Archives for July 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the PBS webcast of the 2016 Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. Here’s an excerpt.

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PBS has telecast dozens of plays and musicals on its “Great Performances” anthology series since the long-running program made its debut in 1972. Now the network is endeavoring to lift spirits crushed by the coronavirus pandemic by pulling some of those fondly remembered performances off the shelf and rebroadcasting them on Fridays on TV, and for a limited time via free streaming video. This week’s offering is a bedazzling gem, a live performance of the 2016 Broadway revival of “Present Laughter,” Noël Coward’s best play, starring Kevin Kline. Rarely have I laughed so hard as I did when I saw it on stage four years ago, and I am very happy to report that it comes across on the small screen with near-identical comic vitality….

“Present Laughter” cannot be made to take flight without an actor oozing with star quality sufficient to take on the showy leading role that Coward originally wrote for himself and which has since been essayed on Broadway by Clifton Webb, George C. Scott and Frank Langella, a list that gives you a pretty clear idea of what an actor needs to come up to scratch as Garry Essendine, Coward’s barely fictionalized alter ego. The brilliance of Mr. Kline’s performance lies in the fact that he plays Essendine not as a grossly inflated caricature but for truth, which—of course—makes him even funnier…..

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Present Laughter:

The “overture” to Mark Morris’ staging of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts, featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006:

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

“Dancers are auto-erotic and have no conversation.”

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

“Taste is knowing what you don’t like.”

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

A 1965 BBC interview with the British painter Francis Bacon. This was the pilot for a TV series that did not go into production, and the interview was never broadcast. The interviewer is Julian Jebb:

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

“The test of whether a picture is any good—that is to say any good for you, which is the only thing that counts—is not whether it thrills you but whether you can remember it.”

Maurice Grosser, Critic’s Eye

In my latest Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the Irish Repertory Theatre’s webcast revival of Conor McPherson’s The Weir. Here’s an excerpt.

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With a handful of exceptions, every important company in the U.S. has canceled or rescheduled its shows through the end of 2020 and hopes to reopen at some point in the first half of 2021. And what will they do until then? A fast-growing number of companies say they’ll fill in the gap with webcasts, though few have described their plans in any detail. To date, the webcasts I’ve reviewed in this space were mostly taped prior to the lockdown, but several companies have also streamed newly produced Zoom-based performances and play readings…

Of these, the best was the New York-based Irish Repertory Theatre’s “performance on screen” (as the company billed it) of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a three-character play whose interconnected monologues were ideally suited to the narrow limitations of Zoom. Now the Irish Rep has topped itself with an even more technically ambitious revival of Conor McPherson’s “The Weir,” a five-actor play that the company produced to great acclaim in 2013 and remounted two years later. Despite certain minor failings, it is by far the most impressive socially distanced theater webcast I have seen.

First seen in this country on Broadway in 1999, “The Weir” is, like so many of Mr. McPherson’s plays, an exercise in storytelling. It centers on four ghost stories told by a quartet of Irish drinkers (Dan Butler, Sean Gormley, John Keating and Amanda Quaid) who are forced by a storm to hole up in a village pub (the fifth person, played by Tim Ruddy, is the bartender). The common theme that binds together their homely tales is the loneliness at the heart of the human condition, and each tale is progressively more unsettling—and more believable….

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Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the Irish Rep’s original 2013 stage production of The Weir: