Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“Resolve: To be altogether more advanced and intelligent, to have more friendships and fewer affairs, to write and read more than I eat and drink, to revisit Paris and write a prize novel.”
Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground
No rest for the weary: I spent the whole damn day writing the last of four pieces that came due the same week as All in the Dances, my Balanchine book. This one was my monthly Commentary essay, about Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich and Stalin and Richard Kostelanetz’s Aaron Copland: A Reader (aren’t you wondering how those two books fit together?), and it ended up being four thousand words long. I started it Thursday morning and finished it at 11:30 Thursday night. Now I’m going to bed. Tomorrow (today, actually) I’ll catch a plane to Raleigh, N.C., to spend two days looking at Carolina Ballet, and I’ll be back some time on Sunday.
Until then, there will be no further blogging from me. In fact, there will be no further writing of any kind from me. Not counting the book and the blog, I’ve produced roughly 8,000 words of publishable prose since Monday morning, and that’s soooo much more than enough. Right now you couldn’t pay me to inscribe a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. (Really!)
Believe it or not, though, it’s nice to be back. I missed you while I was gone, a lot. And though I still have Balanchine-related chores awaiting me next week–I’ve got to choose the illustrations–I plan to spend plenty of time right here at “About Last Night.” So keep your eyes peeled for further cultural bulletins.
See you Sunday.
It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, reviewing Arthur Penn’s revival of Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Eric Stoltz, and Barbara Cook’s Broadway.
Sly Fox isn’t perfect, but it’s damned good for what it is:
“Sly Fox” is, of course, Mr. Gelbart’s very loose rendering of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone,” relocated from seventeenth-century Venice to nineteenth-century San Francisco, where the noted conman Foxwell J. Sly (Mr. Dreyfuss) and his not-so-trusty servant Simon Able (Mr. Stoltz) have set up shop for the purpose of fleecing a bunch of equally dishonest folk. In this modernized version, little of Jonson’s play survives but the plot (Mr. Gelbart claims not even to have read Jonson, relying instead on a 1927 German-language adaptation of “Volpone” by Stefan Zweig), atop which are sprinkled several thousand jokes about greed and hypocrisy. All the characters talk like Groucho Marx, squeezing off punchlines like bullets from a burp gun, and while many go wide of their targets, enough hit the bull’s-eye to keep you flailing with laughter….
As Sly, Mr. Dreyfuss is going up against still-vivid memories of George C. Scott and Robert Preston, his predecessors in the role, and though I never saw either of them on stage, my guess is that he falls a little bit short, perhaps because he’s–well, a little bit short. I envisioned Foxwell J. Sly as a Falstaffian rascal, and Mr. Dreyfuss’ finicky voice and compact frame didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Nevertheless, he’s more than good enough to get the job done, and even better as Judge Thunder J. Bastardson, under whose wary eye the cast of “Sly Fox” conducts a seminar on scene stealing that is glorious to behold.
As for Barbara Cook’s Broadway, well, it’s pretty fabulous:
Speaking of old pros, Barbara Cook used to sing ingenue roles on Broadway back in the Fifties and Sixties, the salad days of musical comedy. Now she’s 76 years old and stars in one-woman shows about those same salad days. Her latest such effort, “Barbara Cook’s Broadway,” is running through April 18 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, the same house where Christopher Plummer is starring in “King Lear,” also through April 18. (Ms. Cook performs on Mr. Plummer’s days off.) Go see it. She sings 15 wonderful show tunes, some familiar and some not, all interpreted in a totally straightforward style that keeps the spotlight on the songs, not the singer. When not making music, Ms. Cook tells tales out of school, including an anecdote about Elaine Stritch that’s worth at least half the price of admission.
No link. Just buy the Journal, O.K.? It’s only a dollar.