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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 18, 2020

A feast of yuletide plays

December 18, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review three webcast productions of A Christmas Carol and a webcast of The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stage versions of “A Christmas Carol” are the “Nutcrackers” of a growing number of American theaters, sure-fire annual cash cows that are both good shows and safe ones—not only because Charles Dickens’s parable of the power of grace is universally known and beloved in the English-speaking world, but also because it evokes the Christmas spirit while steering clear of outright religiosity…

Many of the best “Christmas Carols” I’ve seen this season are one-man shows, of which the most spectacular by far is Jefferson Mays’s version. One of America’s leading stage actors, Mr. Mays is renowned for playing multiple characters in the same show (he portrayed some 40-odd men, women and nonbinary types in Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife”). His fully staged solo version of “A Christmas Carol,” which first ran at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse in 2018 and was headed for Broadway when the pandemic shut it down, is a tour de force of a similar kind, one in which Mr. Mays performs, so far as I could tell, the complete text of Dickens’s novella, turning himself into one character after another with supreme ingenuity….

If you favor a less elaborate, more intimate staging, then I strongly recommend Writers Theatre’s version, in which Michael Halberstam, the company’s artistic director, gives a dramatic small-stage solo reading of “A Christmas Carol” (he carries the book throughout) directed to exceptionally fine effect by Stanton Long. It’s not in any way static—this is a real show, not a lectern reading….

Houston’s Alley Theatre has mounted a Zoom-based version adapted by Doris Baizley and very well directed by Brandon Weinbrenner in which 10 members of the Alley’s resident acting company, all performing from their individual living rooms, divvy up the parts, with David Rainey giving a splendidly pungent, even salty performance as Scrooge….

For those humbuggers who don’t want to see anybody’s “Christmas Carol,” the place to go is Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, which is streaming Mary Zimmerman’s near-wordless pantomime version of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale about a tin soldier who loves a paper ballerina. Not since George Balanchine’s 1975 ballet version have I seen a “Steadfast Tin Soldier” of comparable quality….

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from Jefferson Mays’ performance of A Christmas Carol:

Replay: Mel Tormé sings “Moonlight in Vermont”

December 18, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Mel Tormé sings “Moonlight in Vermont” on TV in 1967. The pianist is Stan Kenton:

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

Almanac: Nero Wolfe on pessimism

December 18, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have beieved it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”

Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

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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