Arts Reporting: Re-release of Audio of Waiting for Godot with Bert Lahr

Drama critic Terry Teachout writes the following for ArtsJournal:

TT: The Cowardly Lion's bravest night

I rejoice to report that the 1956 recording of the first Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, starting Bert Lahr, is finally back in print. Since no one else in the world seems to be aware of this wonderful fact, I decided to announce it to the world in my "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Every critic who covered the show heaped praise on Lahr, and the most perceptive ones saw that his performance was profoundly true to the spirit of the play. Though Lahr was no kind of intellectual, he had instinctively understood what Beckett was up to. "I know it's supposed to be tragic, but there are lots of gags," he told his agent after reading the script. So there are, for "Godot" is a Laurel-and-Hardyesque farce about the meaninglessness of life. Even those critics who, like Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times, found it hard to stomach the play's dark vision were staggered by the crazed beauty of Lahr's acting: "His long experience as a bawling mountebank has equipped Mr. Lahr to represent eloquently the tragic comedy of one of the lost souls of the earth."

Alas, "Godot" closed after just 10 weeks, and Lahr never appeared in it again. But Goddard Lieberson, who produced original-cast albums for Columbia Records, had the brilliant idea to record a complete performance of the play. The existence of the resulting album, which has been out of print for the past quarter-century, is no secret, but its long-standing unavailability has caused it to be overlooked by most people who write about "Godot." Even John Lahr, the comedian's younger son, fails to mention it in "Notes on a Cowardly Lion," the uniquely perceptive biography of his father that he wrote in 1969.

It is, therefore, stop-press news for anybody who loves great theater that the 1956 recording of "Godot" is available once again, not as a CD but as an mp3-only sound file that you can download from Amazon for $3.56 or from iTunes for $5.99. (You can find it on either site by searching for "Bert Lahr.") Culturally speaking, I'd call that the deal of the decade....

The 1956 production of "Godot" was Lahr's show all the way, and to hear it now is to boggle at his seemingly infinite comic resourcefulness. He whines, he whimpers, he chortles, he grunts, giving each line precisely the right flavor. Yet never for a moment does his clowning conceal the play's underlying pathos, and whenever he opens his mouth, it's always Beckett, not Bert Lahr, that you hear....

Read the whole thing here.

Book: Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare by James Shapiro

The daily ArtsJournal on-line signals this review of James Shapiro's history/investigation of the question, published March 25 in The Economist:

William Shakespeare

Hero or hoax

The man and his pen

Mar 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? By James Shapiro. Simon & Schuster; 367 pages; $26. Faber and Faber; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

[ . . . ] “What difference does it make who wrote the plays?” someone asked the author wearily. Mr Shapiro (for whom Shakespeare was definitely the man) thinks it matters a lot, and by the end of this book, his readers will think so too.

The authorship controversy turns on two things: snobbery and the assumption that, in a literal way, you are what you write. How could an untutored, untravelled glover’s son from hickville, the argument goes, understand kings and courtiers, affairs of state, philosophy, law, music—let alone the noble art of falconry? Worse still, how could the business-minded, property-owning, moneylending materialist that emerges from the documentary scraps, be the same man as the poet of the plays? Many have shaken their heads at the sheer vulgarity of it all, among them Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, his brother William, and Sigmund Freud.

Mr Shapiro teases out the cultural prejudices, the historical blind spots, and above all the anachronism inherent in these questions. No one before the late 18th century had ever asked them, or thought to read the plays or sonnets for biographical insights. No one had even bothered to work out a chronology for them. The idea that works of literature hold personal clues, or that—more grandly—writing is an expression and exploration of the self, is a relatively recent phenomenon. [ . . . ]

Read full text at www.economist.com . . . .

Arts Reporting: Survey Identifies 10 Most Important American Dramas, Denver Post,

Received on-line: an in-depth survey carried out by the Denver Post, flagged by the February 14 edition of the free on-line daily




and annotated by ALT:

An excerpt from the article by John Moore, Denver Post theatre critic:

The 10 Most Important American plays -- Theatre must speak for its own time, but will time be kind to the plays being written today?

. . . [W]hen it comes to American plays, greatness can be as elusive as their favorite subject: that fickle American dream.

So which plays rise to the top over time? The Denver Post asked a long list of theater professionals nationwide to give an opinion. Their cumulative take: U.S. writers have produced only two plays in nearly 50 years that belong beside the very best, Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and August Wilson's "Fences."

Our informal survey asked 177 playwrights, directors, actors, professors, agents, producers, students, bloggers, critics and theatergoers to rank the 10 most important American plays ever written.

The top 10 largely reflect a world of booze and brawls, of the disintegrating American family and the gross inequity of the American dream.

And the average age of those plays is 52.

Fittingly, the most historic American play is the one most often described as Greek in scope and tragedy: Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" — a working-class "Oedipus Rex."

Kushner's apocalyptic "Angels" was next, hailed by The New York Times for creating "an astonishing theatrical landscape, both intimate and epic," making it "the most thrilling American play in years." It's followed by "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Kushner calls "Salesman," "Streetcar" and "Journey" "the unquestionable big three" of American playwriting.

About the Austin annotations, with links:

Long Day's Journey into Night was performed as an Actors' Equity Code Project, May 27 - June 7, 2009 directed by Dr. Lucien Douglas for an ad-hoc group that called itself "Ar Rud" (Gaelic: "Our Thing"). Click for ALT review of May 31, 2009.

Anderson High School did Our Town November 12-15, 2009. Wilder's classic will be performed by the University of Texas in April in a traditional staging and by the Zach Theatre in April-May in a more modern staging, probably influenced by the recent successful revival in New York City. Both companies are offering a discount, available with password, to encourage audiences to see the two versions.

Tex-Arts in Lakeway offers The Glass Menagerie February 26 - March 14, directed by Michael Costello and featuring Babs George and Jude Hickey.

City Theatre will stage A Raisin in the Sun February 25 - March 21, directed by Lisa Jordan, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the play.

City Theatre staged August Wilson's Fences February 26 - March 22, 2009, directed by Lisa Jordan and featuring Robert Pellette, Jr. Click for ALT review of March 1, 2009 ; click for ALT profile, "The Incantations of August Wilson and 'Fences.'" (February 25, 2009)

Read more about the survey at the Denver Post on-line. . . .