Archives for March 2018

“Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (trans. M.D. Herter Norton)

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.

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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….

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Read the whole thing here.

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

Norman 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)

“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

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review an off-Broadway revival of A.R. Gurney’s Later Life and the Broadway premiere of Frozen. Here’s an excerpt.

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When a prolific artist dies, it takes time to sort through his output and decide what—if anything—is likely to last. That’s happening right now to the four dozen plays of A.R. Gurney, the bard of the upper-middle-class WASP, who died in June at the age of 86. “The Dining Room,” “The Cocktail Hour,” “Love Letters” and “Sylvia” continue to hold the stage and assure him of a place in the history of postwar American theater. And what of the others? Many, like “Black Tie” and “Indian Blood,” are little more than high-class comfort food for country-club Republicans. But Mr. Gurney was no four-hit wonder, and the Keen Company’s off-Broadway revival of “Later Life,” first produced by Playwrights Horizons in 1993 but rarely seen since then, is a welcome reminder that there are glittering gems lurking amid the paste.

According to Mr. Gurney, “Later Life” is “indebted to Henry James.” In fact, it starts out as a comic variation on “The Beast in the Jungle,” one of James’ most disturbingly melancholy tales. The protagonist, Austin (Laurence Lau), is an affable Boston divorcé of a certain age who has been haunted his whole life long by the certitude that “something terrible” is destined to happen to him. He goes to a cocktail party and meets Ruth (Barbara Garrick), a divorcée of like vintage who claims to have met him years ago. They start to reminisce, interrupted at frequent intervals by the other guests, all of them variously eccentric (and all played with great variety and flair by the same two actors, Liam Craig and Jodie Markell). In between, they strike romantic sparks—until an unexpected occurrence throws them off course…

Unflashy conversation pieces like “Later Life” don’t play themselves. They must be knowingly cast and intelligently directed to make their full effect, and Keen Company, here as always, is up to the challenge….

“Frozen,” the Disneyfied version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” has now been turned into a stage musical and brought to Broadway. It’s unlikely that anything else I say about “Frozen: The Broadway Musical” (to give the show its full official title) will sway those parents who already plan to take their children to see it, so I’ll be brief: If you liked “Frozen” on screen, you’ll like it onstage. Michael Grandage’s fantastically elaborate production, choreographed by Rob Ashford and designed to the hilt and beyond by Christopher Oram, is faithful to the spirit, if not always the letter, of the movie.

For my part, I found both to be well-made but insipid and largely humorless, though the stage version is more tedious….

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To read my complete review of Later Life, go here.

To read my complete review of Frozen, go here.

Pierre Boulez and the New Philharmonia Orchestra perform Claude Debussy’s Jeux on the BBC in 1966:

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

“Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come, dread naught; all will be well.”

Winston Churchill, “My New York Misadventure”

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the bimonthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

In this episode, Peter, Elisabeth, and I lead off by talking at length about what we call “small-show syndrome: the intimate, petite-scale productions that are so popular on American stages these days.” Says the Three on the Aisle web page:

New plays with sprawling casts and multi-hour running times such as Bruce Norris’s The Low Road and David Rabe’s Good for Otto stand out amidst a preponderance of two- or three-handers unfurling over 90 minutes. Yes, there are budgetary constraints, but does this scaling-down affect how playwrights work and which topics they choose to cover? Family is American drama’s favorite topic, but are we doomed to a generation of intimate “couch plays”?…

Yet Teachout argues that a small scale can be seen as a creative challenge rather than a limitation….

We wrap up the episode by talking about shows that we’ve seen lately, as well as others that we’ll be seeing soon.

To listen, download the eighth episode, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any of the first eight episodes, you’ll find them all here.