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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 30, 2017

Broken hearts in a Texas town

June 30, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I write about New York revivals of Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady and Scott McPherson’s Marvin’s Room. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

“The Traveling Lady,” among the most tenderly poignant of the soft-spoken studies of small-town life in which Horton Foote specialized, has had its ups and downs—mostly the latter. It ran for just three weeks on Broadway in 1954. Three years later, Kim Stanley, the star of that ill-fated production, repeated her much-admired performance on TV’s “Studio One,” and in 1965 the play, retitled “Baby the Rain Must Fall,” was unsuccessfully filmed, this time as a vehicle for Steve McQueen. But by then Mr. Foote’s once-promising career was in eclipse, and it wasn’t until years later that he was generally recognized as one of America’s most important playwrights. Now the original stage version of “The Traveling Lady,” judiciously tightened by Mr. Foote from three acts to one for a 2004 revival, is being performed off Broadway in a production directed by Austin Pendleton, who has a knack for making smart things happen in small theaters. He’s done it again: I feel certain that Mr. Foote himself would have delighted in the perfect stylistic unanimity of this lovely revival.

In all its iterations, “The Traveling Lady” tells the story of Georgette (Jean Lichty), who comes to Harrison, the tiny Texas town that was the center of Mr. Foote’s semi-fictional universe, to await the imminent release from prison of Henry (P J Sosko), her ne’er-do-well alcoholic husband, an aspiring country singer who can’t manage to stay out of trouble. What follows is a tightly snarled web of hope and disappointment…

As always, Mr. Pendleton has staged “The Traveling Lady” with a gentle understatement that draws you in before you know it, and his actors exude a feeling of community so strong as to create the impression that they’ve known one another for years, maybe decades….

Scott McPherson’s “Marvin’s Room,” which ran off Broadway in 1991 and was filmed five years later, has made it to Broadway at last. I’m surprised it took so long, since it’s the kind of play that typically goes over big there, a kitchen-sink-and-hospital-room cancer comedy in which all of the characters say cleverish things most of the time. The characters in question include Bessie (Lili Taylor), a dutiful daughter who comes down with leukemia after spending 20 years caring for her (unseen) senile father; Lee (Janeane Garofalo), Bessie’s not-so-dutiful sister, who flew the family coop as fast as she could but now finds herself saddled with a teenage son (Jack DiFalco) who set fire to her house and is now in a mental institution, and…but you get the idea, right? Lots of laughs, lots of jerked tears, very little reality….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Austin Pendleton talks about his off-Broadway revival of Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady:

The 1957 Studio One TV version of The Traveling Lady, adapted by Foote, directed by Robert Mulligan, and starring Kim Stanley, Steven Hill, Robert Loggia, and Mildred Dunnock. This performance was originally telecast live by CBS on April 22, 1957:

Replay: Fred Astaire dances to “Mellow Yellow”

June 30, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERACourtesy of Marc Myers, Fred Astaire dances to Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” on The Fred Astaire Show, accompanied by Young-Holt Unlimited. This program was originally telecast by NBCon February 7, 1968:

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

Almanac: Eric Hoffer on death

June 30, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.”

Eric Hoffer, “Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: ‘Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely,’’” New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971)

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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