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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 13, 2018

Happy feet in Bucks County

July 13, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two noteworthy musical revivals, Bucks County Playhouse’s 42nd Street and the Irish Repertory Theatre’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. Here’s an excerpt.

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What’s the best of all possible summertime musicals? You could do a whole lot worse than “42nd Street,” the stage version of the 1933 movie musical that put the line “You’re going out a youngster—but you’ve got to come back a star!” into the English language. Having racked up two long runs on Broadway, in 1980 and again in 2001, “42nd Street” has since vanished from the stages of Manhattan, but it remains a staple of seemingly every regional theater in America capable of convening a stageful of halfway decent tap dancers. Now the Bucks County Playhouse is mounting it—but in a production to which the words “halfway decent” couldn’t be less relevant. Directed by Hunter Foster, whose 2015 Bucks County revival of “Company” marked him as an up-and-comer, this “42nd Street” is pure fun without a scintilla of cold-weather seriousness.

Mr. Foster’s staging is engagingly cast, and Tessa Grady and Monette McKay are especially winning as Peggy Sawyer, the sweet small-town girl who becomes an overnight smash, and “Anytime” Annie, her spunky sidekick. But “42nd Street” is an ensemble show first and foremost, and in order to produce a proscenium-stage spectacular on a smallish stage in a 409-seat house, every element must be identically persuasive. What is most striking about Mr. Foster’s “42nd Street” is not any individual performance but its total effect…

No major musical, not even “Candide,” is more incapacitatingly flawed than “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” The score, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner, is a gorgeous necklace on which two 50-carat diamonds, “Come Back to Me” and the title song, are strung. Alas, Lerner’s book, in which a psychiatrist falls in love with a patient who appears both to have ESP and to be the reincarnation of an 18th-century English society lady who drowned in a shipwreck, was an obsessive mess. As a result, the show closed in 1966 after an eight-month run and has never been successfully revived in its original form. The film version, which came out in 1970, didn’t do much better, while a 2011 Broadway revival, for which Peter Parnell wrote a brand-new book of the utmost ineptitude, was a well-deserved flop.

Enter Charlotte Moore, artistic director of the Irish Repertory Theatre, who loves “On a Clear Day” but is fully aware of its problems and has endeavored to solve them in her new small-scale revival, in which she has revised Lerner’s book without altering it beyond recognition, ruthlessly scissoring away superfluous characters and dialogue…

The result of Ms. Moore’s handiwork is a miniature musical of tremendous charm whose plot suggests a cross between “Vertigo” and “Arcadia.” While the results aren’t perfect—some of the second-act plot points don’t land as clearly as they might—her “On a Clear Day” works much more than well enough to make the show viable at last, and every other aspect of the production is completely successful….

* * *

To read my review of 42nd Street, go here.

To read my review of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, go here.

The trailer for the Irish Rep’s revival of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever:

Replay: Noël Coward appears on What’s My Line?

July 13, 2018 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERANoël Coward appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?. John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Preston. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on January 12, 1964:

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

Almanac: Mark Twain on law and custom

July 13, 2018 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.”

Mark Twain, “The Gorky Incident”

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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