About Last Night

“‘What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,’ returned my companion, bitterly. ‘The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done.’”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

In today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two out-of-town shows, a Chicago revival of The Price and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival premiere of Head Over Heels. Here’s an excerpt.

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For all his fame, Arthur Miller was never all that commercially successful. Only two of his plays, “Death of a Salesman” and “The Price,” ran for more than a year on Broadway, and “The Price,” though it was telecast on NBC in 1971 and continues to receive occasional high-profile revivals, isn’t nearly as well known as “Salesman.” So when Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre Company announced that it was staging “The Price” and that the cast would include Mike Nussbaum, I knew I had to be there. Mr. Nussbaum (who is, believe it or not, 91 years old) isn’t widely known outside his home town, but he’s one of America’s best character actors. I’ve seen him in everything from Shakespeare to Sondheim, and he’s always knocked me flat. This time, however, he’s outdone himself—though not at the expense of the production, which is so unremittingly taut that I found it all but impossible to look away from the stage long enough to scribble notes on what I was seeing. Maybe that’s the definition of a really good show: one that Mr. Nussbaum can’t steal because everybody else in the cast is as good as he is….

Part of what makes “The Price” so good is that Miller somehow managed to steer clear of the bloviatory sermonizing of his other plays, “Salesman” in particular. He claimed long after the fact that it was really an allegory of America’s involvement in Vietnam, but if so, he covered his symbolic tracks so carefully that it’s hard to see what he meant. Far from being obviously political, “The Price” is a life study of the power of unacknowledged pride to corrode family ties, and though the last 15 minutes are a bit stagy, that doesn’t make them any less riveting.

Louis Contey, who directed TimeLine’s marvelously low-keyed 2010 production of “Frost/Nixon,” has worked no less subtle wonders with “The Price.” I’ve never seen four actors listen so closely to their onstage colleagues: They seem to hang on one another’s words, thereby drawing you into the sticky web of mistrust in which their characters are trapped….

Jeff Whitty’s “Head Over Heels” is a new jukebox musical in which the punkish power-pop songs of the Go-Go’s (“We Got the Beat”) are made to serve as musical accompaniment to an extremely free verse adaptation of “Arcadia,” Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, whose sexy plot has a startlingly modern feel. I relished the ingeniousness with which Mr. Whitty has slotted the songs into the unfolding dramatic action, and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar’s production is frisky and genial. Not so, alas, the book, unless you go in for Ye Olde Renaissance Faire iambic-pentameter humor…

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To read my review of The Price, go here.

To read my review of Head Over Heels, go here.

A scene from TimeLine Theatre’s production of The Price:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I consider the question of why classic big-cast plays are vanishing from America’s stages—and offer some suggestions for what to do about it. Here’s an excerpt.

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Three years ago, an unknown ensemble called the Bedlam Theatre Company set up shop in a grubby off-off-Broadway house and performed George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan,” which calls for some two dozen actors, with a cast of four. It was the most improbable Shaw revival I’d ever seen—and the most exciting.

Today Bedlam is a major name in New York theater, as well as a sign of the times. Our cash-strapped drama companies have been increasingly disinclined in recent years to revive budget-busting big-cast plays like “Saint Joan.” I first took note of that tendency in this space in 2013, and it’s grown even more pronounced since then. To be sure, Broadway does exhume big-cast classics on occasion: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” for example, has been done there nine times, most recently in 2012. But the only plays of that kind that get done with any regularity nowadays, whether in New York or by regional companies, are such well-worn single-set chestnuts as “Streetcar,” “Death of a Salesman,” “Our Town” and “You Can’t Take It With You.” Fine plays all—but there’s more to large-scale theater than familiar staples.

The success of Bedlam’s blazingly imaginative reworking of “Saint Joan” pointed to one way for cash-conscious drama companies to present big-cast plays without dynamiting their bank accounts: Cut the casts by doubling, tripling and quadrupling the roles. Other companies have grappled with the same problem by teaming up to mount expensive shows that they couldn’t afford to produce separately.

One way or another, though, American theater is urgently in need of new solutions to the big-cast problem. Essential parts of the theatrical repertory are falling into disuse. In the hope of moving them out of the warehouse and back onstage again, I offer this list of six significant large-cast plays, only one of which has been seen on Broadway in the past two decades, that deserve to go to the top of the priority list. No, they’re not cheap to do—but they have solid track records of audience success….

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Read the whole thing here.

