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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 18, 2016

Immersed in Tolstoy

November 18, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Broadway transfer of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, directed by Rachel Chavkin. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Immersive theater is, we’re assured, the irresistible panacea that will inspire millennials to put down their smartphones and come charging into theaters at last…but what is it? As most people now use the phrase, immersive theater (which has actually been around forever—that’s how Harold Prince staged “Candide” on Broadway in 1974) jettisons the traditional actors-here-audience-there paradigm, replacing it with an in-your-face style in which the audience is invited to participate in the action of the show. Take “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” Dave Malloy’s musical version of part of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” which has moved to Broadway in a scaled-up version starring Josh Groban. To make it immersive, the Imperial Theatre, a 1,400-seat proscenium-arch house, has been transformed by Mimi Lien, the scenic designer, into a fancy-tacky Russian nightclub with onstage cabaret seating for 200 and a series of ramps that let the cast wander at will among the rest of the audience….

unspecified-31For all its explosive liveliness, Ms. Chavkin’s staging looks like a hopped-up concert version of a musical, not a bonafide Broadway show, and it serves mainly to paper over the essentially undramatic nature of “The Great Comet,” which feels less like an opera than a cantata—or, rather, a novel sung out loud. Large chunks of the unrhymed text come directly from Tolstoy’s book, and the characters spend most of their onstage time telling us what’s happening and how they feel about it instead of showing us. This impression is reinforced by Mr. Malloy’s songs, whose “tunes” are flattened-out non-melodies that exist only to carry the relentlessly wordy text and are superimposed on riffy vamps and short, oft-repeated harmonic cells. If that suggests minimalism, there’s a reason: Much of “The Great Comet” sounds quite a bit like what I imagine Philip Glass might have written had he decided to be a pop singer-songwriter, not a classical composer….

Minimalism mostly bores me, but there’s more than one way to write a show, and I freely acknowledge the extreme cleverness and originality of “The Great Comet.” I just wish it didn’t seem at least 45 minutes longer than it really is.

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

“What Is the Comet,” a short documentary film about Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812:

Replay: Howard Lindsay appears in Life With Father

November 18, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAHoward Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney appear in a scene from Life With Father, a play adapted by Lindsay and Russel Crouse from Clarence Day’s autobiographical essays. The scene is introduced by Oscar Hammerstein II. Lindsay and Stickney created the roles of Father and Vinnie in the original production of the play, directed by Bretaigne Windust, which opened in New York in 1939 and ran for 3,224 performances, making it the longest-running straight play in the history of Broadway. This performance was originally seen on The Ford 50th Anniversary Show, directed by Jerome Robbins and simulcast by CBS and NBC on June 15, 1953:

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

Almanac: Tennessee Williams on the sine qua non of playwriting

November 18, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“What shouldn’t you do if you’re a young playwright? Don’t bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it’ll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.”

Tennessee Williams (interviewed by Dotson Rader in The Paris Review, Fall 1981)

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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