I forgot to mention it on Monday, but I just started a two-week holiday from my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. As regular readers of this blog know well, Mrs. T and I have just been through the wringer, and I’m sorely in need of a respite from playgoing and caregiving.

To this end, an old friend of ours is spending the week at our apartment in New York, looking after Mrs. T’s needs, while I hole up at our place in Connecticut and (as Jake Gittes says in Chinatown) do as little as possible. I’ll be spending the next two nights at a harborside hotel on Long Island Sound of which I am inordinately fond, and on Saturday I’ll return to New York—but not to the Journal. I figure that a full week of absolute rest, followed by an additional week without shows or deadlines, will be enough to restore at least some of my equilibrium.

I will, as always, continue to post the usual daily blog items during my absence—they’re done well in advance—and I’ll also be looking in on Twitter and Facebook from time to time. Mostly, though, I plan to sleep late, read books, watch movies, and sit in a hot tub. So don’t look for reviews until after Labor Day: there won’t be any.

See you around.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s revival of Into the Woods and the Broadway premiere of Sea Wall/A Life. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, one of the finest outdoor summer companies on the East Coast, is now adding musicals to its regular repertory of plays by Shakespeare and more modern works in a classical vein. To this end, Davis McCallum, Hudson Valley’s artistic director, has brought in Jenn Thompson, whose Goodspeed Musicals revivals of “Bye Bye Birdie,” “The Music Man” and “Oklahoma!” were of the highest possible quality, to stage “Into the Woods,” Stephen Sondheim’s fractured-fairy-tale parable of innocence and experience. It’s a logical choice for a troupe that performs under a spacious tent pitched on a wooded bluff overlooking the Hudson River, and the results are a triumph for all parties concerned. “Into the Woods” gets done a lot—a whole lot—but I haven’t seen it done this well since the original 1987 Broadway production.

The hallmark of Ms. Thompson’s version is its visual simplicity: There is no set, only a hoop, five green umbrellas, a few wooden chairs and crates, the plain dirt floor of the playing area and a natural backdrop of trees and sky, all of them deployed with the utmost resourcefulness….

The producers of “Sea Wall/A Life,” a double bill of dramatic monologues by Simon Stephens (“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”) and Nick Payne (“Constellations”) respectively performed on Broadway by Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal, are counting money at the Hudson Theatre, where tickets cost up to $339 apiece and are selling in abundance. I guess that’s what happens when you cast two sensitive, exceedingly handsome young actors (who are both competent, not that it matters) in a show about postmodern masculinity. Alas, “Sea Wall/A Life” starts out dull, then becomes just plain awful….

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To read my Into the Woods review, go here.

To read my Sea Wall/A Life review, go here.

A featurette about the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival revival of Into the Woods: