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ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS 
This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout, Laura Demanski (otherwise known as Our Girl in Chicago, or "OGIC" for short), and Carrie Frye (who signs her postings "CAAF"). Terry, who lives in New York, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary. more

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS 
Terry wrote the introduction to the paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, recently published by New York Review Books. His latest book is All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, published by Harcourt. more

ABOUT TERRY'S OPERA 
Lend me your ears (and eyes)
Men at work
Men at work (II)
Men at work (III)

SEE TERRY TALK 
To view Terry's August videoblog, go here.

Archive  4471 entries and counting

CONTACT
tteachout@artsjournal.com
ogic@artsjournal.com
caaf@artsjournal.com

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TT-OGIC TOP FIVE

A list of new things we've liked (subject to unexpected and wildly capricious updating).

PLAY 
The Dining Room (Clurman, 410 W. 42, closes Oct. 20). A lovely revival by the Keen Company of A.R. Gurney's 1982 play--it's really a string of interlocking sketches--about the decline and fall of the American WASP. Most of the sketches are comic, but the effect is intensely elegiac, for Gurney has mixed feelings about the upper middle class that spawned him, and he isn't afraid to let them show. The six actors in the excellent cast play a total of fifty-seven people, all of them portrayed with telling exactitude (TT).

DVD 
Hangover Square/The Lodger. The first DVD release of John Brahm's much-admired but infrequently screened mid-Forties thrillers, both featuring first-rate scores (Bernard Herrmann scored Hangover Square, Hugo Friedhofer The Lodger) and spectacularly sinister performances by Laird Cregar. The three-disc package also includes a third Brahm film, The Undying Monster, and a wealth of interesting bonus features. Splendid stuff (TT).

CD 
Erin McKeown, Lafayette (Signature Sounds). Our favorite rocker, live at New York's Joe's Pub in January of 2007 with a smoking-hot band. If you've never seen McKeown on stage, this CD will give you a very good idea of what you've been missing all these years. I was there, and this is exactly how it was (TT).

BOOK 
Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (FSG, $30). A major new history of modern classical music, written from a passionately anti-ideological point of view by a critic-blogger with a lively style and an above-average endowment of common sense. By far the best and most reliable account of musical modernism ever to be published (TT).

MOVIE 
Sunshine. Its influences are myriad and apparent--from Tarkovsky to Kubrick to Ridley Scott--but Danny Boyle's space-set thriller synthesizes them deftly and adds enough inventions of its own to carve out a distinctive aesthetic. Of all the destinations cinematic space voyagers have set their sights on, the sun has to be the one with the most raw power to exhilarate the imagination; Sunshine has visual potency to match (OGIC).

Out of the Past

Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).

CD 
Sidney Bechet/Martial Solal Quartet (BMG/Media). In 1957, Sidney Bechet, who was already playing jazz in New Orleans when Louis Armstrong was still in kneepants, recorded an album of standards with a pair of modern rhythm sections that featured Martial Solal on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums. Some found the pairing incongruous, but Bechet had always had open ears--he'd been recording such harmonically sophisticated ballads as "Laura" and "Love for Sale" as early as the Forties--and the contrast between his straight-from-the-shoulder soprano-sax solos and the bebop backing of Solal and his colleagues is electrifying (TT).

BOOK 
L.E. Sissman, Night Music. All but forgotten today, Sissman died of Hodgkin's disease in 1976 at the age of forty-eight, leaving behind a slender but indelible legacy of poems and essays, many of which were about the illness that was to rob America of one of its finest and most promising writers. Twenty-three years later, Peter Davison edited this well-chosen collection of Sissman's verse, whose cool, crisp iambs sit well with the highly individual sensibility of a poet-businessman who looked his fate in the eye without blinking: "Then one fine day when all the smart flags flap,/A booted man in black with a peaked cap/Will call for me and troll me down the hall/And slot me into his black car. That's all." Read him if you dare (TT).

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