Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Somerset Maugham is interviewed by Alan Pryce-Jones in 1965 for Wisdom, an occasional series of TV profiles of older “cultural icons” that aired on NBC from 1952 to 1965:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“To write simply is as difficult as to be good.”
Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando
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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.
Steely Dan’s two appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman, performing “Josie” in 1995 and “Cousin Dupree” in 2000:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“You know, I’ve always figured the waiting is what they pay me for. The acting I do free.”
Edward G. Robinson (quoted in Charlton Heston, In the Arena)
In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about two important tributes to the Great American Play. Here’s an excerpt.
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When Al Hirschfeld died in 2003, the obituary published by the New York Times, in which his pen-and-ink theatrical caricatures had run, bore the following headline: “Al Hirschfeld, 99, Dies; He Drew Broadway.” Even though he also drew movie and TV stars and pop celebrities of all kinds—the subjects of his 10,000-odd drawings, paintings and prints range from Jack Benny and Liberace to the cast of “Frasier”—it was Broadway with which Hirschfeld’s name was and is most closely linked. The vaulting, swooping energy of his caricatures, which embodied the personalities of his subjects without stooping to malice, was inimitable, and no one has been able to take his place.
Hirschfeld drew Broadway for so long that it is possible to put together a nearly unlimited number of subject-specific exhibitions of his work. The latest one, “‘It Goes So Fast’: ‘Our Town’ by Al Hirschfeld,” is an online show of 10 drawings assembled by the Al Hirschfeld Foundation and curated by Howard Sherman…. Mr. Sherman is also the author of the recently published Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ in the 21st Century (Methuen), an important book consisting of oral histories of 12 productions of the play that have opened since 2002 and prefaced by a richly detailed 34-page overview of the original Broadway production and the play’s subsequent history up to the turn of this century….* * *
Read the whole thing here.Go here to watch Al Hirschfeld draw Paul Newman as the Stage Manager in Our Town:
“A truism in the trade is that, maybe this side of King Lear, comedy is the hardest genre to do well, with the caveat that a pretty good Lear is still watchable. A pretty good comedy is not.”
Charlton Heston, In the Arena
Jack Teagarden sings and plays “Basin Street Blues” on Timex All Star Jazz Show (No. 2), originally telecast live by NBC on April 30, 1958. The band also includes Ruby Braff on trumpet, Tony Parenti on clarinet, Marty Napoleon on piano, Chubby Jackson on drums, and Cozy Cole on drums, and is introduced by John Cameron Swayze:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)