About Last Night: January 2007 Archives

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January 31, 2007

TT: Almanac

"I am drawn to stories about people who really, really want something. That helps you to sing in ways that really matter to an audience. If your desire is big enough, then singing seems natural."

Adam Guettel, interview, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Jan. 28, 2006)

Posted January 31, 12:00 PM

TT: As good as a mile

Experience isn�t nearly as good a teacher as it ought to be, but it has taught me a few things, one of which is to always check my tape recorder prior to conducting an interview. An hour before I planned to leave my apartment on Tuesday to meet Ennio Morricone at the Italian Cultural Institute, I changed the batteries in my trusty old miniature cassette recorder and discovered that it had breathed its last. I dropped it in the wastebasket and walked briskly to the nearest Radio Shack to buy a replacement.

I was surprised�though not too much so�to discover that such old-fashioned devices had all but been replaced by digital recorders. Needless to say, I would have been more than happy to purchase one of those instead, but I didn�t have time to fumble with an unfamiliar technology and I still had a stack of Louis Armstrong-related interview tapes to transcribe, so I bought the last cassette recorder in the store, tried it out on the spot to make sure that it worked, paid the clerk, ran out the door, and flagged a cab.

Halfway through Central Park, I tried to remember how long I'd been using my old tape recorder. Suddenly it hit me: I'd bought it one afternoon in 1994 to interview a cabaret singer for the New York Daily News. I met her early that evening at a restaurant in the theater district, sat down at her table, and switched on my brand-new machine. Nothing happened. After a few minutes of futile fumbling, I put it back in my bag, mortified by my inadvertent display of professional incompetence.

What happened next is described in A Terry Teachout Reader:

I pulled out a notebook and started asking her about her early days. She came from a medium-sized town in Michigan. Her father had been a part-time trumpeter, and she had gotten her start with his band. �My family visited New York when I was twelve,� she said, �and I was already the kind of kid who read Earl Wilson�s column and wanted to go to Sardi�s and a Broadway show.� Laughing, I confessed that I, too, had read Wilson�s Broadway column as a child in Missouri. Indeed, the longer we talked, the more we found we had in common. Both of us had cut our teeth on jazz, longed to see the lights of Broadway, and traveled to New york to seek our fortunes.

What started off as an interview imperceptibly became a conversation. She spoke frankly of her struggle with Crohn�s disease, of the ileostomy she had undergone the year before in order to relieve the condition, of the hard times she had known and the hopes she had. After dinner, I walked her to the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where she was singing anonymously in the pit of an ill-fated musical called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, a thankless chore she had taken on in order to pay her medical bills. She was so tiny that I had to stoop to hear her over the roar of traffic in Times Square.

As soon I got back home, I took a closer look at the recorder and saw that the pause switch was on. I laughed myself silly. It never again malfunctioned, and in the thirteen years that followed I used it to tape interviews with Karrin Allyson, George Avakian, Maria Bachmann, Patricia Barber, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tony Bennett, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Charlap, Mary Foster Conklin, Norman Corwin, Eliot Feld, Ren�e Fleming, Jim Hall, Fred Hersch, Stephen Hough, David Ives, Keith Jarrett, Diana Krall, Lowell Liebermann, Audra McDonald, Marian McPartland, Pat Metheny, Dan Morgenstern, Mark Morris, Mark O�Connor, Madeleine Peyroux, Bucky and John Pizzarelli, Maria Schneider, George Shearing, Luciana Souza, Frederica von Stade, Ethan Stiefel, Whit Stillman, Paul Taylor (twice), Twyla Tharp, Edward Villella, Wendy Wasserstein, Robert Weiss, Christopher Wheeldon, Weslia Whitfield, and the members of the Emerson String Quartet, Nickel Creek, and Pilobolus.

All of those conversations were memorable and a few led to treasured friendships, but none would affect me so deeply as the interview with Nancy LaMott that my now-defunct cassette recorder failed to record. May it rest in peace.

Posted January 31, 10:42 AM

TT: Another old friend

A reader wrote, apropos of this posting about an alleged quote of mine, to reassure me that I really did say what the Web says I said. The quote, he gleefully informed me, came from a review of The Cat Who Went to Paris and Particularly Cats...and Rufus published in the Washington Post in 1991. It appeared in the first paragraph:

"This broadcast," Harry Reasoner once said at the beginning of a television show called "Essay on Women," "was prepared by men, and makes no claim to being fair. Prejudice has saved us a great deal of time in preparation." Perhaps I should start with a similar disclaimer: This review was written by the owner of an 11-year-old cat named Blossom. Not surprisingly, I have strong opinions about cats. Some are favorable, others merely resigned. I love Blossom, but I also know the limits of our relationship. He does what he wants, and I do what he wants. Most cat owners are like that. They understand that life with a cat is in certain ways a one-sided proposition. Cats are not educable; humans are. Moreover, cats know this. If you're not willing to humor them, you might as well stick to dogs.

Blossom died in my arms several years ago, but I still remember him (yes, he was a him) with slightly exasperated affection. A framed picture of him shares one of my bookshelves with the selected works of Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, John P. Marquand, and Tom Wolfe�a place of honor, in other words. He was a good cat except when he wasn't, I loved him very much, and I'm glad to have occasion to mention him in this space.

Posted January 31, 4:13 AM

January 30, 2007

TT: Lost in the ozone

A friend writes:

I bought a cat calendar that featured a quote from you, so I had to write. You said: "Life with a cat is in certain ways a one-sided proposition. Cats are not educable; humans are. Moreover, cats know this."

This e-mail amazed me. It sounds very much like something I might have said�I lived with cats for two decades, after all�but I have no memory whatsoever of writing any such thing.

I Googled my alleged quote and found it in several places on the Web, unsourced in all cases, though one person tacked on an additional, equally plausible-sounding sentence: �If you're not willing to humor them, you might as well stick to dogs.� That one doesn�t ring any bells, either. Is it the fate of overly prolific authors to forget their past utterances as they lurch into middle age? Have I said other, comparably pithy things that have vanished no less irretrievably into the ether?

Would that I had time to get to the bottom of this puzzle, but I don�t, for I've got to spend the next couple of hours prepping for today's interview with Ennio Morricone. If anyone out there can tell me where and when I paid this backhanded tribute to the ineducability of Felis domesticus, I'd appreciate hearing from you....

Posted January 30, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch."

Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion

Posted January 30, 12:00 PM

January 29, 2007

TT: Almanac

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning"

Posted January 29, 12:00 PM

TT: Not blogging but working

Last week was a good week for this blog. Our Girl and I had more visitors than usual, partly because we put up a lot of stuff and partly because we popped up on the Guardian�s litblog.

This week is likely to be somewhat dicier, for it seems that my life is in the process of getting more than a little bit hectic. I withdrew to Connecticut over the weekend to write a long Commentary essay on Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz and watch three old movies, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, William Wyler's Detective Story, and Fritz Lang's Human Desire. Today I'm returning to New York to interview Ennio Morricone for a Wall Street Journal profile, see four new plays by Alan Ball, Richard Nelson, Yasmina Reza, and Oren Safdie, and catch a New York City Ballet performance of George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer, hitting all my regular deadlines in between these varied events.

I'll try to blog, too, and Our Girl will pay her usual Wednesday visit to this space, but outside of the daily almanac entry and my weekly theater-related postings, I make no promises whatsoever. For the moment I'm simply going to have to keep my head down and pedal hard.

In the immortal words of the Anonymous Bluesman, If you see me comin', raise your window high/If you see me passin', baby, hang your head and cry. Or something like that.

Later, maybe.

Posted January 29, 10:49 AM

January 26, 2007

TT: The very best we have

Today�s Wall Street Journal drama column starts out with a big bang�a hats-off celebration of Manhattan Theatre Club�s revival of Brian Friel�s Translations�followed by a review of Signature Theatre�s Into the Woods, the first of three reports on my recent expedition to the theaters of Washington, D.C., and its environs:

The only time I don�t think Brian Friel is the best living playwright is immediately after I�ve seen a play by Tom Stoppard. That both men should be represented on Broadway this season is a boon, and though Mr. Stoppard�s �Coast of Utopia� trilogy, being both new and spectacular, will likely get most of the ink, the Manhattan Theatre Club�s revival of �Translations,� directed by Garry Hynes, deserves equal time. This production of Mr. Friel�s 1980 play, among the greatest written in the 20th century, is so comprehensively masterful that no critic, however enthusiastic, can do more than suggest its manifold virtues. Instead of reviewing it, I wish I could simply send you a ticket�.

�Into the Woods,� in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack (the one who chopped down the beanstalk) meet in a forest and get into big trouble together, is one of Stephen Sondheim�s most frequently performed musicals, not because it�s the best but because it�s the most audience-friendly, right down to the reasonably happy ending. Perhaps Signature Theatre, a regional company whose imaginative Sondheim stagings have given it a national reputation, had that in mind when it picked Mr. Sondheim�s fractured fairy tale to open its new two-theater complex, located in an upscale suburban shopping mall not far from downtown Washington. Whatever the reason, this new production is as engaging and smartly designed as the handsome building that houses it�.

No link. Buy a Journal�it�s cheap, easy to find, and full of goodies�or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a wise decision that will give you immediate access to my column and all the rest of the Journal�s Friday arts package. (If you�re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted January 26, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"The images on the screen are patterns of light, not living actors. They are not affected by applause or hissing. They will be the same in a packed house or an empty one. And they will be the same every time the movie is shown. This affects the audience. Occasionally, movie audiences applaud or hiss or walk out, but for the most part they are passive. No social bond between the audience and the actors can exist."

O.B. Hardison, Entering the Maze: Identity and Change in Modern Culture

Posted January 26, 12:00 PM

January 25, 2007

TT: Old home week

I just got back from the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, where the Mark Morris Dance Group has been dancing a mixed bill in its own 140-seat performance space. To see a dance company in so small a venue is an amazingly intimate experience, one not so far removed from watching a working rehearsal. It happens that tonight�s program included Sang-Froid, a dance I was lucky enough to see Morris choreograph eight years ago. I wrote about it in a New York Times essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader:

Mark Morris is making a dance�loudly. Dance studios, with their hardwood floors and mirrored walls, are noisy places even at the calmest of times, and Mr. Morris, who is working on a suite of nine dances to the music of Frederic Chopin, can raise a ruckus sufficient to drown out a medium-size riot. All afternoon he has been shouting, whistling, singing and emitting a steady stream of unprintable class-clown wisecracks in his shrill foghorn voice. It's as if John Belushi had decided to take up modern dance, or maybe Ernie Kovacs.

Visitors are often startled by Mr. Morris's antics, but his dancers are used to them. �Mark was loud before he was famous,� says Tina Fehlandt, a charter member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, not unaffectionately. Meanwhile, Ethan Iverson, the company's music director, clatters away at a finger-twistingly difficult etude on an ill-tuned baby grand in the corner of the studio, while a recording of �The Nutcracker�' pas de deux plays irrelevantly somewhere down the hall�.
The tumultuous music has inspired Mr. Morris to transform Julie Worden, a handsome young woman who looks like a brainy cheerleader, into a suicidal princess who inexplicably finds herself swept up in some sort of mad Gothic torture fantasy. �Stop!� he screams as Ms. Worden sails despondently through the air for the third time in a row. He strikes a great-man pose and yells at no one in particular, �Isn�t it fun to be the cho-re-o-gra-pheur?�

Not only did Morris make all four of the dances I saw tonight, but he also appeared in one of them. The second movement of Italian Concerto is a male solo set to one of Bach�s most passionate instrumental arias. Morris is fifty, stocky, and gray-haired, and he rarely appears on stage anymore save to take curtain calls, but to see him execute the grandly sweeping arm movements of Italian Concerto is to be reminded that great dancing is far more than a mere matter of agility. He still fills his space to overflowing, and no sooner does he stride out of the wings than your eye goes straight to him and stays there.

Watching Italian Concerto and Sang-Froid at the Morris Center took me back to the days when I was seeing two or three ballet and modern-dance performances a week. I came late to dance, and it had so overwhelming an effect on me that I threw myself into it head first, in time becoming a dance critic and, eventually, the author of a book about George Balanchine.

