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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Three’s company

April 9, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review webcasts of Yours Unfaithfully (by the Mint Theater Company) and Trying (by North Coast Repertory Theatre). Here’s an excerpt.

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Miles Malleson is one of the Mint Theater Company’s most significant rediscoveries. Known today solely for his small but striking character roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Stage Fright,” Anthony Asquith’s 1952 film version of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and several of Alec Guinness’ comedies, he was also a dramatist of no mean gifts whose plays had nonetheless vanished from the stage long before his death in 1969. The Mint, which specializes in reviving the work of such writers, has to date produced two of Malleson’s plays, “Conflict” (1925) and “Yours Unfaithfully” (1933), both of which it captured on broadcast-quality archival videos. I saw “Conflict” onstage three years ago and reviewed it as a webcast in October, finding it impressive on both occasions. While I missed “Yours Unfaithfully” when it played at the Mint in 2016, it can now be viewed in streaming video, and the results are at least as good.

“Yours Unfaithfully” had never been staged anywhere before the Mint put it on. It’s easy to see why: It tells the story of an open marriage….

North Coast Repertory Theatre, which presented superior webcast productions of “An Iliad” and “Same Time, Next Year” in 2020, is now offering yet another extremely watchable two-hander. Joanna McClelland Glass’s “Trying,” staged by David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, is a bioplay about Francis Biddle (played by James Sutorius ), a bred-in-the-bone Philadelphia Republican who had a midlife conversion and switched parties to become Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general (in which capacity he unsuccessfully opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II) and, later, to serve as a judge at the Nuremberg war-crime trials….

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To read my review of Yours Unfaithfully, go here.

To read my review of Trying, go 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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