Archives for April 2018

Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet make a cameo appearance in Hollywood Canteen, directed in 1944 by Delmer Daves:

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

“Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.”

Flannery O’Connor, author’s note to the 1962 edition of Wise Blood

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review new Broadway revivals of The Iceman Cometh and Saint Joan. Here’s an excerpt.

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Spring is the season of marathons: First “Angels in America” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” now Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” and George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan.” Taken together, these extra-long shows are stretching patience and pocketbooks, and it’s hard to imagine that very many people other than drama critics and well-heeled theater buffs will get to more than one of them. That’s a pity, since “Iceman” and “Saint Joan,” like “Angels” before them, both have much to offer the high-minded audience member…

“Iceman” and “Saint Joan” also have something else in common, which is that they have lately received significant New York revivals, “Iceman” in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2015 transfer of Robert Falls’ Goodman Theatre staging and “Saint Joan” in the stripped-down four-actor off-Broadway version that put Eric Tucker’s Bedlam on the map in 2012. Staging the classics isn’t a competitive sport, but both of the latter productions were standard-setters, and neither of their successors is as effective as I’d hoped.

Absent a big-name star, the discursive “Iceman” (uncut and with intermissions, it runs for a bit less than five hours) is a defiantly uncommercial proposition. The only reason why it’s back on Broadway is that Denzel Washington is playing Hickey, the doomed traveling salesman who shows up at a dirty, disintegrating saloon-flophouse in lower Manhattan, there to keep an appointment with oblivion. I can understand why he took on the challenge, for he’s following in the footsteps of Jason Robards, James Earl Jones, Kevin Spacey, Lee Marvin (on film) and, most recently, Nathan Lane, whose Hickey exploded off the stage like a truckful of fireworks. But Mr. Washington has always been more of a presence than a performer, solid instead of electrifying, and it’s hard to imagine a part less well suited to his sober-sided style than the desperately jaunty Hickey….

In all other aspects, though, this “Iceman” is a production of high distinction. George C. Wolfe has directed it in a stylized, sometimes anti-realistic manner that is lighter in touch than Mr. Falls’ darkly hued staging…

The Manhattan Theatre Club’s “Saint Joan,” directed by Daniel Sullivan, is also a star-driven show, one whose star, while immensely gifted, is as imperfectly cast as is Mr. Washington. Condola Rashad is one of the most charismatic actors on the New York stage—she seems to stand in her own self-powered spotlight—but as she proved in David Leveaux’s 2013 modern-dress Broadway production of “Romeo and Juliet,” she is by no means a classical actor. Her voice is neither resonant enough nor sufficiently varied in tonal color to allow her to speak Shaw’s etched dialogue compellingly…

Fortunately, the fact that this revival is being performed on the smallish stage of the 650-seat Samuel J. Friedman Theatre works to her advantage, especially in the climactic scene in which Joan of Arc recants her confession of heresy…

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Read the whole thing here.

A montage of scenes from the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Saint Joan:

Bernadette Peters sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Broadway Baby” (from Follies) on The Tonight Show. The performance, originally telecast by NBC on July 27, 1989, is followed by a segment in which Peters is interviewed by Johnny Carson:

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

“He is a poet without contemporary nonsense, including the nonsense of having no nonsense about him.”

Anthony Powell, review of Larkin at Sixty (ed. Anthony Thwaite), originally published in the Daily Telegraph in 1982 and collected in Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfers of Travesties and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Here’s an excerpt.

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Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties,” in which James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, Dada’s founding father, share a stage to lunatic effect, was the unlikeliest Broadway semi-hit of 1975 (it ran for 156 much-discussed performances). Some theatergoers found “Travesties” impenetrably complex, but everybody had an opinion about it, and Mr. Stoppard was thereafter viewed on this side of the Atlantic as a man of consequence. Now he’s the greatest living English-speaking playwright, more or less, and “Travesties” is back on Broadway at last…

I couldn’t begin to summarize “Travesties” accurately in a review three times as long as this one. I’ll say only that it’s a whirligig variation on “The Importance of Being Earnest” in which Mr. Stoppard, having taken note of the unlikely but true fact that Messrs. Joyce, Lenin and Tzara (played here by Peter McDonald, Dan Butler, and Seth Numrich) were all in Zurich in 1917, uses that coincidence as the point of departure for a farce-flavored fantasy….

In addition to the Broadway transfer of the original Royal Shakespeare Theatre production, I’ve seen “Travesties” done twice, by New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 2005 and Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre in 2014. All of those productions were extraordinarily fine, and so is this one, in which Tom Hollander is sensational as Henry Carr, the now-senile British diplomat in whose fast-disintegrating memory the events of “Travesties” take place…

Rarely has a show been less in need of good reviews, from me or anyone else, than “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the latest line extension of J.K. Rowling’s franchise of novels, films and theme parks, which has come to New York after a stupendously successful 2016 opening in London. This two-part, five-hour extravaganza is the most expensive non-musical production ever to open on Broadway, and every dollar of the $68.5 million ponied up by the producers is visible. The special effects are sensational, especially if you like theatrical “black magic,” and each one was dutifully applauded by the audiences at the previews I saw.

Beyond that, I can do no more than to warn those who care that “The Cursed Child” plays like a musical—most of the show is underscored and all of the putative song cues are self-evident—and might have been slightly more fun had it been one….

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To read my review of Travesties, go here.

To read my review of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, go here.

A montage of scenes from Travesties:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Angels in America (two-part drama, R, many shows sold out last week, alternating in repertory through July 1, reviewed here)
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes June 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, most shows sold out last week, closes May 13, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• Macbeth (Shakespeare, PG-13, remounting of Two River Theater Company production, closes June 24, original production reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Seafarer (drama, PG-13, closes May 24, reviewed here)
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes June 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Miss You Like Hell (musical, PG-13, closes May 13, reviewed here)

“If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov, who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years, had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

A 1958 kinescope of an unidentified telecast of part of Carol Burnett’s standup comedy routine:

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

“As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is a mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all.”

G.K. Chesterton, Heretics