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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 29, 2020

Comfort food for the soul

May 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast from Chicago of TimeLine Theatre’s 2013 revival of To Master the Art, a play about Julia Child. Here’s an excerpt.

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As the pandemic continues to wreak financial havoc on America’s performing-arts organizations, more theater companies (though not nearly enough) are turning to webcasts of various kinds as a desperately needed source of revenue. Some, like New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, are airing new online-only productions, while others are streaming older shows drawn from their archives. TimeLine Theatre, a much-admired Chicago troupe that specializes in “stories inspired by history,” has chosen the latter course with “To Master the Art,” a bioplay about Julia Child that was commissioned by the company in 2008 and revived there in 2013. Co-written and staged by William Brown, one of Chicago’s leading directors, and starring Karen Janes Woditsch, a Chicago-based actor of the first rank, it’s a play nicely suited to the moment, an intelligent entertainment about the comforting delights of cooking and eating….

Child was a co-author of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” among the most influential cookbooks of the 20th century, and the star of “The French Chef,” the long-running PBS series that later made her a pop-culture icon (Dan Aykroyd spoofed it to wicked effect on “Saturday Night Live” in 1978). In “To Master the Art,” Mr. Brown and Doug Frew tell how “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” came to be written. That may not sound particularly interesting on paper, but it proves in practice to be a complicated and absorbing tale. Child came to Paris in 1948 with her husband Paul (Craig Spidle), a United States Information Agency official whom she had met when they were both working in Ceylon for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence agency that later became the CIA. A “strapping girl from Pasadena” (as she describes herself in the play) who was bowled over by her first taste of French cooking, she promptly enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu and struck up a friendship with Simone Beck (Jeannie Affelder), who was writing a cookbook for American readers on which Child subsequently collaborated. Thirteen years later, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” made her a household name.

Not only is “To Master the Art” the story of how a person discovers her destiny, but it is also a dual portrait of a loving marriage, and the chemistry between Ms. Woditsch and Mr. Spidle is a big part of what makes it good….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

An excerpt from the first scene of To Master the Art:

Dan Aykroyd plays Julia Child on Saturday Night Live in 1978:

Things go wrong in Julia Child’s kitchen in a clip from an original episode of The French Chef:

Replay: Erich Wolfgang Korngold at the piano

May 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“A Dream Comes True: The Making of an Unusual Motion Picture,” a promotional featurette for Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Hollywood screen version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This trailer contains the only known sound film of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who scored the film, playing piano:

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

Almanac: Shakespeare on despair

May 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly.
But, bear-like, I must fight the course.

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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