Now that Edward Albee and Horton Foote have left us, John Guare would seem to have emerged as the unofficial dean of the American stage. He certainly deserves the title, and not merely because of his seniority: Mr. Guare long ago established himself as one of the most important playwrights of the postwar era. Yet “dean” is an oddly formal-sounding word to apply to a man who may be old—81, to be exact—but is nonetheless best known for such theatrical roller-coaster rides as “The House of Blue Leaves” (1971), “Landscape of the Body” (1977) and “Six Degrees of Separation” (1990), which are as dark as it’s possible to be but whose essential energy is comic to the point of outright zaniness.
“Nantucket Sleigh Ride,” Mr. Guare’s latest play, is all of a piece with its predecessors, a blackish farce about an aging playwright-turned-businessman who steps on a spiritual banana peel and finds himself flung back into the past. It’s the first full-scale play that Mr. Guare has written in some time, and in light of his protracted silence, it’s fair to wonder whether he still has his fast ball. Not to worry, though: “Nantucket Sleigh Ride” is as good as anything he’s given us. Indeed, it strikes me on first viewing that he might possibly have produced a bonafide old-age masterpiece…
“Ain’t Too Proud,” the new Temptations jukebox biomusical, is a Broadway musical for people who don’t like Broadway musicals—or maybe for people who like only jukebox biomusicals. The score, which includes such chart-topping hits of the Sixties and Seventies as “My Girl” and “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone,” is terrific, as are the singing and pit band, but Sergio Trujillo’s choreography is way too slick—the real-life Temptations moved like street-corner kids from Detroit, not glammed-up 42ndStreet gypsies—and the projection-heavy set design is ploddingly dull. As for Dominique Morisseau’s book, it sounds as though a roomful of ad executives wrote it.…
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To read my review of Nantucket Sleigh Ride, go here.
To read my review of Ain’t Too Proud, go here.
Laurence Olivier is interviewed by Michael Parkinson about his film career on Cinema. This program was originally telecast by Granada Television on November 19, 1970:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Here, as else- and every-where in criticism, not only the hardest thing but also the hardest thing to get recognized when attained, is the appreciation of difference without insisting on superiority.”
“As has been suggested above, the Book of History is the Bible of Irony: and, it may be added, the newspaper is a sort of key to that book though no doubt they change positions very frequently.”
Playhouse 90’s TV version of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” originally telecast live by CBS on November 6, 1958. The adaptation is by Stewart Stern and the telecast was directed by Ron Winston. The cast includes Roddy McDowell, Eartha Kitt, Oskar Homolka, Richard Haydn, and Boris Karloff as Kurtz:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets.”
I see a good many pre-1970 musicals as part of my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, and it occurred to me the other day to draw up a list of the best ones. Here, then, are the fifteen American musicals that I believe to be of indisputably permanent interest….
