• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2017 / February / Archives for 17th

Archives for February 17, 2017

Dumb blonde gets smart

February 17, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Sarasota revival of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Few commercial comedies age well, but the best ones can retain their charm long after their contemporaneity has faded. Among them is Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday,” whose original 1946 stage production set Judy Holliday on the path to stardom. The 2011 Broadway revival should have done the same thing for Nina Arianda, who put her own deliciously personal spin on Billie Dawn, the not-so-dumb dumb blonde who became Holliday’s signature role. But the other leads were erratically cast, and the production as a whole failed to make a sufficiently strong impression on the public at large, closing after just 73 performances. I’ve been waiting ever since for a first-class regional company to take a fresh shot at “Born Yesterday.” Now Sarasota’s Asolo Repertory Theatre has done the honors with a version directed by Peter Amster that is consistently winning. If they’d done “Born Yesterday” like this on Broadway six years ago, it’d still be open.

Casting, the saying goes, is two-thirds of directing, and Mr. Amster has dealt himself a handful of aces. Christina DeCicco plays Billie, a chorus girl turned rich man’s mistress, in the familiar manner of Holliday, yet there’s nothing mechanical about the way in which she evokes her model. She wears the role like a second skin, punching the laugh lines in a voice of solid brass while never letting us forget that beneath her sexy surface, Billie is a painfully vulnerable woman who hates herself for having hitched her wagon to the dark star of Harry Brock (Norm Boucher), a boorish thug who claims to “love that broad” but slaps her around whenever she fails to toe the line.

Mr. Boucher looks and sounds like a refrigerator with a klaxon horn hidden in the freezer, and he invests his part with the hard edge of barely controlled violence that was missing from Jim Belushi’s buffoonish Broadway performance….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the 1950 film version of Born Yesterday, written by Garson Kanin, directed by George Cukor, and starring Judy Holliday, William Holden, and Broderick Crawford:

Replay: Somerset Maugham’s “The Alien Corn”

February 17, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAThe film version of “The Alien Corn,” a short story by Somerset Maugham, adapted for the screen by R.C. Sherriff, directed by Harold French, and starring Dirk Bogarde. This adaptation was released as part of Quartet, a 1948 film comprising screen versions of four of Maugham’s stories:

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

Almanac: Logan Pearsall Smith on the effects of wealth

February 17, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and keep absolutely sober.”

Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

February 2017
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  
« Jan   Mar »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in