Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Johann Vexo plays Edwin H. Lemare’s organ transcription of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre on the Moeller-Reuter pipe organ of Philadelphia’s First Presbyterian Church:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Sir: there are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
From 2008:
I confess to having been more stirred by the words of an actress I know whom I encountered in a theater lobby a couple of months ago. She introduced me to her boyfriend as follows: “Terry isn’t just a writer and a critic–he’s an artist, too. He’s writing an opera!”
This is a distinction whose significance I unhesitatingly admit. As far as I’m concerned, critics aren’t artists. In my capacity as a critic and biographer, I think of myself as an artisan–a craftsman. One of the reasons why I believe this to be so is because I used to be an artist back in the days when I was a professional musician. That fact has conditioned my approach to criticism….
Read the whole thing here.
“Do you know I sometimes think I’m a man of genius, half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty of expression is wanting; but the need for expression remains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a closed door.”
Henry James, Roderick Hudson
Itzhak Perlman and Janet Goodman Guggenheim perform Ernest Bloch’s “Nigun” (from Baal Shem) in concert at Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall in 1990:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
I tell you not for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
G.K. Chesterton, “The Ballad of the White Horse”
The twenty-first 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.
Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
This week, the critics answer a question from a reader about whether critical standards should be different in reviews of community theatre versus Broadway theatre.
Then they turn the tables on each other! The critics ask each other questions, such as, “Which Shakespeare play would you be happy never to see again?” and “What classic musical or play do you find irredeemably bad?”…
To listen, download the latest episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.
In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the first Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery and the U.S. premiere of Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman. Here’s an excerpt.
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Broadway has caught up with Kenneth Lonergan, America’s greatest living dramatist, who has now had three of his six full-length plays produced there in the past four seasons, all of them masterly and all satisfyingly well-mounted. “The Waverly Gallery,” first performed in 1999, is an autobiographical memory play narrated by a young man whose grandmother suffers from dementia. It is a harrowingly honest group portrait of the havoc wrought by that disease, not only on those who have it but on those who love them, and this revival, directed with uncommon grace by Lila Neugebauer, is a close-to-ideal enactment of what might just be Mr. Lonergan’s most gripping stage play to date—which is saying something.
The family portrayed in “The Waverly Gallery” is a gaggle of what one of its members tartly describes as “liberal Upper West Side atheistic Jewish intellectuals.” Gladys (Elaine May), the matriarch, runs an art gallery that went to seed when her memory started to crumble. By now she is keeping it open just to have something to do all day, with her daughter (Joan Allen), son-in-law (David Cromer) and grandson (Lucas Hedges) doing all that they can to look after her, a task well on the way to becoming impossible…
Ms. May is not, of course, a stage actor—my guess is that she’s being miked—but her lack of experience in that specialized capacity doesn’t stop her from giving a performance that blends bewilderment with courage in a way that is beautifully, heartbreakingly right….
“The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s new play, which has transferred to Broadway after a successful London run, is a kind of Irish counterpart of “August: Osage County,” a three-and-a-quarter-hour study of a close-knit rural family that is being pulled apart, in this case by the poisonous effects of political fanaticism. Largely devoid of the self-regarding pretentiousness that made his previous plays unwatchable, it builds to an explosively potent surprise ending whose force is diminished by the fact that it takes Mr. Butterworth most of the garrulous first act to finally get down to dramatic business….
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To read my review of The Waverly Gallery, go here.
To read my review of The Ferryman, go here.
Scenes from the original 2000 off-Broadway production of The Waverly Gallery, starring Eileen Heckart and directed by Scott Ellis:
Scenes from the Broadway transfer of The Ferryman: