solely to see stars in the flesh. Nor is there any other reason to go to “Misery,” which has nothing else to offer save for the chance to get Mr. Willis’ autograph after the show.

CT2_vXJWwAE1d8_.jpg-largeYou know the plot: Mr. Willis plays Paul, a romance novelist who crashes his car in Colorado and awakes to find himself laid up in the spare bedroom of Annie (Laurie Metcalf), a middle-aged nurse who claims to be his “number-one fan.” Not only are both of his legs broken, but Annie turns out to be crazy….

While the film of “Misery” simplifies the novel, it succeeds spectacularly well in scaring the audience, in large part because of Kathy Bates’ Oscar-winning performance as Annie, which is both creepy and (here’s the key) completely plausible. Not so “Misery: The Play,” which is as scary as a lukewarm cup of Nesquik. Two big things are wrong with it: Mr. Willis never seems even slightly frightened, and Ms. Metcalf, though she leaves you in no doubt of her craziness, isn’t pitiful….

Arthur Miller’s “Incident at Vichy,” which was last performed in New York six years ago and hasn’t been seen on Broadway since the original production closed there in 1965, is a creakily earnest one-act play about a group of 10 Frenchmen, most of them Jewish, who are ordered by the Vichy police to report to “a place of detention” (Miller’s words) for unknown reasons. Ninety minutes later…but you can figure the rest out for yourself. While waiting to learn their unsurprising fate, they make speeches, some of them craven, others noble, and all written in the well-known Miller manner…

Michael Wilson, lately of “The Trip to Bountiful,” ratchets up the dramatic tension much higher than you’d think it could possibly go, and his ensemble cast is superior…

* * *

To read my review of Misery, go here.

To read my review of Incident at Vichy, go here

Is Fawlty Towers fascist?

November 20, 2015 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I offer a transatlantic perspective on the racial-sensitivity imbroglio at Yale. Here’s an excerpt.

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Erika Christakis, a lecturer at Yale’s Child Study Center who doubles as associate master of the university’s Silliman College, called forth the demons last month when she replied to a mass e-mail from Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Council urging students not to wear “culturally unaware or insensitive” costumes on Halloween. If you keep up with the safe-spaces-and-trigger-warnings movement, you know that the only acceptable response to such a memo is in the abject affirmative. Instead, Ms. Christakis asked this seemingly reasonable question: “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious…a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” This set off an explosion of student outrage, followed by a groveling apology from Yale’s president….

article-0-1A6B460C00000578-745_634x393Around the same time that Yale caved in to the grievance merchants, the British Broadcasting Corporation announced that it will make 10,000 hours of TV programming from the ‘70s available for online downloading by residents of the United Kingdom—including a number of once-popular comedies that network executives long ago banned from the airwaves as racially insensitive. One of them, believe it or not, is an episode of John Cleese’s “Fawlty Towers,” the funniest sitcom ever made, that the BBC will no longer broadcast in unexpurgated form because it puts “insensitive” racial epithets in the mouth of…yes…a pompous old bigot.

I tremble to think what the BBC would do with “All in the Family” videos. Torch them, probably. Nevertheless, the network has now decided to allow similar shows of its own to be purchased online, accompanied by warning labels proclaiming each one to be “an un-PC product of its time but remains a cherished piece of vintage comedy.” Note, by the way, that political correctness is a good thing in the BBC’s Orwellian lexicon. Even so, it is still deigning to let individual viewers choose (for now) what they want to watch in the privacy of their own homes.

The significance of this approach ought to be more obvious than it is nowadays: It acknowledges that what’s offensive to some may well be innocuous to others. To suppress a work merely because certain viewers find it “insensitive” is the first step down a Teflon-coated slope that can lead straight to full-blown censorship—so why not leave to the individual the choice of whether to consume it?…

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Read the whole thing here.

Replay: George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes

November 20, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAThe pas de deux and finale from George Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes, danced by Melissa Hayden, Jacques d’Amboise, and New York City Ballet. The music is by John Philip Sousa, arranged by Hershy Kay. This performance was originally telecast on NBC’s Bell Telephone Hour on February 10, 1959:

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

Almanac: Henri-Frédéric Amiel on melancholy

November 20, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal intime (trans. Mrs. Humphry Ward)

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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