I still love dance, but in recent years I�ve been spending so much time covering Broadway and regional theater that I rarely get to see Morris or Paul Taylor or New York City Ballet. Maybe that�s why tonight�s performance hit me so hard, to the point that my eyes actually filled with tears at the close of Love Song Waltzes, a moment about which Joan Acocella wrote beautifully and evocatively in her 1993 biography of Morris:

At the end of Love Song Waltzes one man waltzes each of the other eleven dancers off the stage, one by one, until finally he is alone. He pauses, and then, as the lights go out, he walks offstage by himself. For a dance that has taken the group as its subject, this is a stark ending, an admission that, the group notwithstanding, we are also alone, and we die alone. (The ending looks like a death.) But this does not undo the meaning of what has come before. Insofar as we transcend aloneness, we do so in the group. And what the group does is dance. It is significant that when the man is left alone on the stage, he stops dancing. He doesn�t waltz out; he walks out. When the others are gone, the dance is over, literally and figuratively. Dance and the group are the image of life as against death.

Balanchine choreographed the same set of Brahms waltzes in a totally different but no less moving way in Liebeslieder Walzer, my favorite of all his ballets. I regret to say that I haven�t seen it for years, and it�s been at least two years�far too long�since I last saw New York City Ballet. Fortunately, a blogger friend is taking me to an NYCB performance of Liebeslieder next Thursday. I don't like to wish time away, but after seeing Love Song Waltzes, I can hardly wait.

Posted January 25, 12:00 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here�s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
� Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
� A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
� Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
� The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
� Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes May 12)
� The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
� The Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)
� Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
� The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
� Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
� Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, closes Feb. 18)
� Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, extended through Mar. 25)
� The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
� The Germans in Paris (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
� Two Trains Running (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

Posted January 25, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it�s better than a new one."

Willa Cather, The Professor's House

Posted January 25, 12:00 PM

January 24, 2007

TT: Small package

I just got back from Joe�s Pub, where I saw the front end of a two-nighter by Erin McKeown. She�s touring in support of her new CD, Sing You Sinners, about which I recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal:

Ms. McKeown, one of the freshest singer-songwriters of her generation, has chosen this time around to cut an album of standards. What sets it apart from the superficially similar efforts of such aging rock stars as Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart is that Ms. McKeown isn�t recycling the smooth sounds of yesteryear. Instead, she sings �Something�s Gotta Give� and �Just One of Those Things� as if she�d written them herself, performing them in the casual, slightly rough-hewn style of her previous albums, We Will Become Like Birds and Grand. The effect is both arrestingly personal and utterly contemporary�

All true, and I can�t recommend Sing You Sinners strongly enough�yet now that I�ve seen McKeown perform, I understand why Our Girl swears that you haven�t really heard her until you hear her in person. She�s amazing on stage, focused and charismatic, and her backup musicians, who suggest by turns a rockabilly combo, a jump band, and a power trio, are no less impressive. She�s also a charmer, a five-foot-nothing cutie with a sunshiny smile who obviously loves nothing better than singing in front of a crowd. (It tickled me that she was wearing a pinstriped suit, which made her look like she was auditioning to play the Master of Ceremonies in a big-budget high-school production of Cabaret.)

One of the many things that impressed me about tonight�s gig was the unforced ease with which McKeown moved from familiar standards like �Get Happy� and �Rhode Island Is Famous for You� to her own songs, making everything she sang seem all of a piece. I brought one of my twentysomething friends along, and she was knocked out by McKeown�s originals. �She�s so literate,� my friend said, and I agreed wholeheartedly. I rank her right up there with Jonatha Brooke, than which there is no higher praise.

From New York McKeown and her band head down to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. (where she�ll be taping an All Things Considered segment). You�ll find the rest of their itinerary here. Go, and tell her OGIC and I sent you.

Posted January 24, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion."

Marta Zahaykevich, �Critical Perspectives on Adult Women�s Development�

Posted January 24, 12:00 PM

OGIC: My town, more than just an ursine cult

This week, I live in a city consumed. Only a game, you say? Tell it to the scamps who pitched themselves into Lake Michigan after dark on a day when the temperature did not exceed the freezing point. Aw, such an endearing waste of emergency resources! Every city loves a champion, but certain places embrace certain championship runs with special fervor and purpose. In Chicago, a championship run mounted by a defensive-minded Bears team is probably as heaven-sent as it gets, giving the real-life superfans a chance to flaunt their imperviousness to the elements and reaffirm solemn allegiance to smashmouth football.

My point is this: it may seem from the outside�as it certainly does from the inside�that this is a town given over completely to ursine cultism and Superbowl anticipation. Through it all, however, cultural life in Chicago does go on. One case in point is the Art Institute, which will bravely kick off its free February on a Saturday when many Chicagoans will probably be busy buying the supermarkets out of Polishes, MGD, and blue and orange face paint. But wouldn't February 3rd be better spent at the AIC's debut of Q & Art? That day, more than 100 art experts will be posted throughout the galleries that day to field all questions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I love the idea of this event, especially as a way to kick off a month of free access to one of the greatest museums in the world. From the museum�s press release:

On hand to answer questions and offer information will be the chief curators and department heads from American art; Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture; African and Amerindian Art; the Ryerson and Burnham libraries; conservation; and Ancient art. Curatorial staff from all departments�Photography to Contemporary, Decorative Arts to Architecture and Design�will also be available throughout the museum. In the museum�s Fullerton Hall, historic and contemporary programs about the Art Institute�will run continuously from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.

�Q&Art� is a major initiative by the Art Institute to make the museum as accessible as possible to all. The Art Institute hopes that Chicagoans will take advantage of its �open house� for the first three weeks of February and specifically on Saturday, February 3.

Offering access plus accessibility through personal contact, the Art Institute appears to be looking for a way to reach out to new audiences that's an alternative to the heavily hyped blockbuster show. Here's hoping they find some success drawing in new museumgoers and that other museums take notice�even if the act of God involving the local gridiron team deflates attendance, which, unfortunately, it well may.

Also in the home of the bean, the bona fide Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, hailed by Terry here, has five days and six performances left in its Chicago run. I�ll be there Saturday night.

Finally, inspired by Terry�s euphoric report from the Erin McKeown show last night, I checked her tour schedule. The diva dynamo lands at Schuba�s on Southport, her traditional and ideal Chicago venue, on March 1. I will so be there, with so many bells on, they'll hear me coming a block away.

Posted January 24, 11:57 AM

TT: New kid on the block

Commentary, for which I write a monthly art-related essay, has gotten into the blogging business with a bang, launching a group blog called Contentions. It�s mostly about politics, but I�m contributing a weekly feature called �Bookshelf� in which I comment on new, newish, and (occasionally) not-so-new books about the arts. My first posting was on Howard Pollack�s George Gershwin: His Life and Work and Amanda Vaill�s Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. This week I wrote about Lee Tanner�s The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography and Michael Ainger�s Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography.

Contentions' contributors all have their own archive pages. To read my postings, past, present, and future, go here.

Posted January 24, 9:54 AM

January 23, 2007

TT: Man's man

�God, I love this guy,� said the young man at the Barnes & Noble cash register from whom I purchased a couple of Elmore Leonard paperbacks the other day. �There�s nothing better to read on a plane.� Three days earlier I�d been sitting in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C., reading Unknown Man #89 as I ate my breakfast, when a balding, middle-aged businessman stopped at my table and said, �You�re going to love that one.�

I mention these two encounters because they�re the only times in recent memory that a stranger has spoken to me about a book I was reading�and both of the strangers in question happened to be men.

I wrote an essay about Mickey Spillane a few years ago that contained the following observation:

Spillane was writing for a generation of fellow veterans who spent their off-duty hours thumbing through paperbacks�thrillers, westerns, even the odd classic. They were accustomed to taking pleasure in the printed word. Now their grandsons go to the movies, or watch TV. Novels, even mysteries, are overwhelmingly read by and written for women. This is not to say that nobody�s writing regular-guy books anymore: they�re just not being read by regular guys. A no-nonsense crime novelist like Elmore Leonard is far more likely to appeal to eggheads like me than the working stiffs about whom he writes�I�ve never seen anybody reading a Leonard novel on the subway�whereas Spillane�s books were actually read and enjoyed by men who weren�t all that different from Mike Hammer. He may well have been the last novelist of whom such a thing could be said.

Might I have spoken too soon? Probably not. Still, I have a feeling that if regular guys are reading any new novels at all, it�s Elmore Leonard�s novels that they�re reading, and that�s all right by me. To be sure, Leonard isn�t as good as his critical advocates like to claim�among other things, he�s more than a little bit repetitious�but his best books are wonderfully entertaining, and on those not-infrequent occasions when I find myself stuck in a hotel room and disinclined to grapple with literature, I�m always happy to find one on my nightstand.

Crime is Leonard's nominal subject matter, but it isn�t his main interest. I can�t think of a Leonard novel that doesn�t contain a prominent romantic subplot, usually involving an encounter between two divorced or separated people in their thirties or forties who got married too soon. These encounters are invariably portrayed in the wisecracking manner of Howard Hawks, but the relationships that arise from them are perfectly serious. Time and again Leonard�s characters admit to having foolishly fallen for partners who turned out to be boring, self-involved jerks, and time and again we see them meeting nicer partners who inspire them to take a second chance on love.

Could this be the reason why Leonard is so popular among male readers? I wonder. Men, after all, are often a good deal more idealistic than they care to admit, and Leonard gives them good old-fashioned romance hidden in a plain brown wrapper of violence. What�s not to like?

Needless to say, this is what sets Leonard apart from the first-generation noir stylists. They were romantics, too, but of a very different sort, disillusioned and cynical, and in their books the good guy never, ever got the nice girl. I readily admit to finding that kind of cynicism appealing, but there�s another part of me that warms to Leonard�s romantic optimism, even though I�m well aware that it�s as much of a pose as Philip Marlowe�s curdled nobility.

Here�s something I wrote a few years ago:

Most commercial films are made on the assumption that audiences want to see moral struggle�but not too much of it. Much more often than not, we know as soon as the credits roll exactly what we're supposed to think the star ought to do (kiss the girl! give back the money!), and we spend the next hour and a half waiting for him to finally get around to doing it. When he does, we go home happy; if he doesn't, we go home feeling cheated, and tell all our friends to pick a different movie next weekend.

I like happy endings, too, but I don't always want them to be so easy as that, and given the inescapable fact that we all live under the twin aspects of modernity and eternity, I have a special liking for films that convey something of the complexity of modern life without losing sight of the pole star of truth. In particular, I like films about gravely flawed human beings who, faced with a set of similarly imperfect alternatives, suddenly find their moral imaginations regenerated by grace, make the best possible choice available to them and accept the consequences, good or bad.

All of which is well and good, but doesn�t necessarily serve the purpose of amusing tired, fussy aesthetes who feel the need to spin their mental wheels for an hour or two before drifting off to sleep. Great art, after all, portrays a world in which nobody meets cute, everybody ends up dead, and most people get a lot less out of life than they want�none of which is especially restful to contemplate at the end of a long day.

That�s why I watch old Hollywood movies on TV after hours, and why I read Elmore Leonard, a solid craftsman who tickles my fancies without insulting my intelligence. I can think of far less honorable ways to pass an evening.

* * *

If you�ve never read any of Elmore Leonard�s books, I suggest starting with Maximum Bob or LaBrava.

You might also consider watching Steven Soderbergh�s 1998 film of Out of Sight, which is faithful to both the plot and the spirit of the novel on which it is based.

UPDATE: A friend wrote:

Great art also portrays beauty, laughter, and joy.

To which I replied:

Yes, but honestly. It doesn't pretend that the other things don't exist (though it doesn't necessarily emphasize them, either). That's why Schubert can make you so happy�because his happiness is set in front of a backdrop of reality.

To which he replied:

But you wrote the definition, and you wrote it entirely grim.

To which I replied:

Yeah, yeah, O.K., I give up! I was feeling grim.

Posted January 23, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen�to use an image you'll understand�it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of...fact."

Brian Friel, Translations

Posted January 23, 12:00 PM

January 22, 2007

TT: Words to the wise

I planned to post something long and thoughtful today, but it turns out that I�m severely overpressed with multiple deadlines, so instead I�ll stall for time by pointing you in the direction of a few things worth seeing and/or hearing:

� Turner Classic Movies is showing two rarely seen Fifties films that I strongly commend to your attention. Fritz Lang�s Human Desire, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, will air on Monday at four p.m. EST. Billy Wilder�s Ace in the Hole (also known as The Big Carnival), starring Kirk Douglas, will air on Thursday at 2:30 a.m. EST. Both films take an extremely dark view of human nature, so brace yourself before tuning in.

