Archives for 2007

First Pat Buckley, now Kitty Carlisle Hart: the old order passeth, which makes me feel more than usually middle-aged.

As a child I watched Kitty Carlisle on To Tell the Truth, the classic game show that introduced me to the word “affidavit,” and a little later I saw A Night at the Opera for the first time and was amazed to find that the distinguished and amusing lady who sat on a TV panel every afternoon had once been a movie star of sorts. Later on I played Beverly Carlton in a college production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and discovered to my further amazement that she was the widow of its co-author, Moss Hart.

It hardly seemed possible that such a self-evidently historic person as Kitty Carlisle Hart (as she now styled herself) should still be alive when I finally made it to New York twenty-two years ago, but she sure enough was, having outlived her far more famous husband to become one of the last surviving relics of an age in which I would have preferred to live. What’s more, she kept on ticking all the way to the end, appearing in cabaret and constantly popping up on the town.

I never met the Widow Hart, but I did sit behind her two years ago at a matinée performance of the grisly Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie that starred Jessica Lange and Christian Slater. After intermission I saw her seatmate-companion fumbling with the assisted-listening device that Mrs. Hart had been using to hear the actors. Clearly she’d been having trouble getting it to work. Having recently watched Broadway: The Golden Age, the thought occurred to me that she had most likely seen Laurette Taylor in the original production, and I briefly thought of tapping her on the shoulder and saying, “Don’t bother–you’re not missing anything.” Alas, I didn’t have the nerve, and so missed an opportunity to amuse a legend.

The New York Times obituary of Kitty Carlisle Hart is here. For a lovely tribute by Stephen Holden, the Times‘ smartest critic, go here. The Times also ran a nice little piece today about Pat Buckley’s place in Manhattan’s “nouvelle society,” which you can read by going here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews 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:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

“I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Courtesy of Broadway Stars, the Web site that posts links to theater-related news stories, reviews, and commentary, you can now read my Wall Street Journal pan of The Pirate Queen for free:

Has there ever really been a musical so bad that it was funny? (I mean an actual show, not “Springtime for Hitler.”) “Taboo” and “In My Life” both began promisingly, but my sense of humor was swamped by their sheer awfulness well before intermission. “The Pirate Queen,” on the other hand, is a gift that keeps on giving: It starts out dumb, then gets dumber, and at no time does anything other than preposterous ever take place on stage or in the orchestra pit….

To read the whole thing, go here. (This link is only good for one week, so act promptly!)

One of the as-yet-inexplicable side effects of changing publishing platforms has been that anyone trying to visit “About Last Night” via www.terryteachout.com, our alternate URL, is getting bounced to the main ArtsJournal page instead. Stand by–we’re working on it!

When I moved to the Upper West Side apartment in which I now live, I went to Staples and bought myself a cheap but functional swivel desk chair. It disintegrated a year or so ago, and I replaced it with one of my spare dining chairs, an ancient wooden folding chair with a cane seat. This was supposed to be a temporary expedient, but like many men, I don’t much care for shopping, so I never got around to buying a real desk chair. I spend roughly half of my waking hours sitting at my desk, though, and after months of hard use, the folding chair finally started to give out on me as well. Not wanting to be like Glenn Gould, who continued to use his homemade adjustable piano chair long after the bottom had fallen out of it, I decided that I had to get a new chair at once.
After spending three years sitting in a swivel chair with wheels, I knew I wanted something simpler and less mobile, and now that I’ve turned my apartment into a miniature museum, I figured that it ought to be aesthetically pleasing as well. Since the Teachout Museum is mostly devoted to American art, and since I’m a midcentury modernist at heart, it hit me that the time had come at last to add a piece by Charles and Ray Eames to my collection. After much thought, I came to the conclusion that an Eames molded plywood dining chair could easily do double duty as a desk chair, so I broke down and bought one last week. I’ve been sitting in it (and looking at it) with the utmost pleasure ever since.
It was Our Girl who first got me interested in the Eameses. She owns an Eames lounge chair that I’ve envied fiercely ever since I first laid eyes on it. My little desk chair is a vastly more modest affair, but I love it anyway, and it goes perfectly with the two Fairfield Porter lithographs that hang over my work space. Come see it, OGIC!
Now if only I can find a midcentury-modern couch small enough to fit into my living room and comfortable enough to sit in pleasurably….

