Archives for March 26, 2021

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review webcasts of the Alley Theatre’s Medea and George Street Playhouse’s Fully Committed. Here’s an excerpt.

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Professional stagings of the Greek tragedies are increasingly uncommon on this side of the Atlantic. The last such production to reach Broadway, for example, was Euripides ’ “ Medea, ” in which Fiona Shaw played the title role to show-stopping effect in 2002. I can’t remember the last time I reviewed a Greek tragedy in this space, nor do any of them appear to have been mounted online in the past year. So it is exciting news that Houston’s Alley Theatre is webcasting “Medea” in a first-class production specifically conceived for online viewing—all 10 actors have been filmed in separate spaces, interacting on split screens—and directed with self-effacing skill and imagination by Rob Melrose, the company’s artistic director….

New Jersey’s George Street Playhouse, which recently webcast a marvelous production of Theresa Rebeck’s “Bad Dates,” is now offering yet another sure-fire one-performer comedy. “Fully Committed” is Becky Mode’s enormously popular 2000 play about a struggling young actor (Maulik Pancholy) who pays the rent by taking reservation requests at a hyper-trendy Manhattan restaurant that serves such fancy-shmancy dishes as “crispy deer lichen atop a slowly deflating scent-filled pillow, dusted with edible dirt.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I talk about the role of streaming video and other online content in the post-pandemic world. Here’s an excerpt.

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The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival recently announced that André De Shields, lately of “Hadestown” and one of the best actors in New York, will be playing the title role in a new production of “King Lear” that will open in June—outdoors and in front of a socially distanced live audience…if.

That ominous monosyllable wasn’t part of the announcement, of course, but it might just as well have been. Everybody knows that the restarting of the arts in America is contingent on the success of mass vaccination and the tamping down of potentially dangerous Covid-19 variants. Yet that isn’t stopping arts organizations from preparing to reopen their doors for the first time since lockdowns began a year ago this month….

Despite all this hopeful news, the specter of Covid-19 still haunts the arts. Yet we are nonetheless seeing the first stirrings of a post-Covid arts world, and when it comes to pass, we’ll find out whether America’s arts institutions have truly learned the lessons of audience engagement taught by the pandemic….

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Read the whole thing here.

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

Once a month, Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal; Elisabeth Vincentelli, contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker; and Peter Marks of the Washington Post get together to talk about what’s going on in the American theatre.

On the anniversary of the theatre shutdown, we reached out to our listeners to write to us with their reflections, thoughts, and feelings about the past year. And write to us they did: from Illinois, Iowa, Connecticut, New York, and beyond, telling stories of loss, redirection, and unwavering hope for the future.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Noël Coward sings his “Uncle Harry” on TV in 1955:

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

“But I think the secret of playwriting can be given in two maxims: stick to the point and whenever you can, cut.”

Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up