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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Stumbling down memory lane

March 5, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review George Street Playhouse’s webcast of Theresa Rebeck’s Bad Dates. Here’s an excerpt.

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The premise of Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates,” which is being webcast by New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse, is all but infallible. It’s a one-act monologue delivered by Haley Walker (played by Andréa Burns ), a charmingly ditsy, compulsively talkative restaurant manager and single mother of a certain age who owns 600 pairs of shoes, has been on far too many disastrous dates to count, but decides to try again after a long stretch on the shelf. The lights go up on a fluffy bedroom piled high with shoeboxes—Haley is in the middle of a frenzied search for the right pair to wear on the date on which she will be going at evening’s end—and the action, such as it is, consists of Haley’s telling us the labyrinthine story of her life, which includes a climactic skirmish with the Romanian Mafia and the New York Police Department. While that may sound slight in the telling, “Bad Dates” never fails to give great pleasure in the hands of an appealing actor and a solid production team, and Ms. Burns and her George Street colleagues are all that and much, much more….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Bad Dates:

Replay: Ginette Neveu plays Chausson’s Poème

March 5, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Ginette Neveu plays the closing section of Ernest Chausson’s Poème. This rare silent film footage is synchronized with Neveu’s commercial recording of the piece:

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

Almanac: Mary Renault on love and hate

March 5, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”

Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo

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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