“The idealist, I have noticed, is apt at times to be imprudent in the affairs of the flesh. He sometimes finds love in places which the police inconveniently visit.”
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.
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)
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….
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous. The humorist has a quick eye for the humbug; he does not always recognize the saint.”
