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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 11, 2019

Making Marilyn Monroe boring

April 11, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Review I review the world premiere of Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, the first theatrical presentation of The Shed, New York’s new arts center. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Kenneth C. Griffin Theater, the most conventional of The Shed’s performance spaces, is a nondescript-looking 500-seat multipurpose black-box theater on the sixth floor that can be set up and subdivided in an infinite number of ways. While such auditoriums are common enough nowadays—most colleges have one—they’re harder to find in midtown Manhattan, which is dominated by Broadway’s traditional proscenium-arch theaters. Whether this one will have any impact on the culture of theater in Manhattan, though, will likely depend more on what the Griffin Theater presents than how it’s presented. Judging by its inaugural offering, I’m skeptical in the extreme, for “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is an embarrassment, a show that I would never have considered reviewing had its premiere been given under any other circumstances.

As the title indicates, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is a mash-up, a verse play by Anne Carson loosely based on Euripides’ “Helen” in which the lives of Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe are compressed into a single narrative, one in which Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Fritz Lang and Pearl Bailey also play prominent roles. The results occasionally reminded me of “The Mother of Us All,” Gertrude Stein’s 1947 opera about the life of Susan B. Anthony, in which historical fact is interwoven with fey fantasy: “Enter Norma Jean as Mr. Truman Capote./First choral song./Enter chorus./I am my own chorus.” Mostly, though, “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy” is a bore, for Ms. Carson’s “verse” is flat-footed, clunkily colloquial and—needless to say—very political: “HISTORY OF WAR: LESSON 6/In war, things go wrong. Blame Woman.”

“The Mother of Us All” works, of course, because Virgil Thomson, Stein’s collaborator, set it to a droll musical score full of deadpan parodies of what he affectionately described as “gospel hymns, darn-fool ditties, inspirational oratory and parades.” Not so “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” which has been turned by Paul Clark into a humorless two-person “melologue,” a 90-minute-long play-with-singing. His score, a wall-to-wall carpet of synthesized drones and sound effects that could have been lifted from a ’70s happening, is wholly anonymous-sounding. Ben Whishaw, lately of “Mary Poppins Returns,” and Renée Fleming, who needs no introduction, play…well, I’m not sure who they play. At first he seems to be a screenwriter and she his mousy secretary, which might possibly make him Mr. Miller, but in due course Mr. Whishaw dons drag and becomes Mrs. Miller….

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Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Joseph Conrad on youth and middle age

April 11, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon—too soon before life itself.”

Joseph Conrad, Youth

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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