Archives for May 21, 2021

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Philadelphia webcast of The Tempest. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Shakespeare resistance, like vaccine hesitancy, is a condition incomprehensible to those who don’t suffer from it. What’s not to like about the greatest playwright who ever lived? Yet if I had to guess, I’d say that most Americans—because they know his works from the page, not the stage—dislike him. The problem is that his plays were written to be watched and enjoyed in the theater, not slogged through in school. The superficial difficulties of understanding posed by their elaborate, at times archaic language evaporate in performance.

You’d think the pandemic would have given locked-down Americans a chance to brush up their Shakespeare —on screen. But while many of his plays have been successfully turned into commercial movies and made-for-TV films, comparatively few productions were newly webcast by theater troupes in the U.S. in 2020, mainly because the casting demands were too onerous. Now Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company is streaming an archival video of “The Tempest” taped in 2018 at a live performance in the company’s 120-seat auditorium. I first made the Lantern’s acquaintance three months ago when it webcast an extremely impressive video-only revival of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” and this production, modestly scaled yet artistically ambitious, confirms my already-favorable impression of the company….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

I paid tribute to Norman Lloyd last week in The Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Most of the obituaries for Norman Lloyd, who died last week at the astonishing age of 106, led with the same two items: He fell off the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur” and was one of the stars of “St. Elsewhere,” an NBC series about a rundown Boston hospital that ranked among the finest TV dramas of the ’80s (or ever, truth be told). They also made prominent mention of the sheer length of his career, which began on stage in 1932 and ended in Hollywood with “Trainwreck,” an Amy Schumer comedy that came out in 2015, the year he turned 100. No other stage or screen actor is known to have worked to a greater age. 

In between, he worked with, among countless other notables, Judd Apatow, Ingrid Bergman, Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, John Houseman, Burt Lancaster, Jean Renoir, Martin Scorsese, Orson Welles and Robin Williams. Late in life he gave anecdote-rich interviews to relative youngsters like TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and the New Yorker’s Alex Ross who were agog at the friends he’d made and the things he’d done. Mr. Ross, who spoke to Mr. Lloyd in 2015, described him as “staggeringly undiminished by age.”

How did he pull it off? To begin with, Mr. Lloyd fulfilled the Prime Directive of Stage and Screen Longevity: Don’t die. Unlike Welles, who lived a profligate life in every sense of the word and predeceased his old friend and colleague by 36 years, he was a temperate man blessed with a long and happy marriage (his wife died in 2011 at the age of 98) who played tennis twice a week well into his hundredth year.

In addition, he was not a movie star but a character actor….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Norman Lloyd talks about his role in St. Elsewhere:

The Beaux Arts Trio plays Ravel’s A Minor Piano Trio on a 1987 BBC telecast:

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

“A memorandum is wrtten not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.”

Dean Acheson (quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 8, 1977)