Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artie Shaw appears as the mystery guest on the third episode of What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Arlene Francis, Richard Hoffman, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Louis Untermeyer. Shaw’s segment begins at 16:46. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on March 2, 1950:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“No matter how insecure, almost all the stars I’ve worked with have a high degree of self-knowledge. They may hate what they see, but they do see themselves.”
Sidney Lumet, Making Movies
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The recent return of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” to America’s professional stages is long overdue—though it’s easy to see why it went missing for so long. First mounted on Broadway in a 1942 production directed by Elia Kazan and starring Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead and Montgomery Clift, “The Skin of Our Teeth” ran for 359 performances, won Wilder the third of his three Pulitzer Prizes, and was widely and rightly taken at the time to be comparable in quality to “Our Town.” But while it was soon taken up by schools and amateur troupes, the play’s large cast (30 actors) and longish running time (two hours and 40 minutes) made it too unwieldy for most professional companies to consider, and it hasn’t been seen on Broadway since 1975, when a revival directed by José Quintero closed in less than a week.
Not until Arin Arbus’ warmly received 2017 Brooklyn staging did a new generation of playgoers rediscover and embrace the quirky beauties of “The Skin of Our Teeth.” The Berkshire Theatre Group’s new production, directed with total understanding by David Auburn, is the third version that I’ve reviewed in the past two years, and I’ll now be surprised if it doesn’t come back to Broadway sooner rather than later.
Why the collective change of heart? Because Wilder’s “fantastick comedy” (his spelling) about the history of humankind, which received its premiere when the United States was fighting a war whose outcome was as yet far from sure, was written to give hope to its viewers at a moment of high national anxiety….
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Read the whole thing here.Stephen Sondheim gives a master class in which he rehearses a group of students from London’s Guildhall School in “Getting Married Today,” a song from Company:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Tragedy, when it works, leaves no room for tears.”
Sidney Lumet, Making Movies
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss the problem of critical error—and how unconscious prejudices often contribute to it. Here’s an excerpt.
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Critics like to think their opinions are more than that, but we all know better. We’re always getting things wrong, usually by failing to appreciate the virtues of the new. Otis Ferguson, one of the shrewdest film critics who ever lived, actually panned “Citizen Kane” for being too talky. Another case in point is the now-notorious review in which Brooks Atkinson dismissed the original 1940 production of “Pal Joey” as “drab and mirthless.” To Atkinson’s credit, though, he changed his mind when he reviewed the 1952 Broadway revival, praising “Pal Joey” the second time around for “the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.”
I have a feeling that Atkinson fell victim in 1940 to unconsciously letting his prejudices get in the way of his perceptions, a less well-known but equally insidious source of critical error that can apply to revivals as well as new works….
H.L. Mencken was onto something when he claimed that criticism is “no more than prejudice made plausible.” Take John Simon, the dean of American film and theater critics, who nevertheless once wrote that “I consign anyone considering ‘The Searchers’ a masterpiece…beyond the critical pale.” Yet John Ford’s now-classic 1956 Western ranked #7 on Sight & Sound’s most recent critics’ poll of the greatest films of all time….
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Read the whole thing here.“I don’t know why I feel like this, but rehearsal halls should always be a little grungy.”
Sidney Lumet, Making Movies
Gloria Swanson appears as the guest in excerpts from a 1957 episode of This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)