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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 2020

A farce fit for a star

July 31, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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:

Replay: Mark Morris’ Four Saints in Three Acts

July 31, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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)

Almanac: Virgil Thomson on dancers

July 31, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

Almanac: Virgil Thomson on taste

July 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

Snapshot: a 1965 interview with Francis Bacon

July 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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)

Almanac: Maurice Grosser on what makes a picture good

July 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“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

A fly on the studio wall

July 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

My latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, in which I talk about D.A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company, is now on line. Here’s an excerpt.

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Fifty years ago, the phrase “cinéma vérité” had only just started to enter common English-language usage, and it seems a safe bet that most Americans who’d heard of the fly-on-the-wall style of documentary filmmaking pioneered in the U.S. by D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew were more than a little bit suspicious of its underlying premise. Is it reasonable to expect people to behave unselfconsciously when you fill a room full of movie cameras aimed at them? In fact, that’s just what happens once the subjects get used to the presence of the cameras and crew: They fade into the wallpaper, and those who are being filmed soon cease to be conscious of their presence.

As for Mr. Pennebaker, who died in August, his preferred subject matter was music, and so it is appropriate that “Dont Look Back,” his critically acclaimed 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan, should have clinched his directorial reputation. But in the world of theater, Mr. Pennebaker is not merely known but legendary for “Original Cast Album: ‘Company,’” the 1971 film about the making of the original cast album of the show that established Stephen Sondheim as the most influential Broadway songwriter of the postwar era….

“Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” is a triumphant demonstration of the theory of cinéma-vérité: Everybody in Columbia’s old recording studo on East 30th Street is too busy getting the show on tape to preen or posture for Mr. Pennebaker’s cameras. They know they only have a limited amount of time at their disposal, and they all stick closely, even ruthlessly, to the business at hand….

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Read the whole thing here.

From Original Cast Album: Company, Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers record “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”:

Homely tales of the human condition

July 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

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:

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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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