About Last Night

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County * (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

The critic leaves at curtain fall

To find, in starting to review it,

He scarcely saw the play at all

For starting to review it.

E.B. White, “Definitions”

I’m currently weaning myself off coffee so consider the post title above as suffused with longing. I’ve spent the last couple days at one cup a day (down from a steady day-long drip) and so feel a little flattened and pre-lingual and Flowers for Algernonish. Yet in the midst of the bleakness a few animating things present themselves:
• The portfolio of poems by Jack Spicer included in the July/August issue of Poetry, the contents of which the magazine has available online (scroll down). I wasn’t familiar with Spicer’s work before — Lowell was, but he knows his California poets — but I’m completely enamored. A couple to explore are “Any fool can get into an ocean…” and “Imagine Lucifer.”
The magazine notes that a volume of Spicer’s collected poetry, My Vocabulary Did This To Me (that title is taken from the poet’s reported last words), is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press this fall. A collection of his lectures on poetry, The House That Jack Built, has already been out for some time. You can read an excerpt of one of the lectures here, although I recommend reading this introduction along with it as well as this brief bio of Spicer.
• A while back Rockslinga had a sampling of quotations from Zadie Smith’s essay on novel-writing in the June Believer. I finally picked up a copy of the magazine and I’m so glad I did. Originally given as a lecture at Columbia University, the essay’s one of the most helpful pieces I’ve read about long-haul fiction writing, a nice blend of practical advice with the abstractly inspiring. Unfortunately, it’s only partly available online, which doesn’t do you much good at your desk right now, does it? So until you can procure your own copy, you can read Smith’s very fine essay on Kafka in the current issue of New York Review of Books.
Smatterings elsewhere:
• As the future of the L.A. Times Book Review is considered, Mark “TEV” Sarvas proposes a possible new incarnation for the review as an online powerhouse a la The Guardian. Discussion is invited in the comments, and I point it out as it’s interesting to consider how papers will/ should adapt their book coverage in the future. (Aside: If you’re not reading it already, the L.A. Times book blog, Jacket Copy, is excellent.)
• Fernham provides a report on a lecture she attended on the Borges translation of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (short version: liberties were taken).

Nat “King” Cole sings “Sweet Lorraine,” accompanied by Coleman Hawkins and the Oscar Peterson Trio, with Herb Ellis on guitar and Ray Brown on bass:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

I just found out that the alternate URL for this site, www.terryteachout.com, has been out of order for the past few days. Don’t know why, and it’s hard to get anything fixed in July, but rest assured that we’re working on it.
In the meantime, you can always view About Last night by going to www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight, so please spread the word.

Attention, film buffs! For those of you who, like me, treasure the Hollywood western at its smartest and most aesthetically compelling, a piece of stop-press news has been eddying through the Internet for the past month or so, courtesy of the in-house blog of Tapeworks Recording Studios in Hartford, Connecticut. It finally caught up with me yesterday:

It was a B Movie bonanza in Tapeworks today as noted film authority Jeanine Basinger narrated a companion DVD track to the Budd Boetticher Western, The Tall T, starring Randolph Scott and Maureen O’Sullivan.
This is the first in a series of Boetticher releases that will comprise a box set of the directors distinctive works.
A regular presence in the Hartford recording studio, Prof. Basinger has provided commentary on numerous titles while viewing the films with Chief Engineer Bill Ahearn at Tapeworks and simultaneously with a Hollywood production company on the digital patch.
Jeanine Basinger is Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies and Founder and Curator of the Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut.

For those of you just joining us, I’ve been fulminating for years about the fact that only one of the six classic films starring Randolph Scott and directed by Budd Boetticher, Seven Men from Now, has been transferred to DVD. The Teachout Reader contains an essay about the Boetticher-Scott westerns (you can read it here) in which I praise them at length and in the strongest possible terms:

The clean, spare look of the Boetticher-Scott films is mirrored in their no-nonsense scripts. Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station, both written by Burt Kennedy, are for all intents and purposes the same movie as Seven Men from Now–the basic plot mechanism is recycled from film to film, along with a few choice snippets of dialogue–while Decision at Sundown and The Tall T, the former doctored by Kennedy and the latter adapted by him from a novel by Elmore Leonard, arise from different situations but develop in similar ways. More often than not, Scott plays the part of a solitary, vengeful drifter who is searching for a man has wronged him, usually by murdering his wife. In the course of his travels, he meets an unhappily married woman, to whom he is powerfully and illicitly attracted, and a villain who is charming and courageous–a hero gone bad, in other words. The villain proves to be looking for the same man as Scott, but their interests are in conflict, forcing them into a climactic showdown.
What sounds repetitive on paper proves miraculously varied in practice. Just as Degas never tired of the ballet dancers he painted time and again, so does Boetticher come up with ever-fresh ways to frame his players among the sun-scorched rocks of Lone Pine, finding painfully austere beauty in that least seductive of landscapes….

Now coming to a DVD player near you? It sure looks like it–and about damn time, too.
I’ll keep you posted.