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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Half of perfection

April 29, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review the last two Broadway openings of the 2015-16 season, Shuffle Along and Tuck Everlasting. Here’s an excerpt.

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BN-NN281_SHUFFL_P_20160412171820The first half of George C. Wolfe’s “Shuffle Along” is to 2016 what “Hamilton” was to 2015: It’s the musical you’ve got to see, even if you have to hock your Maserati to pay for the ticket. The cast, led by Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter, is as charismatic as you’d expect, and Savion Glover’s near-nonstop choreography explodes off the stage with the unrelenting impact of a flamethrower. But then comes intermission, and what had looked like a masterpiece goes flat and stays that way.

What’s wrong with “Shuffle Along”? In order to explain why the show doesn’t work, it’s necessary to start by explaining what it tries to do. The original “Shuffle Along,” which is now forgotten save by theater historians, was one of the very first all-black Broadway musicals to score a major commercial success. It can’t be revived because the book, by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles, is dated beyond hope of revision, but the jazzy Eubie Blake-Noble Sissle score (which is now best remembered for “I’m Just Wild About Harry”) still retains much of its punch and charm. Hence Mr. Wolfe’s show, whose title, “Shuffle Along, or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” sums up his approach. He has taken the score and used it as the basis for a “42nd Street”-style backstage musical that not only tells how “Shuffle Along” was made but seeks to explain its historic significance…

113527Mr. Wolfe, who directed “Shuffle Along” and wrote the book, has thus tried to cram two different but related shows onto the same stage, one of them a flashy, more or less traditional musical-with-a-message and the other a sober-sided play-with-songs about a little-known but nonetheless important episode in the history of black culture in America. The problem is that the first act, in which the emphasis is placed almost exclusively on the production numbers, is so viscerally entertaining that you can’t help but feel disappointed when the dancing stops and the talking starts—especially since the talking, while undeniably interesting, is for the most part undramatic, even bookish….

“Tuck Everlasting,” Natalie Babbitt’s immensely and deservedly successful 1975 children’s novel about immortality and its discontents, has now been turned into a modestly proportioned, low-key Broadway musical about a family whose members wander into an enchanted wood, drink unwittingly from a fountain of youth and live—and live—to regret it. The results aren’t perfect by any means, and the pop-folk score (music by Chris Miller, lyrics by Nathan Tysen) owes far too much to “Into the Woods” for comfort. Still, “Tuck Everlasting” realizes enough of its ambitions to be watchable…

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To read my review of Shuffle Along, go here.

To read my review of Tuck Everlasting, go here.

A CBS Sunday Morning feature about Shuffle Along:

Replay: Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert sing “Tonight”

April 29, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERACarol Lawrence and Larry Kert sing “Tonight” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The song, by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, is from the score of West Side Story. This performance, which documents Jerome Robbins’ staging of the number for the original Broadway production, was originally telecast by CBS on November 2, 1958:

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

Almanac: Gavin Creel on the anxieties of actors

April 29, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“We’re all insecure. We’re all neurotic. We’re all trying so hard to figure our process out. And kindness behooves you, because you’ve got to come back the next day and do it again.”

Gavin Creel (interviewed by Dave Itzkoff in “For the Cast of ‘She Loves Me,’ It’s the Sweet Smell of a Revival,” New York Times, March 2, 2016)

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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