Archives for November 5, 2021

Return engagement

November 5, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Forgive my absence from the blog this week—I was, as Patrick O’Brian would say, overpressed with sail, and I needed some time to myself to get caught up. I’m now ready at last to resume regular postings.

Longtime readers of “About Last Night” will remember my friend Laura Demanski, who used to co-blog with me under the pseudonym “Our Girl in Chicago” once upon a time. Laura and I are still the closest of friends, and I’ve been mourning the recent death of her mother Lucile, about whom you can read more here. Laura wrote her obituary, and did so with elegant simplicity.

My heart goes out to Laura, and to Greg Demanski, her father. It is, as I know all too well, a devastating thing to lose either a parent or a spouse. May your thoughts be with Laura and Greg in their time of trial.

Watering a dry soul

November 5, 2021 by Terry Teachout

I review the new musical version of The Visitor in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

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Turning a perfect movie into a stage musical is almost always a fool’s game. The only way the results are guaranteed to work is if you add a perfect score, as Stephen Sondheim did with “A Little Night Music” and David Yazbek did with “The Band’s Visit.” Otherwise, the resulting show rarely makes an impression sufficiently strong enough to be memorable in its own right.

“The Visitor,” the Public Theater’s new stage version of Tom McCarthy’s poignant 2007 film about a depressed widower whose parched soul is refreshed by an unexpected encounter with three illegal immigrants, doesn’t quite fill the bill: The score, by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, is no better than fair. But the show works anyway, both because the book, by Mr. Yorkey and Kwame Kwei-Armah, is so faithful to Mr. McCarthy’s original screenplay and because the production, directed by Daniel Sullivan and starring David Hyde Pierce, is superlative. Everything good about the film is reproduced on stage so precisely that the comparative weakness of the score largely ceases to be an issue….

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Read the whole thing here.