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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Becky Sharp takes the stage

April 4, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on the premiere of Kate Hamill’s stage version of Vanity Fair. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Vanity Fair,” in which William Makepeace Thackeray recorded the adventures of Becky Sharp, a young woman who is prepared to do pretty much anything in order to claw her way to the top of Victorian England’s greasy pole of success, isn’t quite so widely read in the U.S. as it used to be. Nevertheless, it remains one of the 19th century’s most enduringly popular novels, and it’s amazing that no one seems to have successfully brought it to the stage until now. Enter Kate Hamill, whose 2014 Bedlam Theatre Company adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility” was a well-deserved success and who has now turned Thackeray’s 1848 “novel without a hero” into a play. I’m suspicious as a rule of stage versions of classic novels, which are in most cases pointless attempts to “repurpose” a beloved book for purposes of profit. But Ms. Hamill’s “Vanity Fair,” which is being performed to coruscatingly brilliant effect by the Pearl Theatre Company, is something else again, a masterpiece of creative compression…

The plot of “Vanity Fair” is far too labyrinthine to summarize neatly. Suffice it to say that Becky (played by Ms. Hamill herself) and her best friend Amelia (Joey Parsons) seek to stay afloat in a society that has little to offer women with neither wealth nor position. Amelia, being fundamentally good at heart, sticks to the straight and narrow path of virtue, but the amoral, ruthlessly realistic Becky is more inclined to take the advice of one of the various protectors who take an interest in her progress through life: “Never be too good, nor too bad. The world will punish you for both. Try to pace right with the rest of us in the unnoticeable hypocritical middle.”…

Ms. Hamill has envisioned “Vanity Fair” as a show performed by “a seedy band of roving actors, putting on a play with minimum effort.” The set, ingeniously designed by Sandra Goldmark, is a rundown theater dressed with the miscellaneous leavings of forgotten productions. In addition to Becky and Amelia, five men (Zachary Fine, Brad Heberlee, Tom O’Keefe, Debargo Sanyal and Ryan Quinn) divvy up 17 speaking roles between them, dressing and cross-dressing in full view of the audience…

Eric Tucker, the director, is the co-founder of Bedlam Theatre Company, of which Ms. Hamill is also a member. As regular readers of this column will recall, I rank Mr. Tucker alongside David Cromer at the pinnacle of the short list of America’s most imaginative stage directors, and save for the fact that it’s being presented on a proscenium stage, his “Vanity Fair” has all the hallmarks of a Bedlam production. The quick-change shape-shifting of the cast, the outrageous physical comedy of the staging, the startlingly witty use of props: All are Mr. Tucker’s now-familiar trademarks, and all add immeasurably to the show’s impact….

Ms. Hamill’s Becky is a saucy, spunky schemer who, as the Victorians liked to say, is no better than she has to be. As for Ms. Parsons, one of my favorite New York-based actors, she has a genius for endowing seemingly thankless straight-man female parts with a warmth and emotional intensity that make them memorable….

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Read the whole thing here.

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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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