Archives for December 2010

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report from Chicago on the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is a very great production. Here’s an excerpt.
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When not writing plays like “August: Osage County” and “Killer Joe,” Tracy Letts acts. In David Cromer’s 2005 Off-Broadway staging of Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow,” he played an effete, stuttering drama critic; in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 2009 Chicago revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” he played a sleazy penny-ante thief. This time around he’s playing George, the hard-drinking, switchblade-tongued small-town professor who is at the molten center of Steppenwolf’s new production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It’s a part that couldn’t be more different from the others in which I’ve seen Mr. Letts, and what he does with it makes me wonder whether there’s a better character actor to be found on the American stage today.
What is most striking about Mr. Letts’ performance, though, is that it doesn’t stand out from the rest of this remarkable show. Instead, Mr. Letts is part of an ensemble cast whose four members, directed with uncommon subtlety by longtime Albee collaborator Pam MacKinnon, function as an exquisitely well-coordinated ensemble in which nobody ever makes a false move. In the wrong hands, “Virginia Woolf” can come off as a hysterically overwrought insult marathon. In the hands of Mr. Letts, Amy Morton, Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks, it feels as though you’re sitting quietly in a corner of the room, watching four people get tight, shed their inhibitions and admit to themselves and one another that their hopes and dreams have come to naught….
A note for East Coast theater buffs: Steppenwolf’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” will transfer to Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, where it will be performed as part of Arena Stage’s Edward Albee Festival. Whether in Chicago or Washington, it’s a show you mustn’t miss.
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Read the whole thing here.
In 1962 Columbia Masterworks recorded a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Arthur Hill, Uta Hagen, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon, the four members of the original Broadway cast. Here’s an excerpt from that album, which has been out of print for decades:

Glynis Johns and Len Cariou sing “Send in the Clowns,” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:

Man is a victim of dope

In the incurable form of hope.

Ogden Nash, “Good-by, Old Year, You Oaf or Why Don’t They Pay the Bonus?”

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:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, on hiatus Jan. 9-31, then open through Feb. 20, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)

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

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

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING TONIGHT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:

• I Capture the Castle (comedy, G/PG-13, suitable for unusually precocious children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, reviewed here)

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

Alec Guinness plays the title character in Father Brown, a 1954 film directed by Robert Hamer and based on the mystery stories of G.K. Chesterton:

A rare sound newsreel film of G.K. Chesterton speaking at Worcester College in 1931:

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

“No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?”
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”
Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance