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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Nine parts com, one part rom

August 4, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Public Theater’s new Shakespeare in the Park production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

No play, by Shakespeare or anyone else, is better suited to outdoor performance than “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” not only because so much of it takes place in a forest but because of the way in which it commingles sweet, spacious romanticism and slip-on-a-banana-peel comedy. It’s just the kind of show you want to see on a balmy midsummer night—and Lear deBessonet’s Shakespeare in the Park production is just the kind of staging that it deserves. I’ve seen a couple of “Midsummers” that were as good as this one, foremost among them Eric Tucker’s sublime five-person 2015 Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival version, but none better.

Ms. deBessonet is a very big talent who’s been waiting in the wings until now, mainly occupying herself with the Public’s community-based Public Works “participatory theater” classical productions, which make use of amateur actors. The highest-profile show that she’d previously directed in New York was the Public Theater’s 2013 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Szechwan,” an outrageously imaginative vaudeville romp whose décor looked as if it had been recycled from the nearest alley. But while this “Midsummer” is a costlier undertaking with a big-name cast—Annaleigh Ashford, Danny Burstein, Kristine Nielsen, and Phylicia Rashad are among those present—it partakes of the same improvisatory sensibility, and does so with the same éclat.

While this isn’t a high-concept “Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the normal sense of the word, Ms. deBessonet’s approach to the play is nonetheless clear-cut: She’s staged it as if it were a Broadway musical. The casting of Ms. Ashford, Mr. Burstein and Ms. Nielsen, three of Broadway’s funniest comedians, as Helena, Bottom and Puck, underlines the slant of her production, a rom-com that’s 90% com and 10% rom….

It’s as if she’d staged the production specifically to disarm viewers who don’t know the play going in and are a little bit afraid of it: Every twist and turn of the knotty plot comes across with the sunlit clarity of a perfectly executed pratfall….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

A video featurette about Lear deBessonet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Replay: Norman Bel Geddes’ “To New Horizons”

August 4, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERA“To New Horizons,” a promotional film about technology and the American future created by the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes and shown as part of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at the 1939-40 World’s Fair:

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

Almanac: Tocqueville on democracy and neologisms

August 4, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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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