Archives for April 2018

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an off-Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. Here’s an excerpt.

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Most American theatergoers know “Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw’s most popular play, through “My Fair Lady,” the even more popular 1956 musical version. The “Hamilton” of its day, “My Fair Lady” was filmed in 1964, and between the screen version and the stage version, which Lincoln Center Theater is opening on Broadway later this month, it’s become surprisingly hard to see “Pygmalion” in its original form….

Now Bedlam, which specializes in radically reconfigured small-scale productions of the classics, is performing “Pygmalion” in an 80-seat off-Broadway theater in a production staged by and starring the prodigally gifted Eric Tucker, the company’s artistic director. As always with Bedlam, this slimmed-down revival, in which six actors cover 10 speaking parts, is joltingly original in its approach to Shaw’s 1913 play. Purists may not approve of the results—but I guarantee they’ll make you think.

If you’ve never seen “Pygmalion,” you may be surprised to learn that it’s a comedy, but not, unlike “My Fair Lady,” a romantic one. Shaw went to considerable trouble to make clear that Henry Higgins (Mr. Tucker), the haughty, anti-social professor of phonetics, and Eliza Doolittle (Vaishnavi Sharma), the low-born Cockney flower girl whom he endeavors on a bet to teach how to speak and act like a Vicwardian lady, entertained no romantic feelings for one another….

What resulted was an effervescent satire with a hacksaw-hard political edge. Mr. Tucker has deliberately sharpened that edge by turning his Eliza into an Indian immigrant from Delhi whose “depressing and disgusting” accent (as Higgins describes it) is an all-but-impenetrable mixture of Cockney and Hindi….

I wasn’t always convinced by Mr. Tucker’s decision to depart so drastically from Shaw’s explicit intentions. So what? When an artist of such originality opts to veer off the main road and go his own way, the smart thing to do is follow his lead and ask questions later….

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To read the complete review, go here.

Universal Mind of Bill Evans: The Creative Process and Self-Teaching, a 1966 documentary directed by Louis Cavrell:

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

Preposterous ass, that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain’d!
Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies or his usual pain?

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

The latest episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly 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 interview a new face in the theater world:

The panel’s guest is acclaimed singer-songwriter Erin McKeown, who is making her first foray into musical theater with Miss You Like Hell, the musical having its New York debut this month at the Public Theater. McKeown—pronounced “Mc-KYONE”—talks about the collaboration she’s forged with the Pulitzer winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes (Water by the Spoonful) to tell the story of a mom played by Daphne Rubin-Vega who goes on a road trip with her long-estranged teenage daughter….

Vincentelli, Teachout, and Marks devote a segment to analyses of two recent Broadway openings that have sparked Tony buzz in the theatre world: first, they talk about the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, starring Laurie Metcalf, Alison Pill and Glenda Jackson, in her first Broadway appearance in 30 years. And then they shift to the powerful new staging from London’s National Theatre of Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America….

We wrap up the episode by talking about other shows that we’ve seen lately.

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

In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

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, nearly all 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)
• Lobby Hero (drama, PG-13, virtually all shows sold out last week, closes May 13, reviewed here)
• Three Tall Women (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, closes June 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Good for Otto (drama, PG-13/R, closes April 15, reviewed here)
• Later Life (drama, PG-13, closes April 14, reviewed here)

“There was something about an old prison, even when declined into a mere remand centre, that brought comfort to the weariest soul, a sense of tried and tested purpose, a feeling of solidarity in a shifting world. Hither men had come to pay for their crimes, and paid, and hence returned to the society that had judged them, and thence more often than not returned again to this same spot in a cycle of crime and punishment, wrong and retribution, as endless and unremitting as all those other cycles of day and night, birth and death, Left and Right, Romantic and Classical, promotion and relegation, marriage and divorce, ingestion and defecation, permissiveness and puritanism, itching and scratching, whose centrifugal forces hold the timeless, limitless, meaningless universe together.”

Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence (courtesy of Mrs. T)

John Updike is interviewed by Al Page on Upon Reflection, originally telecast in 1989 by UWTV, the University of Washington’s television station:

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

“We talk, by a sort of habit, about Modern Thought, forgetting the familiar fact that moderns do not think. They only feel, and that is why they are so much stronger in fiction than in facts; why their novels are so much better than their newspapers.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Trouble with Our Pagans” (Illustrated London News, September 13, 1930)