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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Obvious, but not too obvious

November 30, 2018 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Here’s an excerpt.

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You needn’t believe in historical inevitability to have predicted that the election of Donald Trump would lead in short order to a New York revival of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.” Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, in which Adolf Hitler becomes a Depression-era Chicago gangster who is out to corner the local cauliflower trade by hook, crook or tommy gun, has a way of getting produced whenever the White House happens to be occupied by a president who rings the gong of backstage outrage. “If we’re not screaming and shouting now, when are we ever going to do it?” asks John Doyle, the director of Classic Stage Company’s new production….

As fine an artist as Mr. Doyle is, and as excited as I was by the prospect of seeing Raúl Esparza in the title role, I was more than a little bit apprehensive about this production going in. “Arturo Ui,” after all, isn’t one of Brecht’s masterpieces—its satire is too cartoonish—and I’ve seen a fair number of shows in recent months whose claims to artistic seriousness were undercut by the willingness of their makers to stoop to over-obvious anti-Trump pandering. But Mr. Doyle mostly avoids blatant point-making, instead giving us an electrifyingly coarse and colloquial show into which Mr. Esparza’s complex performance fits with surprising neatness….

Not only is the action of the play, which unfolds in a fluorescent-lit warehouse, grotesquely comic in tone, but Mr. Esparza turns Ui-Hitler into a figure of fun (his whiny, nasal voice reminded me of Jerry Lewis). At the same time, though, he also plays the dictator as a man given to startling outbursts of self-pity and doubt, a quality remarked on by many people who knew Hitler personally…

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Read the whole thing here.

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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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