I wasn’t able to post last Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser due to circumstances beyond my control, so here it is, a little late but none the worse for wear. I reviewed two new Broadway revivals, Inherit the Wind and A Moon for the Misbegotten:

Most people know what they think they know about the Scopes “monkey trial” from having seen “Inherit the Wind,” the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that ran on Broadway for two years, was made into a movie in 1960 and has since been performed by every professional, semi-professional and unprofessional theater company in the English-speaking world. But “Inherit the Wind,” which has just been revived on Broadway in a big-budget production starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, isn’t what it appears to be. Far from being a fact-based docudrama about what happened when the state of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in its public schools, it’s a fictionalized account of the trial that plays fast and loose with the facts in the case of Tennessee v. Scopes. You don’t have to be a Holy Roller to be exasperated by its cartoonish absurdity–or disgusted by its repulsive smugness….
Bryan is turned into an oafish opportunist, Scopes into a secular saint, the citizens of Dayton into a slack-jawed gaggle of mouth-breathing morons, and Darrow into a homespun cracker-barrel agnostic with a heart of gold and a weakness for noble curtain speeches: “You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you? Tomorrow, sure as hell, somebody else’ll have to stand up. And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!” To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to listen to such tripe without snickering. I don’t, and I didn’t.
It’s impossible to stage “Inherit the Wind” in anything like a dramatically serious way, and Doug Hughes, the director, hasn’t even tried. Nothing that happens in this production bears any obvious relationship to recognizable human behavior. Each performance is a caricature, starting with that of Mr. Plummer, who plays Henry Drummond, the character based on Darrow (everyone in “Inherit the Wind” is given a transparent pseudonym). He oozes the kind of charm that makes you want to go straight home and scrub yourself with a pumice stone. As for Denis O’Hare, cast as a smart-alecky reporter bearing the suspiciously familiar-sounding moniker of E.K. Hornbeck, I’ll say only that in the course of researching my biography of H.L. Mencken, it somehow escaped my notice that he bore any resemblance whatsoever to Pee-wee Herman….
How bad can a good play be? Pretty awful, actually. Eugene O’Neill’s “A Moon for the Misbegotten” opens with an hour and a half of exposition so superfluous that you itch to trim it with a meat ax, all delivered in the kind of stage-Irish accents that should have gone out with John Ford. But just when you’re thinking your watch has stopped, the play gets started, and soon you forget about everything but the tragedy of Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan (Kevin Spacey and Eve Best), two sinfully proud, irreparably damaged people who can’t bring themselves to let down their guard and love one another. No, it’s not as good as “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” “Ah, Wilderness!” or “The Iceman Cometh,” but “A Moon for the Misbegotten” definitely works, even in so ill-conceived a staging as the Old Vic production that just arrived from London for a two-month run on Broadway….
Howard Davies, the director, must have ordered his cast to play the first act for excruciatingly obvious laughs, while Bob Crowley’s set, which is dominated by a surrealistic-looking farmhouse apparently located somewhere in the Dust Bowl, looks as though it had been intended for a German production of “The Grapes of Wrath” rather than a show set in rural Connecticut circa 1923. Ignore all that and concentrate on Ms. Best. She’s miscast–Josie is supposed to be big and ugly–but so magnetic that it doesn’t matter….

No free link. To read the whole thing, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to last week’s drama column, plus the rest of the paper’s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

This is part of a piece I wrote for Crisis immediately after the Columbine massacre:

It is not enough simply to say that violent movies drive young men mad, since people have been killing other people on the silver screen ever since The Great Train Robbery. Nor is today’s violence uniquely explicit. When Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee at Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat–and when, later on, you see her hideously scarred face–the effect is as shocking as anything in Pulp Fiction. Yet no one has suggested that such films permanently warped the psyches of Eisenhower-era children. Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about the way violence is presented in contemporary movies. But what?
As it happens, Marvin himself offered a partial but nonetheless compelling answer to that question. “When I play these roles of vicious men,” he told an interviewer, “I do things you shouldn’t do and I make you see that you shouldn’t do them.” Today, any actor or director who dared say such a thing would sound hopelessly naive, but Marvin had earned the right to speak plainly: an ex-Marine who was grievously wounded in combat in World War II, he knew that violence has consequences. Not so his jejune successors, in whose morally weightless films violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces–but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I still feel that way.