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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 16, 2020

The critic and the vampire

October 16, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a production of Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas webcast from Dallas. Here’s an excerpt.

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Prior to the coming of the pandemic, I traveled all over America to see and review regional theater productions. Thanks to the theatrical webcasts that I started covering in March, though, I’ve been discovering first-rate companies of whose existence I was previously unaware. That’s one of the many reasons why smart theater companies will make streaming video an integral part of their plans for the post-COVID future—it’s an indispensable way to spread the word more widely about what they’re doing. 

Dallas’ Undermain Theatre, the latest of these discoveries, was founded in 1984 and now performs in a 90-seat theater of its own. While it’s highly thought of in Texas, I only just found out by chance that Bruce DuBose, the company’s producing artistic director, is starring in a webcast version of “St. Nicholas,” one of Conor McPherson’s monologues about unhappy people who live too close to the edge that separates the real from the unreal. Written in 1997, it has since become one of Mr. McPherson’s most admired monologues, and what Undermain is doing with it is thrilling. Not only is Mr. DuBose an outstanding performer, but the production as a whole is identical in quality to the superlative work being done online by New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.

The premise of “St. Nicholas” is funny going in: The principal character is a self-hating, booze-swilling Dublin drama critic in his late fifties who falls in with a group of vampires. As if that weren’t enough, Mr. McPherson’s critic is jealous of the people he reviews because he longs in vain to write his own plays: “I had no ideas for a story….I could only write about what was there already. I was a hack.” This is, needless to say, an over-familiar piece of abuse flung at critics by those who resent them—but Mr. McPherson, being not a hack but one of our very greatest playwrights, turns it into a wholly believable tale of a troubled soul who has lost his way in the dark….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for St. Nicholas:

Replay: André Previn conducts Bernard Herrmann

October 16, 2020 by Terry Teachout

André Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony perform a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho at a 1979 concert:

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

Almanac: Emerson on light

October 16, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

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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