• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2019 / August / Archives for 16th

Archives for August 16, 2019

Cheers for Jenn Thompson

August 16, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Into the Woods and the Broadway premiere of Sea Wall/A Life. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, one of the finest outdoor summer companies on the East Coast, is now adding musicals to its regular repertory of plays by Shakespeare and more modern works in a classical vein. To this end, Davis McCallum, Hudson Valley’s artistic director, has brought in Jenn Thompson, whose Goodspeed Musicals revivals of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “The Music Man” and “Oklahoma!” were of the highest possible quality, to stage “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim’s fractured-fairy-tale parable of innocence and experience. It’s a logical choice for a troupe that performs under a spacious tent pitched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and the results are a triumph for all parties concerned. “Into the Woods” gets done a lot—a whole lot—but I haven’t seen it done this well since the original 1987 Broadway production.

The hallmark of Ms. Thompson’s version is its visual simplicity: There is no set, only a hoop, five green umbrellas, a few wooden chairs and crates, the plain dirt floor of the playing area and a natural backdrop of trees and sky, all of them deployed with the utmost resourcefulness….

The producers of “Sea Wall/A Life,” a double bill of dramatic monologues by Simon Stephens (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”) and Nick Payne (“Constellations”) respectively performed on Broadway by Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal, are counting money at the Hudson Theatre, where tickets cost up to $339 apiece and are selling in abundance. I guess that’s what happens when you cast two sensitive, exceedingly handsome young actors (who are both competent, not that it matters) in a show about postmodern masculinity. Alas, “Sea Wall/A Life” starts out dull, then becomes just plain awful….

*  *  *

To read my Into the Woods review, go here.

To read my Sea Wall/A Life review, go here.

A featurette about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival revival of Into the Woods:

Replay: Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison “rehearse” My Fair Lady

August 16, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison appear in a staged, scripted recreation of the first rehearsal for the 1956 Broadway premiere of My Fair Lady, in which they created the starring roles. This sequence is drawn from The Fabulous Fifties, which was originally telecast by CBS on January 29, 1960:

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

Almanac: Montaigne on getting along with uneducated people

August 16, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“We live and negotiate with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and vulgar are often as regular as those of the finest thread, and all wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance), we must no more intermeddle either with other men’s affairs or our own; for business, both public and private, has to do with these people.”

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Three Commerces” (trans. Charles Cotton)

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

August 2019
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jul   Sep »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Snapshot: Vladimir Horowitz plays Schubert
  • Almanac: Jacques Barzun on the piano
  • Lookback: on joining the National Council on the Arts
  • Almanac: Thornton Wilder on hope
  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in