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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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A Pericles of pure joy

September 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two more productions that I saw last month at Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, Pericles and The Maids. Here’s an excerpt.

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Eric Tucker is America’s best classical stage director, and American Players Theater is America’s best classical theater festival. It’s fitting, then, that APT has brought Mr. Tucker to Wisconsin to stage a Shakespeare play, and that the results, performed in the company’s outdoor amphitheater, should be so miraculously memorable. “Pericles, Prince of Tyre” is rarely staged because of the near-insurmountable complexities of its plot, but Mr. Tucker has turned it into a crowd-pleaser. By turns earthy and fanciful, unabashedly absurd and divinely poetic, his production is a riotous explosion of pure joy.

Unlike Shakespeare’s better-loved plays, “Pericles” is—not to put too fine a point on it—more than a bit of a mess. A loose-knit skein of coincidence, it tells the increasingly implausible tale of a Phoenician prince who loses his wife and daughter at sea, then finds them again at the end of a string of adventures that occupy several decades and involve some 60-odd characters. What’s more, Mr. Tucker has mounted it in the crazy-quilt style of his own Bedlam Theatre Company, performing the play with 10 actors who switch without warning from part to part, changing accents as cheerfully as they change hats. But thanks mostly to his own shrewd direction and partly to the colorful, ingeniously designed costumes of Daniel Tyler Mathews, it’s not hard to stay abreast of the plot, and the occasional moments of near-chaos become part of the fun.

I use that last word advisedly, for the fundamental energy of Mr. Tucker’s “Pericles” is comic, a strategy that heightens the emotional potency of the serious passages…

Down the hill in the company’s 200-seat Touchstone Theatre, APT is presenting a revival of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” for which the word “fun” could hardly be less appropriate. First performed in 1947, “The Maids” is a claustrophobic portrait of the all-but-sadomasochistic relationship between a high-society Parisian woman known only as “Madame” (Rebecca Hurd) and her two servants (Andrea San Miguel and Melisa Pereyra), both of whom hate her—and themselves. You can interpret “The Maids” in any number of ways, but whatever it means, the play never fails to land with shattering dramatic force so long as it is paced in such a way as not to give the game away too soon. Ana Cristina (Gigi) Buffington, the director of this revival, understands the need to keep a tight rein on the proceedings, and her three actors give performances of a scalding yet controlled violence that is fearful and wonderful to behold….

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Read the whole thing here.

Eric Tucker talks about Pericles:

Ana Cristina (Gigi) Buffington talks about The Maids:

Replay: Benny Goodman plays “Avalon” in 1959

September 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERABenny Goodman plays “Avalon” on TV in 1959. Jess Stacy is the pianist, Lionel Hampton the vibraphonist, Gene Krupa the drummer. This performance was originally telecast by CBS on The Big Party on December 17, 1959:

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

Almanac: Rudyard Kipling on national decadence

September 8, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”

Rudyard Kipling (quoted by André Maurois in The Art of Writing)

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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