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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 26, 2018

Laughing at the devil

March 26, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, the first of two this week, I review the Broadway revival of Angels in America. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Twenty-five years after it opened on Broadway, Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America” is back, this time in the U.S. transfer of a British production. In Marianne Elliott’s National Theatre staging, the pivotal role of Roy Cohn is played by—of all people—Nathan Lane, and his presence is its most distinctive element.

If you’ve followed his career at all closely, you’ll know that Mr. Lane is no mere musical-comedy clown. He is, like John Lithgow, a dead-serious actor whose energy is comic, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he gives an idiosyncratic performance as the reptilian Cohn, a monster of aggression who was, at least in public, nothing if not unfunny. Mr. Lane, by contrast, plays him at first as a whiny, kvetching jokester given to sudden flares of red rage…

The fact that Mr. Lane is so unlike the real-life Cohn is one of the most interesting aspects of this revival. “Angels,” after all, is a quarter-century old and portrays events that took place in the ’80s. Back then, Roy Cohn was in every way a man of the moment. Now he belongs to the ages—and so does the AIDS crisis. As a result, “Angels” has become a kind of history play, and thus can be staged with a freedom from its factual grounding that wasn’t possible in 1993, when its terrible subject matter was a living memory to all who saw it. You needn’t cast an actor who looks like Cohn: You can go your own way, searching out contemporary echoes in the script instead of relentlessly evoking the past.

This is what Ms. Elliott has done, though not always to good effect. She has given us a neon-lit, slick-looking “Angels” full of elevators, trap doors and fathomless film-noir shadows, one in which we are surely meant to think “Donald Trump” whenever we hear “Ronald Reagan.” The look of the show, whose set is designed by Ian MacNeil, is reminiscent of her over-elaborate staging of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time,” in which bells-and-whistles trickery smothered the play instead of heightening its effect….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for the HD simulcast of the 2017 National Theatre production of Angels in America:

Just because: Norman Lloyd on Jean Renoir

March 26, 2018 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERANorman Lloyd talks about working with Jean Renoir on The Southerner, written and directed by Renoir in 1945. This clip is drawn from an interview with Lloyd conducted by Gary Rutkowski for the Archive of American Television in 2000:

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

Almanac: George Bernard Shaw on the nature of art

March 26, 2018 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.”

George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah

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, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [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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