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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 19, 2019

Not exactly Billary

April 19, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two Broadway openings, Lucas Hnath’s Hillary and Clinton and a revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. Here’s an excerpt.

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From “Julius Caesar” to “Abe Lincoln in Illinois” and beyond, theater has long given us fictionalized what-are-they-like-at-home glimpses of powerful politicians and their private lives. At their best, such shows can be both provocative and memorable, but the latest of them, Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton,” takes a self-evidently promising subject and misses every opportunity to make it dramatic. No matter how you feel about the Clintons, you’ll likely find it a once-over-lightly disappointment.

What is most puzzling about Mr. Hnath’s play is the episode from the Clintons’ shared life that he has chosen to put onstage. Instead of writing about the 2016 election, he’s turned the clock all the way back to 2008, the year in which Mrs. Clinton (Laurie Metcalf) lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama (Peter Francis James). What’s more, he’s sought to write what the marquée cutely describes as “primarily a comedy,” although that catchphrase is misleading: Shorn of its limp punchlines, “Hillary and Clinton” is the story of the complicated, apparently unhappy marriage of two formidably ambitious people, one of whom usually got what he wanted and the other of whom mostly didn’t.

As promising as this sounds on paper, it doesn’t work in the theater, in part because John Lithgow is playing Bill Clinton. Granted that theater is an art of illusion and that Mr. Hnath has very specifically instructed his actors not to “imitate” (his word) the people they’re playing, Mr. Lithgow’s familiar onstage persona, that of the comic WASP, is so far removed from Mr. Clinton’s down-home glad-handing that you spend much of the play wondering who thought it was a smart idea to cast him….

Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” is back on Broadway for the first time since 1988, and it probably shouldn’t be. It’s not a bad play, you understand, but no amount of high-class craftsmanship can conceal the fact that “Burn This” is a smiley-faced variation on “A Streetcar Named Desire” (neurotic-but-not-hopelessly-so dancer turned choreographer, secretly sensitive coke-snorting stud whose sexual prowess brings her back to life, nice boring boyfriend, happy ending) with a Sassy Gay Second Banana™ thrown in to confuse the issue. The four parts are respectively played by Keri Russell, Adam Driver, David Furr and Brandon Uranowitz, all of whose performances have a shallow, one-notey feel….

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To read my review of Hillary and Clinton, go here.

To read my review of Burn This, go here.

Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow talk about Hillary and Clinton:

A TV commercial for the original 1987 Broadway production of Burn This:

Lanford Wilson talks about Burn This in 1987:

Replay: Humphrey Bogart on baseball

April 19, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Humphrey Bogart endorses major-league baseball in an undated TV commercial filmed and originally telecast in the Fifties:

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

Almanac: George Orwell on power

April 19, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

George Orwell,Nineteen Eighty-Four

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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