Archives for July 2020

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal I review two important theater webcasts, the National Theatre’s 2016 revival of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea and the Mint Theater’s 2014 revival of George Kelly’s The Fatal Weakness. Here’s an excerpt.

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If you’re looking for theater webcasts to keep you entertained during the pandemic, the website of London’s National Theatre should be one of your regular stops. Not only does the NT routinely make broadcast-quality videos of its major productions, but it is responding to the closing of British theaters by streaming a free video every Friday on its “National Theatre at Home” webpage. These videos, each of which remains available for a week, are of the highest possible artistic merit and technical finish, and the company’s latest offering, a 2016 revival of Terence Rattigan’s “The Deep Blue Sea” directed by Carrie Cracknell, will be of special interest to American viewers, since Rattigan’s plays are rarely produced in the U.S. “The Deep Blue Sea,” his masterpiece, had a brief Broadway run in 1998, but so far as I know, it hasn’t been staged over here since then, in New York or anywhere else.

I can’t imagine a better introduction to Rattigan than “The Deep Blue Sea,” a 1952 drama about the English middle class and its stiff-upper-lip discontents that is at once suavely crafted and profoundly felt….

Ms. McCrory is thrilling as the desperate Lady Hester, though she never overshadows the other members of Ms. Cracknell’s well-matched ensemble cast, and the production comes through with shining precision on video….

Here’s a happy surprise: The Mint Theater, an off-Broadway troupe that specializes in staging unjustly forgotten 20^th-century plays to unfailingly pleasing effect, has been storing up broadcast-ready three-camera archival videos of its productions since 2013. Now it’s making three of the best ones, George Kelly’s “The Fatal Weakness,” Harold Chapin’s “The New Morality” and Hazel Ellis’ “Women Without Men,” available for free in a “Summer Stock Streaming Festival” package….

If the company itself is new to you, I suggest that you start with “The Fatal Weakness,” which had a short Broadway run in 1946 but was never revived anywhere until the Mint exhumed it in 2014. Best known for “The Show-Off” (1924), which still gets produced from time to time, and best remembered for being Grace Kelly’s uncle, Kelly was one of the most popular playwrights of his day. Few remember him today, yet his best plays remain impressive. “The Fatal Weakness,” far from being a dusty museum piece, is a tough-minded serious comedy about the high price of upper-crust adultery….

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To read my review of The Deep Blue Sea, go here.

To read my review of The Fatal Weakness, go here.

An excerpt from The Deep Blue Sea:

Oscar Levant is the guest on an episode of The Jack Benny Program. The co-stars are Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, Mary Livingstone, Frank Nelson, and Don Wilson. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on November 30, 1958:

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

“I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

William Holden appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? The host is John Daly and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Q. Lewis. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on September 23, 1956:

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

“Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. Now everyone is aware of him. He creates a regular eddy among the tourists and the barkeeps and B-girls who come running to the doors of the joints.”

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

In my Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I pay tribute to Ennio Morricone and Johnny Mandel. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle.” So said Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriters and the studio system’s cynic-in-residence. Much the same thing could be said about writing movie music. Save for the handful of film composers who, like Henry Mancini and John Williams, also had successful careers as performers, scarcely any of the men and women who score films in Hollywood and elsewhere are known by name to moviegoers. As a general rule, it doesn’t even help to write a song for a successful film that becomes a hit in its own right: David Raksin wrote “Laura,” one of the most frequently sung ballads of the 20^th century, yet he was and is known for the most part only to musicians and connoisseurs of the invisible art of film scoring.

Ennio Morricone and Johnny Mandel were  near-identical cases in point. They scored far more than their share of box-office smashes, and some of the cues they wrote, like Mr. Morricone’s wailing, warbling theme for “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966) or Mandel’s “Suicide Is Painless,” written for Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H” (1970) and later used as the theme for the even more popular TV series based on the movie, are familiar to moviegoers everywhere. Yet neither man won anything like full-fledged fame, and their obituaries spent a fair amount of space explaining who they were and why it mattered….

Instead, they were content to labor in the background, selflessly serving the films for which they wrote and the singers and instrumentalists who wholeheartedly embraced their music, leaving it to their colleagues—and posterity—to acknowledge them as the artists they were. Such was the shadowy but undeniable greatness of Ennio Morricone and Johnny Mandel…

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Read the whole thing here.

From 2010: 

Mr. Harriman—I never got used to calling him Dick, not even after I grew up, moved to New York, and became a full-time critic of the arts—was the most genial of impresarios, a famously soft-spoken man who never had a bad word to say about anyone, at least not in my hearing. Nor did I ever hear anyone say a bad word about him. He was kind, sweet-natured, and impeccably tasteful in every aspect of his life and work. That he took an interest in me when I was an undergraduate was one of the luckiest breaks in a life that has been full of good fortune….

Read the whole thing here.