Archives for November 6, 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review West Coast webcasts of Art and Same Time, Next Year. Here’s an excerpt.

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How effective can a stage comedy be when performed without an audience? Having now seen two such webcasts, both of them taped in empty theaters, I still don’t know for sure.

San Francisco Playhouse, a company new to me, is currently testing the efficaciousness of online comedy with Yasmina Reza’s “Art.” Like Ms. Reza’s “God of Carnage,” it’s a serious small-cast comedy (three characters) of bad middle-class manners that hit big on Broadway, where it opened in 1998 and ran for 600 performances. Directed by Bill English, the company’s artistic director, on a simple but elegant set of his own design, it tells the tale of Serge (Johnny Moreno), an art snob who spends $200,000 on a minimalist painting that his old friend Marc (Jomar Tagatac) curtly dismisses as “a piece of white shit.”…

While this production is a trifle rough around the edges, the cast is well chosen and Mr. English’s staging serves the play equally well. Not so the absence of an audience, which is a problem, if never a serious one….

Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year” was an even bigger hit than “Art”: It opened on Broadway in 1975, ran for 1,453 performances, then was turned into a popular movie. It is now a regional-theater staple, and North Coast Repertory Theatre, a very fine troupe whose headquarters is a suburban shopping center not far from San Diego, is presenting it as a fully-staged webcast taped on its main stage.

Directed by David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, “Same Time, Next Year” is a lightweight romcom about George and Doris (Bruce Turk and Katie MacNichol), who are married—but not to one another—and who meet once a year for an adulterous tryst without informing their spouses….

“Same Time, Next Year” has long since become a period piece. Even its best laugh lines smack of Neil Simon’s old-fashioned one-two-get-ready-for-the-joke style: “I have a friend who says that life is saying ‘yes.’ The most I’ve ever been able to manage is ‘maybe.’” Such jokes land much harder when there are people present to laugh at them….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Art:

A Terry Teachout Reader, my self-anthology, came out sixteen years ago. I’ve published hundreds of pieces on various subjects since then, and I have no plans to put together a sequel to the Teachout Reader, so I’ve launched a series of occasional posts drawn from my fugitive essays, articles, and reviews. I hope you like this one, which came from a 2006 Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column called “Unrisky Business.”

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One of the occupational hazards of being a drama critic is that strangers are forever asking you what shows they should see. Experience has taught me that what most of them really want to know is which Broadway musical they should see. A friend of mine whose sister lives in New Jersey once put it even more bluntly. “My sister and her husband want to go to a Broadway show,” she asked me. “What would you recommend?”

“What kind of show do they have in mind?”

“Oh, you know. Something safe.”

I knew what she meant, but I decided to probe more deeply. “What do you mean by safe?” I asked.

“Nothing too serious,” she replied. “A musical, maybe. Nothing that’ll make her cry.” 

I know plenty of snobs whose response would have been to roll their eyes. Not me. I’m a firm believer in what Arnold Bennett called “the great cause of cheering us all up.” What’s more, I don’t have much patience with intellectuals who sneer reflexively at “safe” art. Ask them what they mean by “safe” and you’ll find that they have in mind everything from “Spamalot” to Shakespeare. To such folk the only art worth seeing is that which has the power to shock—and then only if it does so in a way that suits their own preconceptions. I’m especially amused by their insistence that the classics are too “safe” to bother with nowadays. What could be more shocking than “Hamlet,” in which, as Howard Dietz so neatly put it, “a ghost and a prince meet/And everyone ends in mincemeat”? As for “Oedipus Rex,” let’s not even go there.

The American Symphony Orchestra League just issued a list of the pieces of classical music most frequently played by North American orchestras during the 2005-06 season. The top five, in descending order: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s “Jupiter,” Tchaikovsky’s Fifth, Beethoven’s Ninth and Brahms’ First. Need I point out that all five are as deadly serious as it gets? Or that each one can still reduce a receptive listener to tears?

Of course I don’t think all art should play it safe. Much of the greatest art, after all, is challenging, even shocking. As Clement Greenberg, the critic who put Jackson Pollock on the map, so wisely pointed out, “All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.” It’s important not to be scared away by art that doesn’t look the way you expect, or tell you what you want to hear. But it’s no less important to appreciate the permanent value of realistically painted landscapes and comedies with happy endings. If you think you’re too good for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” I suggest you consider the alternative possibility that it might be too good for you.

An excerpt from “Le Mystère Picasso,” directed in 1955 by Henri-Georges Clouzot:

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

“The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.”

Jackson Pollock, unbroadcast 1950 interview