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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 22, 2020

Plain and powerful

May 22, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the latest American Shakespeare Center webcast, a revival of Frank Galati’s stage version of The Grapes of Wrath. Here’s an excerpt.

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Whether on stage or screen, John Steinbeck’s novels play better than they read, a fact that was proved yet again when Frank Galati turned “The Grapes of Wrath” into a stage play written for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. First performed there in 1988, it transferred to Broadway in 1990 and won a best-play Tony, beating out Craig Lucas’ “Prelude to a Kiss,” Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” and August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson.” An exceptionally fine adaptation that continues to be revived, its virtues are now on display courtesy of Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center, whose touring company, based in Staunton, taped a performance in March in ASC’s 300-seat Blackfriars Playhouse, a modern historical recreation of a theater built in London in 1596 that has been transformed into an online soundstage for the duration of the pandemic. 

Directed by José Zayas and presented on an open Elizabethan-style stage, Mr. Galati’s no-frills “Grapes of Wrath,” like John Ford’s classic 1940 film version, strips away much of Steinbeck’s preachiness to focus on the stony-hard lives of the Joad family, who flee the smothering dust and debt of Depression-era Oklahoma and drive their rickety, overstuffed jalopy to California in search of hope. The result is a play full of contemporary echoes that are both unexpected and unforced, performed by ASC with a sober plainness of utterance that pierces the heart like a well-honed arrow….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Grapes of Wrath:

Replay: a TV interview with James Stewart

May 22, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Michael Parkinson interviews James Stewart and his wife Gloria on the BBC in 1973:

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

Almanac: Confucius on diligence

May 22, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“To rank the effort above the prize may be called love..”

Confucius, Analects

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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