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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 6, 2018

When the king is a queen

July 6, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two of the Hudson Valley Shakepeare Festival’s new productions, Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew. Here’s an excerpt.

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Seven years ago, it was still inherently newsy when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival put on a “Julius Caesar” whose title role was played by a woman, Vilma Silva. Nowadays, though, gender-bending revivals of the classics have become all but commonplace, and what makes Davis McCallum’s Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of “Richard II” noteworthy is not that Julia Coffey has been cast as Shakespeare’s unhappy king, or even that her performance is so distinctive: It is, rather, Mr. McCallum’s staging. As crisp, legible and full of import as a well-written headline, his “Richard II” cuts straight to the heart of a play that has never been as popular as its historical companion pieces…

Ms. Coffey, who first came to my attention when she appeared in Mr. McCallum’s 2014 Mint Theater revival of John Van Druten’s “London Wall,” is at home with both aspects of Richard II’s cloven personality, pivoting from arrogance to desperation so smoothly as to suggest that both qualities are opposite sides of the same coin of character….

In the #MeToo moment, how can “The Taming of the Shrew” be staged without setting off alarm bells of political incorrectness? The best way, it strikes me, is to play it the way Shakespeare wrote it, as a slapstick comedy in which a proto-feminist hellion gets her comeuppance at the hands of an arrogant man, and let the audience draw its own conclusions about what it’s seeing. This is more or less the way Shana Cooper approaches the play in her Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival directorial debut, and the results are consistently satisfying—the best “Shrew” I’ve ever reviewed, in fact.

Ms. Cooper, a newish face on the theatrical scene, has written a program note that bristles with up-to-the-minute notions (“The world of ‘Taming’ is one…in which women are judged and punished for not adhering to the rules of the game as dictated by a patriarchal society”). But whatever her production really “means,” Ms. Cooper’s “Shrew” plays as a riotously bawdy baggy-pants farce, one whose director is unafraid to opt for broad comic gestures and whose cast is more than happy to oblige her….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Richard II:

The trailer for The Taming of the Shrew:

Replay: Paul Strand’s Manhatta

July 6, 2018 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAManhatta, a 1921 silent film documentary about New York City photographed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. The titles are drawn from the poetry of Walt Whitman. To read more about the film, go here:

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

Almanac: Thomas Jefferson on the hope for universal freedom

July 6, 2018 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others.”

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826

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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