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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 28, 2020

Funny man on the aisle

April 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I consider Robert Benchley’s work as a drama critic. Here’a an excerpt.

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Few things are so fleeting as the fame of a professional humorist. In the ’20s and ’30s, Robert Benchley was one of America’s best-known comic writers, a founder of the Algonquin Round Table who published essay collections with facetious titles like “My Ten Years in a Quandary, and How They Grew” that made him at least as popular as James Thurber. Indeed, a few of his one-liners (“In America there are two classes of travel—first class, and with children”) remain in circulation to this day. But he was also a neurotic self-doubter with a deadly taste for booze, and therein lay his downfall: When Hollywood discovered that he could play his amiably fuddled self on screen, first in comic shorts like the Oscar-winning “How to Sleep” (1935) and then in well-paid supporting roles in such feature films as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (1940) and Fred Astaire’s “The Sky’s the Limit” (1943), he stopped writing, started drinking in self-devastating earnest, and died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1945. Today Benchley is remembered almost entirely for his films, and his essays are largely forgotten.

Even less well remembered is that from 1920 to 1940, Benchley simultaneously held down a day job as a working drama critic, first for the old Life magazine in its pre-Luce incarnation and then, from 1929 to 1940, as the regular drama critic of the New Yorker. Nor was there anything facetious about his reviews: Benchley covered the Broadway premieres of everything from fluffy musicals to the tragedies of Eugene O’Neill….

What is far from surprising is that when Benchley wrote about light comedy, he did so both amusingly and with perfect taste, distinguishing only between the brilliant and brainless. He loved the early stage appearances of the Marx Brothers (“We may be doing them a disservice by boiling over about them like this, but we can’t help it if we feel it, can we?”). He went like a laser-guided drone to the money moment in “Girl Crazy”: “George Gershwin has written some good numbers, and Ira, his brother, has fitted some excellent words to them, and a young lady named Ethel Merman does wonder with three of them, sustaining one splendid note in ‘I Got Rhythm’ over a period of time usually allotted to the trumpets in orchestration.” Bull’s-eye!…

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Read the whole thing here

“How to Sleep,” written by and starring Robert Benchley and directed by Nick Grinde:

Lookback: on gratitude

April 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

From 2010:

If you need to adjust your attitude–and I did–a repeat viewing of Groundhog Day will likely do the trick. I laughed and laughed, then found myself overcome with gratitude at film’s end. I’m the luckiest person I know, and sometimes I forget it. Not tonight, though….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Shakespeare on sorrow

April 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

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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