The New Criterion
Quite simply, the best cultural review in the world
- John O’Sullivan Subscribe Now and get unlimiteв access
TheaterJune 2008 LuPone's turn by Brooke Allen On Gypsy at the St James Theatre, Boeing-Boeing at the Longacre Theater, and The New Century at Lincoln Center. The highbrow theater and opera director Peter Sellars once gave it as his opinion that there have been three great epochs in theatrical history: ancient Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and twentieth-century American musical comedy. Not everyone will go along with his judgment, but I think it is safe to say that the American musical is now considered, at least among the more open-minded segments of the intelligentsia, to be one of our major contributions to world culture (along with jazz and the Hollywood movie). The ecstatic reception of the new South Pacific revival at Lincoln Center confirms me in my suspicion that Richard Rodgers, written off by the hoity-toity some thirty years ago as a facile middlebrow tunesmith, is now accepted as being a major composer, the equal perhaps of Verdi or Puccini, and that some of our musicals can easily hold their own with Tosca and Traviata. One such is Gypsy This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 June 2008, on page 42 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/LuPone-s-turn-3860
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
Subscriber login
Subscribe today
Print & Online packages Available
Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. by Brooke Allen On Rock 'n' Roll at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, The Farnsworth Invention at the Music Box Theatre, Pumpgirl at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Speech & Debate at the Roundabout Theater. by Brooke Allen On the Wooster Group's Hamlet, the Manhattan Theater Club's The Receptionist, and Things We Want at the New Group. by Brooke Allen On In the Heights at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Almost an Evening at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, Parlour Song at the Atlantic Theater, and The Four of Us at Manhattan Theatre Club. by Brooke Allen On Conversations in Tusculum at the Public Theater, The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa ETC., Gray Area at the Barrow Group, and Next to Normal at the Second Stage Theater. by Brooke Allen On Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall, The Lifeblood at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company, and Two Thousand Years at the New Group. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
EventsOctober 22 2008 GALA EVENT: The New Criterion Benefit Art Auction January 25 2009 TRAVEL EVENT: The New Criterion Cruise Webcasts
The Milt Rosenberg Show: Free Speech in an age of Jihad
Roger Kimball on liberalism's response to Islam
Encounter Books at 10, an interview with Roger Simon Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must be a new criterion subscriber to post a comment. {subscribe now}