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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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The sly fox of Amherst

April 2, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast version of The Belle of Amherst. Here’s an excerpt.

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Emily Dickinson is not only a great poet but an artistic giant who casts a long shadow across both high and popular American culture. On the one hand, her hauntingly gnomic verses formed the basis for “Letter to the World” (1940), one of Martha Graham’s very best dances, and Aaron Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson, ” a song cycle of supreme sublimity. On the other hand, she cavorts wildly and ahistorically throughout “Dickinson,” the Apple TV+ comedy series in which she is transformed into a kind of proto-goth chick who takes opium and has hot sex with her brother’s fiancée.

“The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s 1976 one-woman play about Dickinson, falls somewhere in between these distant extremes, if far closer to the former than the latter….

Julie Harris appeared in a PBS version of the play taped at a 1976 Los Angeles performance, and that telecast (which can be streamed on Amazon Prime) has caused her to be indissolubly identified with part and play alike. While “The Belle of Amherst” continues to be performed by regional theater companies all over the U.S. and was revived off Broadway in 2014, nobody ever writes about it without making mention of Harris’s delicate, subdued performance, which is widely regarded as definitive.

You’d think such a play would have been taken up as soon as the Covid-19 pandemic closed American theaters and forced them to resort to streaming video, not least because as a one-hander it presents none of the logistical challenges of an ensemble production. But Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new online version of “The Belle of Amherst,” starring Margery Lowe, jointly produced with Coral Gables’ Actors’ Playhouse and taped without an audience in PBD’s 218-seat theater, appears to be the first one to be webcast since the start of the lockdown….

Not only is this one of the best theatrical webcasts I’ve seen in the past year, exactly comparable in artistic quality and production values to Undermain Theatre’s “St. Nicholas” and the Wilma Theater’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” but Ms. Lowe’s performance is superior in certain important ways to that of Julie Harris.

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Belle of Amherst:

Replay: Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sing “Moonlight in Vermont”

April 2, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald sing a duet version of “Moonlight in Vermont” on an episode of The Frank Sinatra Show originally telecast by ABC on May 9, 1958:

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

Almanac: Somerset Maugham on Ibsen and the theater of ideas

April 2, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“The disadvantage of ideas in the theatre is that if they are acceptable, they are accepted and so kill the play that helped to diffuse them.”

Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

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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