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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Making the most of streaming theater

April 1, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, I reviewed webcast versions of The Last Five Years and The Aran Islands. Here’s an excerpt.

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The most consequential development in the postmodern history of the musical has been the explosion of interest in small-scale revivals initially triggered by John Doyle’s 2005 Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” What we have not yet seen is a comparable explosion of newly written “chamber musicals” that, like Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” (2001) and Josh Schmidt’s “A Minister’s Wife” (2009), are written for very small casts and accompanied by instrumental ensembles of like size. Since such shows would be well suited to the daunting problems posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is good news that “The Last Five Years,” a two-actor musical, is now being presented as a webcast production of supreme dramatic and technical excellence, as fine a show of any kind as I’ve reviewed since I started covering online theater a year ago….

Joe O’Byrne’s “The Aran Islands” is a one-man play assembled by him from turn-of-the-century journal entries by J.M. Synge, the author of “The Playboy of the Western World.” It’s the 10th video production of New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre, whose shows continue to set the gold standard for theatrical webcasting. Performed by Brendan Conroy, directed by Mr. O’Byrne and filmed earlier this year at Dublin’s New Theatre, it is a digital remount of the Irish Rep’s original 2017 production, a piece of richly colored storytelling enhanced this time by film footage shot on the isolated islands portrayed in the play….

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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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