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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Theater by the sea

August 31, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two New Jersey revivals, Cape May Stage’s The Lion in Winter and East Lynne Theatre Company’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Here’s an excerpt.

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Plays that die on Broadway usually stay dead—but not always. Not only did James Goldman’s “The Lion in Winter” close in 1966 after a disappointing 92-performance run, but it had identically bad luck when it came back 33 years later, staying open for just 93 performances the second time around. Yet Goldman’s most popular play (he is now best remembered for having written the book for Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies”) still has a solid revival life elsewhere in America….

I last reviewed “The Lion in Winter” a decade ago at Chicago’s Writers Theatre, so when Cape May Stage announced its new production, it struck me as an opportune occasion to see how the play is holding up. A 30-year-old company headquartered in a deconsecrated Presbyterian church that has been converted into a plain but handsome theater, Cape May Stage has a long history of mounting well-directed small-scale productions of well-chosen small-cast plays in this seaside resort town at the southern tip of the Jersey Shore. I’ve seen the company do John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” and Theresa Rebeck’s “The Understudy,” in both cases to memorable effect, and this revival is fully as pleasing as its predecessors….

Roy Steinberg, who doubles as Cape May Stage’s artistic director, and Marlena Lustik, his real-life wife, lead the outstanding cast, delivering their sharp-toothed dialogue with lip-smacking relish. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between them for best-in-show honors—they are an ideally matched pair…

Like Cape May Stage, East Lynne Theater Company performs in a church, but its performance space, the polygonal sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church of Cape May, is still in regular use as a house of worship. As a result, East Lynne’s sets sometimes have a slightly sketchy feel, but its productions of older American plays leave nothing else to be desired. It’s hard to imagine a more diverting piece of summer fun than Gayle Stahlhuth’s revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” Joseph Kesselring’s improbably black 1941 comedy about a warm-hearted pair of little old ladies (Suzanne Dawson and Ms. Stahlhuth) whose charities include taking in lonely male boarders, putting them out of their misery by feeding them homemade elderberry wine laced with arsenic, cyanide and strychnine, then burying them in the cellar.

A farce so soundly constructed that it all but plays itself, “Arsenic and Old Lace” is for that reason a staple of amateur companies throughout America. It is, however, far more rewarding to see it played by professionals who can get the most out of its macabre wit, and Ms. Stahlhuth’s production crackles with flawlessly executed touches of slapstick….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the 1968 film version of The Lion in Winter, starring Peter O’Toole:

A scene from the 1944 film version of Arsenic and Old Lace, starring Cary Grant, Jean Adair, and Josephine Hull:

Paul Taylor, R.I.P.

August 31, 2018 by Terry Teachout

I wrote an appreciation of Paul Taylor for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Paul Taylor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was the dean of American choreographers—though that’s a strangely stiff word to use about a master of modern dance who was in private life far from formal. Even when he joined the members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company to take a bow at evening’s end, I can’t recall ever seeing him wearing anything but casual clothes, just as he usually spoke of his work, at least to journalists, in the lightest of tones. Only once did he break that rule in my hearing, when I asked him in an interview whether he thought his dances would survive him. He sat in silence for a moment, then replied, “I don’t know if they’ll last. I try to make them to last. They’re not made to be seen one time.” Nor were they…

Part of the durability of his dances arises from the subtlety with which they dramatize the opposing polarities of man’s divided self— male/female, dark/light, primitive/civilized, innocent/knowing—and set them in motion on stage, there to collide with one another, sometimes comically and sometimes fatally. Rarely does a Taylor dance express an emotion without also hinting at its inversion. This dualism is part of what makes his work at once ambiguous and accessible…

Early in my dancegoing life, I took a willing but initially unenthusiastic cabaret singer to a performance of “Esplanade,” Mr. Taylor’s signature piece, set to the music of Bach. When the curtain came down, I asked her what she thought. It wouldn’t be right to say she was speechless, since she was doing her best to reply, but she couldn’t get a sentence going: She was so stunned that all she could do was stammer. I’ve never seen anyone else react so viscerally to their first viewing of a Taylor dance, but more than a few of my friends have come pretty close.

What is it about Mr. Taylor’s work that inspires such enthusiasm? When it comes to “Esplanade,” the answer is self-evident: I don’t know another modern dance that speaks to the viewer with such immediacy and emotional openness. Yet the extroversion of “Esplanade” conceals the same heart of darkness that beats away in most of his other dances. The first time you see it, you’re left with an indelible mental image of dancers striding, flying, even sliding across the stage—but on second and third viewing, these pictures gradually give way to the remembered vision of a mysteriously androgynous, seemingly untouchable woman, searching in vain for a place in the indifferent world….

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Read the whole thing here.

The second section of Paul Taylor’s Explanade, performed by the original cast and originally shown on PBS’ Dance in America in 1978. The score is the slow movement of Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto:

Replay: Mabel Mercer sings Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh

August 31, 2018 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAMabel Mercer sings “I’m Watching You,” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, in an undated live performance from the Seventies at Cleo’s, a New York nightclub, accompanied by Jimmy Lyons. This song was written for a never-completed musical based on James Thurber’s The Wonderful O:

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

Almanac: Chesterton on marriage

August 31, 2018 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

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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