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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for September 22, 2017

The old-fashioned way

September 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

In my two drama columns for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a pair of regional revivals, Walnut Street Theatre’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in Philadelphia and Shakespeare & Company’s God of Carnage in Lenox, Massachusetts. Here are excerpts from both reviews.

* * *

Fifty-five years after it opened on Broadway, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” remains the funniest musical ever written. The Larry Gelbart-Burt Shevelove book about hanky-panky in ancient Rome is so well wrought that it could almost be successfully performed without Stephen Sondheim’s score, though Mr. Sondheim’s elegantly turned songs add immeasurably to the total effect. In addition, “A Funny Thing Happened” is also a time capsule, a vade mecum of baggy-pants vaudeville comedy elevated to the highest possible level of theatricality. It’s possible to put a fresh spin on the show, as Jessica Stone did in her wonderful 2015 all-male Two River Theater revival, but it isn’t necessary, and there’s much to be said for doing it the old-fashioned way, so long as you have a cast and director who speak the all-but-lost language of Catskills-style kill-or-be-killed comedy—which is where Frank Ferrante comes in.

Mr. Ferrante, the director and star of Walnut Street Theatre’s revival of “A Funny Thing Happened,” got his start playing Groucho Marx in a 1986 off-Broadway revue written by Arthur, Groucho’s son. Though he’s only 54, he looks and sounds just like the kind of comedian you might have seen working at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel three-quarters of a century ago. Every time he opens his mouth and spits out punch lines, you can smell the cigar smoke halfway up the aisle. Mr. Ferrante plays Pseudolus, the scheming Roman slave whose role was created on Broadway by Zero Mostel, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job.

Not only is Mr. Ferrante a marvelous performer, but he’s also staged “A Funny Thing Happened” with explosive comic punch…

“God of Carnage,” Yasmina Reza’s comedy of bad manners about two New York couples whose children get into a bloody playground fight, has been making the regional rounds ever since the Broadway production closed in 2010. It’s easy to see why: Who wouldn’t want to do a tightly written, ferociously funny hit that calls for only four actors and one simple living-room set? I’d been wondering, though, how well Ms. Reza’s clever variation on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was holding up after seven years of hard use, so when Shakespeare & Company announced that it would be performing “God of Carnage,” I decided to go see for myself. I’m immensely pleased to report that Regge Life’s staging, performed in the company’s 186-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, is terrifically potent, and that the play itself, which skewers with lip-smacking gusto our collective pretensions of middle-class gentility, appears not to have aged a whit….

* * *

To read my review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, go here.

To read my review of God of Carnage, go here.

Replay: Leonard Bernstein conducts The Rite of Spring

September 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERALeonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony in a live performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, originally telecast by the BBC on November 27, 1966:

(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 Jane Austen

September 22, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence. What are your views? When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head. Greater than Charles [Dickens]; greater than Walter [Scott]—with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”

Rudyard Kipling, letter to C.R.L. Fletcher (April 10, 1915)

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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