Vivien Leigh stars in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, adapted for TV by Ellen M. Violett, directed by Henry Kaplan, and originally telecast in England in 1959 on ITV Play of the Week:

Bill Monroe plays “My Last Days on Earth,” which he wrote when he was being treated for colon cancer in 1981. He died in 1996:

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

“There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

John Adams, letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1814

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.

BROADWAY:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, closes Jan. 17, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• Guys and Dolls (musical, G, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)
• You Never Can Tell (Shaw, PG-13, closes Oct. 25, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• An Iliad (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 18, reviewed here)
• The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WIS.:
• The Island (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• The Twelve-Pound Look (one-act comedy, G, not suitable for children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NEW HOPE, PENN:
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, G/PG-13, extended through Sept. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• Bedroom Farce (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms

TUESDAY, AUGUST 18 (cont’d) As soon as I retrieved my wandering suitcase and returned from the Hartford airport, Mrs. T and I collected our nephew Ian and his friend Max and drove down to New York. Ian recently graduated from high school and starts college this month, so we decided to mark the occasion by taking him to a Broadway show.

After much thought, I concluded that Hand to God was the best possible choice. Not only did I give the show a rave review in The Wall Street Journal, but its X-rated humor struck me as more than sufficiently scabrous to satisfy a pair of bright teenage boys. Mrs. T hadn’t accompanied me when I reviewed it in April, and I knew she’d like it, too, so I bought four orchestra tickets (incontrovertible proof of how much I’d liked the play) and took to Twitter to congratulate myself in advance on my keen understanding of the adolescent mind. No sooner did I trumpet our plans than I received a message from one of the publicists for Hand to God asking if the four of us might possibly like to go backstage after the performance to meet the cast. I accepted with alacrity.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 Ian and Max spent the day barnstorming around Manhattan while Mrs. T got her hair done and I undertook various back-in-town-for-two-days-so-better-get-it-done-now chores. We met for dinner at Blue Fin, then went to the Booth Theatre to see Hand to God, at which our guests and Mrs. T laughed so hard that I briefly wondered whether they might rupture themselves. We made our way to the stage door afterward and spent the better part of an hour chatting with Geneva Carr, Marc Kudisch, and Steven Boyer, all of whom couldn’t possibly have been nicer. Steven went so far as to don one of the hand puppets used in the show and pose for a selfie taken by Ian.

(If you think I’m a jaded theater professional, by the way, think again. The truth is that I’m every bit as star-struck as the most avid of fans, and I had to pinch myself a couple of times to make sure I was really backstage at a Broadway show.)

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 Ian and Max returned to Connecticut by train in the afternoon. As soon as they left, Mrs. T and I collected the rental car, drove to Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, and checked into the superlatively cozy Bridgeton House on the Delaware, one of our two favorite B&Bs, which happens to be within easy driving distance of the Bucks County Playhouse, whose production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee I was set to review the following night. Talk about convenient!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 We drove to New Hope and ate a stupendously good dinner at Italian Cucina, then walked two blocks to the playhouse and saw Putnam County, which proved to be every bit as good as I’d hoped.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 This being a working trip, I got up first thing in the morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal reviews of Putnam County and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival revival of Guys and Dolls before breakfast.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 We left Bridgeton House after breakfast (fresh figs!) and drove north through the Delaware Water Gap to Ecce Bed and Breakfast, our other favorite B&B, which we love so much that we spent our honeymoon there.

I’ve written about Ecce more than once in this space since I first went there in 2005, so I won’t belabor its virtues yet again save to say that the view (Ecce is situated on a wooded bluff three hundred feet above the Delaware River) is spectacular, the breakfasts are sumptuous, and the owners (who have long since become good friends) are kind and considerate to a fault. On top of all that, the upstairs hall is decorated with a gorgeous pair of pencil-signed Al Hirschfeld lithographs of Lucille Ball and Carol Channing. I mean, what’s not to like?

No shows or deadlines—we came to Ecce to unwind, and did so successfully.

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 Back home to Connecticut, where I checked my e-mail and learned that Dramatists Play Service had sent the first finished copies of the acting edition of Satchmo at the Waldorf to our New York apartment. It was a perfect finish to my busman’s semi-holiday.

(Last of four parts)

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A scene from the Broadway production of Robert Atkins’ Hand to God, starring Steven Boyer:

A scene from the Broadway production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, performed by the original cast at the 2005 Tony Awards ceremony: