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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Out for revenge (and dinner)

March 26, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review webcasts of the Alley Theatre’s Medea and George Street Playhouse’s Fully Committed. Here’s an excerpt.

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Professional stagings of the Greek tragedies are increasingly uncommon on this side of the Atlantic. The last such production to reach Broadway, for example, was Euripides ’ “ Medea, ” in which Fiona Shaw played the title role to show-stopping effect in 2002. I can’t remember the last time I reviewed a Greek tragedy in this space, nor do any of them appear to have been mounted online in the past year. So it is exciting news that Houston’s Alley Theatre is webcasting “Medea” in a first-class production specifically conceived for online viewing—all 10 actors have been filmed in separate spaces, interacting on split screens—and directed with self-effacing skill and imagination by Rob Melrose, the company’s artistic director….

New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse, which recently webcast a marvelous production of Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates,” is now offering yet another sure-fire one-performer comedy. “Fully Committed” is Becky Mode’s enormously popular 2000 play about a struggling young actor (Maulik Pancholy) who pays the rent by taking reservation requests at a hyper-trendy Manhattan restaurant that serves such fancy-shmancy dishes as “crispy deer lichen atop a slowly deflating scent-filled pillow, dusted with edible dirt.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

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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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