TT: Those who cannot do…

I just got back from a month on the road, and in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two of the shows I saw there, American Players Theatre’s The Critic and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s August: Osage County. Here’s an excerpt.
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It isn’t quite right to say that nobody does “The Critic” nowadays, but Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, written in 1779, is far less familiar to American audiences than “The School for Scandal” and “The Rivals,” the works of his that remain perennially popular. The current revival by Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre appears to be the first professional production of any consequence to be mounted in this country in the past decade. Yet “The Critic” is one of the best comedies ever written, a backstage farce that offers infinite opportunity to a resourceful director and a cast of virtuoso farceurs. Fortunately, APT has both at its disposal, and William Brown has whipped up a staging whose full-tilt frenzy is strong enough to knock down a building or two.
Mr. Puff (Jim DeVita), the play’s central character, is an unashamedly venal press agent who introduces himself as “a practititioner in panegyric, or—to speak more plainly—a professor of the art of puffing, at your service, or anybody else’s.” He also fancies himself a playwright, and approaches the well-heeled Mr. Dangle (Darragh Kennan) and the waspish Mr. Sneer (Jonathan Smoots), a pair of opinionated connoisseurs, in the hopes of enlisting their support for his latest effort…
Mr. Brown has covered Sheridan’s witty cake with a thick and tasty frosting of slapstick so elaborate as to defy any attempt at accurate description. All I can tell you is that I’ve never laughed so hard in my life…
Sometimes a play that makes a strong first impression fails to hold up on repeat acquaintance. Not having seen “August: Osage County” since it opened on Broadway, I was eager to find out whether it was as powerful as I remembered, so I made a point of catching the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s version. I’m happy to report that it looks as good—maybe even better—the second time around, in part because Christopher Liam Moore’s staging is so satisfying but mostly because the play itself is a wonderfully sound piece of work, a group portrait of collective self-loathing that is all the more devastating for using humor to make its points.
Though the original production was more than funny enough, Mr. Moore and his cast have opted for a more broadly comic portrayal of what one of the members of Mr. Letts’ fictional clan describes as “the creepy character of the Midwest.” If you saw Steppenwolf’s version of the play, you may find this approach to be disconcerting at first, but OSF’s resident ensemble never stoops to caricature, and the results are every bit as effective in their own way….
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Read the whole thing here.