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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 21, 2016

Not since Stoppard

October 21, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two Roundabout Theatre Company productions, the U.S. premiere of Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love and a Broadway revival of The Cherry Orchard. Here’s an excerpt.

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The baby boomers are starting, at long last, to march off history’s stage, fervently congratulating themselves on their immortal specialness as they reluctantly quit the scene. My guess, though, is that their theatrical obituary, which will be penned by their resentful children, won’t be a warm one. Mike Bartlett, a 36-year-old British playwright who has attracted much attention on both sides of the Atlantic with “Cock” and “King Charles III,” tried his hand at writing the first draft in 2010 with “Love, Love, Love,” a serious comedy about inter-generational conflict that has nothing good to say about his parents’ generation. “Love, Love, Love” is now making its American debut courtesy of the Roundabout Theatre Company, which is presenting the play in the Laura Pels Theater, its off-Broadway house, in a production directed by Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”). It’s a major event: Mr. Bartlett has given us what looks on first viewing like the best stage comedy to come along since Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing”…

tn-500_0073_benrosenfieldzoekazanrichardarmitageinlovelovelovephotobyjoanmarcus2016The three acts of “Love, Love, Love,” respectively set in 1967, 1990 and 2011, play like John Osborne rewritten by Neil Simon: The laughs are piled high atop one another, but they’re bracingly angry. In the first act, Sandra (Amy Ryan), a self-consciously free middle-class spirit who does her thing regardless of consequences, comes to the apartment of Henry (Alex Hurt), her working-class boyfriend, to sleep with him. Then she gets a look at Kenneth (Richard Armitage), his feckless roommate and younger brother, and decides on the spot to bed him instead—in part, I suspect, because he’s more upwardly mobile. (Kenneth landed a scholarship to Oxford, while the hard-working Henry is holding down a solid but dull job.) A quarter-century later, they’re married, monied and the parents of Rose and Jamie (Zoe Kazan and Ben Rosenfield), whose welfare they disregard when they decide on a whim to get divorced. By 2011, Kenneth and Sandra are doing just fine, but their children’s lives have been smashed by their selfishness….

“Love, Love, Love” is, in short, a morality play, but one so well made and pulverizingly funny that it hardly ever feels preachy….

Simon Godwin’s Roundabout Theatre Company revival of “The Cherry Orchard” is the most pointless production of a Chekhov play I’ve ever seen, a stylistic mélange whose ill-fitting parts give the impression of having been hammered together out of three or four different jigsaw puzzles. While the production, like the play itself, is nominally set at the dawn of the 20th century, Mr. Godwin’s clattery, hectic staging suggests an exceptionally unsubtle Chekhov-our-contemporary modern-dress version. Stephen Karam’s workmanlike new adaptation recasts the play in an unpoetic English that is scabbed over with up-to-the-second slang (“Get out!”) and given a vulgarizing shot of progressive politics…

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To read my review of Love, Love, Love, go here.

To read my review of The Cherry Orchard, go here.

A scene from Love, Love, Love, starring Zoe Kazan and Amy Ryan:

Replay: The opening of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V

October 21, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAThe main titles and prologue of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The score is by William Walton:

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

Almanac: Bertrand Russell on the limits of skepticism

October 21, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Skepticism as a philosophy is not merely doubt, but what may be called dogmatic doubt. The man of science says ‘I think it is so-and-so, but I am not sure.’ The man of intellectual curiosity says ‘I don’t know how it is, but I hope to find out.’ The philosophical Skeptic says ‘nobody knows and nobody ever can know.’ It is this element of dogmatism that makes the system vulnerable.”

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

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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