Archives for May 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and a Pennsylvania production of Dial “M” for Murder. Here’s an excerpt.

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It’s been a quarter-century since Audra McDonald’s unforgettable performance as Carrie in Nicholas Hytner’s Lincoln Center Theater production of “Carousel” made her famous. At 48, Ms. McDonald is now clearly and wisely inclined to move on from such standard musical-comedy roles, and she is in any case as outstanding an actor as she is a singer. So it makes sense that she should be returning to Broadway for the first time in three years in a straight play of which she is the incontestable star. What’s more, Ms. McDonald’s performance in the newly opened Broadway revival of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” Terrence McNally’s 1987 romcom about a steamy one-night stand that blossoms into love, is a very fine piece of work—albeit one in which she has been cast sharply against type.

The problem is that Ms. McDonald is called upon to play a working-class waitress who, according to the script, is a woman of “striking but not conventional good looks” with a “fairly tough exterior.” Ms. McDonald, by contrast, is an exceptionally beautiful woman with a cultivated speaking voice who couldn’t have less in common with a character created by Kathy Bates and previously played on Broadway by Edie Falco…

As for Mr. McNally’s play, it’s a sugar-sweet fantasy, the most blatantly commercial thing he’s ever written…

Frederick Knott wrote three popular plays, all of them mysteries, a genre that migrated long ago from Broadway to the small screen. Two of them, “Dial ‘M’ for Murder” (1952) and “Wait Until Dark” (1966), were box-office smashes that were filmed just as effectively, enough so that Knott gave up writing after “Wait Until Dark” and spent the rest of his life (he died in 2002) living comfortably off his royalties. 

While neither play has yet to be successfully revived on Broadway, they both continue to be performed by amateurs and regional companies, and I’ve long been curious to see whether they still work onstage. To that end, I drove out to Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse to see that excellent company’s version of “Dial ‘M’ for Murder,” and am delighted to report that Knott’s best-remembered play is still tremendous fun, a thriller so tautly and meticulously plotted that the audience at the matinée I saw didn’t make a sound (except for startled gasps at all the right moments)….

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To read my review of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, go here.

To read my review of Dial “M” for Murder, go here.

Excerpts from the Broadway revival of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune:

The original theatrical trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s screen version of Dial “M” for Murder:

Titus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back earlier this week for the latest in a series of conversations about film noir and “noir-adjacent” films. In the latest episode, we discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, written by Ernest Lehman, scored by Bernard Herrmann, and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, James Mason, and Martin Landau. Our hour-long chat is now available on line.

Here’s Titus’ summary of our conversation:

Titus and Terry Teachout talk about North by Northwest, Hitchcock’s perfect comedy. We move by way of thriller from the noir to what it would take for a noir hero, betrayed by a beautiful woman, nevertheless to find his way to romance in the element of comedy. Cary Grant pulls off a performance by turns comic and tragic, trying to make sense of life in modern America, and ends up getting married.

To listen to or download this episode, go here.

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Alfred Hitchcock introduces North by Northwest:

An excerpt from Jackson Pollock 51, a documentary film about the artist directed by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg. The score is by Morton Feldman:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“In childhood, the impetus of conversation is curiosity. The child talks to ask questions. But one of its first lessons, as it advances, is that a question is an intrusion, and an answer a deceit.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “On the Character of Mrs. Hemans’s Writings”

“There is nothing so easy as to be wise for others; a species of prodigality, by the by—for such wisdom is wholly wasted.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Romance and Reality

From NBC’s Wisdom, an occasional series of TV profiles of older “cultural icons” that aired from 1952 to 1965, excerpts from conversations with Igor Stravinsky, Pearl Buck, Robert Frost, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, Margaret Mead, Carl Sandburg, Somerset Maugham, Robert Moses, and Marcel Duchamp:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience”

From 2009:

Misleading though it can be to read an artist’s life into his work, I’m not greatly surprised that the Rothko Chapel was created by a man who committed suicide a year before it opened. I say this as one who loves Mark Rothko’s paintings of the late Forties and early Fifties passionately. In those days he was full of life, spilling over with the bold, high-key colors that he first saw in the work of Pierre Bonnard. But something seems to have gone badly wrong by the time he got around to painting the Rothko Chapel murals (though there are plenty of critics and scholars who beg to differ)….

Read the whole thing here.