It was another lackluster week for New York theater, as I report in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, which contains variably unenthusiastic reviews of Christopher Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them and the Broadway transfer of Rock of Ages. Here’s an excerpt.
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What will American playwrights do without George W. Bush to kick around? Judging by Christopher Durang’s “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” it would appear–at least for the moment–that they’ll simply have to keep on kicking. Mr. Bush, it seems, is the indispensable man of political theater, the all-purpose target without whom no self-respecting progressive, Mr. Durang included, can hope to get through the working day.
To be sure, Mr. Bush is never mentioned by name in “Why Torture Is Wrong,” but he is omnipresent all the same, for it is his war on terror that is the highly specific subject of Mr. Durang’s scattershot satire. How specific? This specific: “John Yoo from the Justice Department wrote a torture memo that says it isn’t torture unless it causes organ failure. And even if it does that, as long as the President says the words ‘war on terror,’ it’s A-okay.” In case you didn’t notice, that’s a joke. “Why Torture Is Wrong” is full of such “jokes,” which is one of the reasons why it soon outstays its welcome: Mr. Durang, who is under normal circumstances a very witty man, has made the mistake of letting his anger get the best of him….
“Rock of Ages” is a moderately amusing jukebox musical whose ear-shredding score consists of a compilation of the greater and lesser hits of such noted arena rockers of the ’80s as Pat Benatar, Bon Jovi, Foreigner, Journey, Styx and Twisted Sister, all of which I loathed when I first heard them on the radio a quarter-century ago. It would be the grossest of understatements to say that I expected nothing out of “Rock of Ages,” so I’m pleased–sort of–to report that it could have been a whole lot worse….
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Read the whole thing here.
Archives for April 10, 2009
TT: Almanac
“Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilirating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!”
Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure