Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Marin Mazzie sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” from Merrily We Roll Along:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”
Cicero, Philippicæ
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Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, one of the East Coast’s leading drama companies, has taped a fully staged site-specific production of “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” at a private location in the Poconos, turning the cast and crew into a closed quarantine “bubble” so that they could work together face-to-face instead of taping their performances separately via Zoom or green screens. The result, which looks more like a small-scale movie than an online webcast of a stage show, is a flawless, impressively well-cast production of a work of singular distinction, one for which the word “remarkable” is, if anything, an understatement.
The play, directed by Blanka Zizka, is set in rural Wyoming in 2017. It centers on Emily (Campbell O’Hare), Kevin (Justin Jain) and Teresa (Sarah Gliko), who are in their mid-to-late 20s and are meeting at the off-the-grid shack of Justin (Jered McLenigan), a somewhat older but like-minded man. The young people are all in the familiar process of discovering themselves, but there is nothing else ordinary about them: They are conservative Catholic intellectuals-in-the-making who have been girding themselves for battle in the coming culture wars….
While I feel sure that many of those who saw “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” in New York found the characters, not entirely without reason, to be potentially dangerous extremists, they are far more complicated and interesting than that, for life in urban America has nibbled away at their orthodoxies….
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for the Wilma Theater’s webcast of Heroes of the Fourth Turning:
Greer Garson presents the 1952 Best Actor Oscar to Humphrey Bogart for his performance in John Huston’s The African Queen. It was Bogart’s first Oscar:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I don’t claim to know that God exists. I only claim that he does without my knowing it.”
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers
My “Sightings” column in this week’s Wall Street Journal is about large-scale virtual presentations of famous works of art. Here’s an excerpt.
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The bad news is “Immersive Van Gogh,” a 500,000-cubic-foot high-tech video installation that opens in Toronto on Dec. 21, in Chicago on Feb. 11 and in San Francisco on March 18. It makes use of 50 digital projectors to show animated versions of “Starry Night” and several of the painter’s other masterworks, accompanied by New Age-style music. The press release maunders on at length about how the visitor (masked and socially distanced, of course) will “wander through entrancing, moving images…truly illuminating the mind of the genius.” I haven’t seen the show in person, but the extensive video clips I’ve viewed online suggest that attending “Immersive Van Gogh” is not even remotely like the intensely involving experience of encountering a painting up close. Instead, the work of one of the greatest of all visual artists has been turned into something more like a giant video game….
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Read the whole thing here.“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself
The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs an excerpt from Taylor’s Musical Offering, set to the music of Bach and accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. This performance was filmed on January 16, 2019:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)