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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 21, 2020

Worst side story

February 21, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. Here’s an excerpt.

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Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the Hit Parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity….

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’ finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage….

All this, Mr. van Hove has said, is to the end of giving us “a ‘West Side Story’ for the 21st century.” On paper, that’s an obvious but not-unreasonable idea. I’m for changing the classics when it’s done with taste and imagination—I just reviewed an 85-minute high-concept all-female “Macbeth” that was thrilling from start to finish—and “West Side Story” is similarly overdue for a thoroughgoing spring cleaning. This is especially true of Robbins’ dances. While I love his vibrant, vaulting sketches of teenage passion, I’ve seen them too many times to feel the urgent need to see them again any time soon. Of the five previous “West Side Story” revivals that I’ve reviewed in this space, all either reproduced Robbins’ steps more or less literally or were strongly influenced by his style. The trouble with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography is not that it’s new but that it’s dull…

As for Mr. van Hove’s staging, it is, like everything else he’s done in New York, a medley of self-regarding minimalist clichés slathered with political sauce….

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Read the whole thing here.

Replay: the opening night of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana

February 21, 2020 by Terry Teachout

A British Pathé newsreel story about the 1953 Covent Garden premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, commissioned as part of the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The premiere was a now-legendary disaster, largely because the opening-night audience consisted mainly of upper-class luminaries hostile to modern music, and the opera (which is only mentioned in passing in the clip) failed to establish itself in the repertory until more than a decade later:

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

Almanac: G.K. Chesterton on open-mindedness

February 21, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

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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