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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 9, 2017

In Maine, a Broadway-worthy Ragtime

August 9, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In the first of two Wall Street Journal drama columns filed this week from New England, I review a Maine revival of Ragtime. Here’s an excerpt.

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How are American theater companies, most of whose leaders incline unabashedly to the left, responding to the Trump presidency? Two different New England companies, Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse and Massachusetts’ Barrington Stage, both made a point this summer of producing “Ragtime,” the musical version of E.L. Doctorow’s bourgeois-baiting 1975 novel about life in America at the turn of the 20th century. Not only does “Ragtime” center on a black piano player who is radicalized by white racism, but it also portrays a group of Eastern European immigrants, one of whom, Emma Goldman, was in real life an anarchist and hard-left labor activist….

Whatever their ulterior motives for programming such a show in the first year of President Trump’s administration, it’s no less safe to assume that both companies also had an eye on the box office. A smash hit when it came to Broadway in 1998, “Ragtime” remains deservedly popular to this day. To be sure, Terrence McNally’s heavy-handed book is a too-much-tell-not-enough-show pageant-style adaptation of the novel, but the Lynn Ahrens-Stephen Flaherty score is a vital, propulsive piece of near-operatic music drama that sweeps aside all reservations, be they critical or political. As for the Ogunquit Playhouse revival, it’s a first-rate piece of work, to my mind even more effective than the solid but commercially unsuccessful revival of “Ragtime” that came to Broadway in 2009. I’ve seen some fine musicals in Ogunquit since I started going there a decade ago, but this one, directed with crisply disciplined authority by Seth Sklar-Heyn, is the best yet….

Mr. Sklar-Heyn and his collaborators clearly understand that the dramatic force of “Ragtime” arises from its score, a knowing pastiche of ragtime-era American popular song styles: Every number is beautifully sung and vibrantly staged. The result is a musical that feels much shorter than its three-hour running time, one in which the forward momentum never flags for a second….

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Read the whole thing here.

Brian Stokes Mitchell, Audra McDonald, Marin Mazzie, and the cast of the original 1998 production of Ragtime perform the show’s title song on that year’s Tony Awards telecast:

Snapshot: Charles and Ray Eames’ “House”

August 9, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERA“House: After Five Years of Living,” a 1955 film by Charles and Ray Eames about the California home that they designed for themselves. The score is by Elmer Bernstein:

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

Almanac: Wallace Stevens on imagination

August 9, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value”

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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