� Erin McKeown, the singer-songwriter whom Our Girl and I praise as often as we think we can get away with it, is playing a two-nighter this Tuesday (at 7) and Wednesday (at 9:30) at Joe�s Pub. She�s touring in support of Sing You Sinners, her new album of pre-rock standards, though she�ll also be singing some of her own songs. For more information, go here.

� Amy Burton, one of my very favorite classical singers, is performing the voice-and-piano version of John Corigliano�s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan this Thursday at 7:30 at Symphony Space. Here�s what Corigliano wrote about the song cycle when it was premiered in 2000:

I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts, and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard�and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music.

I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art�crossover in the opposite direction, one might say�.

For more details about the performance, go here.

� The off-Broadway revival of Room Service that I praised lavishly in The Wall Street Journal three weeks ago has been extended through March 25. For more information, look immediately to your right at the first item in the Top Five module.

� Music & Arts has just released Artur Schnabel Plays Mozart, a budget-priced five-CD box set that contains all of Schnabel�s commercial Mozart recordings, made between 1934 and 1948, plus live performances of two additional concertos (K. 482 and 488) and sonatas (K. 333 and 533/494). To order, go here.

Now, if you�ll excuse me, I�ve got to get back to work! See you tomorrow, maybe....

Posted January 22, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"To remember everything is a form of madness."

Brian Friel, Translations

Posted January 22, 12:00 PM

January 20, 2007

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

To purchase or investigate, click on the link.

PLAY: Room Service (SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam, extended through Mar. 25). An electrifyingly frenetic off-Broadway revival of the 1937 backstage farce about a fast-talking Broadway producer with a heart of brass who can't raise enough cash to pay his hotel bill. Filmed by the Marx Brothers in 1938, Room Service works infinitely better on stage, and the Peccadillo Theater Company has given it a first-class production directed with zany aplomb by Dan Wackerman. If there's a funnier show in New York, I haven't seen it (TT).

DANCE: Mark Morris Dance Group (2 Lafayette St., Brooklyn, closes Jan. 24). A perfect mixed bill: Morris' latest effort, a new work set to Bach's Italian Concerto, plus three of his finest small-scale pieces, Love Song Waltzes (1989), The Argument (1999), and Sang-Froid (2000). All programs will be danced in the wonderfully intimate performance space of the Morris company's Brooklyn headquarters. Not to be missed under any circumstances whatsoever (TT).

EXHIBITION: The Odyssey Continues: Masterworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art and from Private New Orleans Collections (Wildenstein & Company, 19 E. 64, up through Feb. 9). One hundred works of art, including major pieces by Lotto, Tiepolo, Rodin, Bonnard, Redon, Braque, Kandinsky, Pollock, Cornell, and Diebenkorn. The $10 admission fee benefits NOMA, which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and is nowhere near recovering. Do yourself--and NOMA--a favor and visit this memorable show (TT).

DVD: Ballets Russes (Zeitgeist). An enthralling 2005 documentary about the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, one of the most important dance companies of the Thirties and Forties, whose barnstorming tours helped to create an audience for dance in America. Interviews with surviving members are skillfully blended with vivid archival performance footage to tell an irresistibly nostalgic tale of life on the road. Great, great fun (TT).

CD: Erin McKeown, Sing You Sinners (Nettwerk). "About Last Night"'s favorite pop singer-songwriter hangs up her pen (temporarily) to cut an album of old-time standards performed in a rough-hewn, bewitchingly unslick style that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the glammed-up slumming of Linda Ronstadt and her successors (TT).

Posted January 20, 12:09 PM

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

To purchase or investigate, click on the link.

CD: Glenn Gould, Mozart Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 (Sony). Glenn Gould claimed to hate Mozart's music and played it badly--with one towering exception. Never have the stern yet shapely melodic lines of Mozart's greatest minor-key concerto been etched more incisively than in this 1961 recording, gracefully accompanied by Walter Susskind and the CBC Symphony. If you're one of the many music lovers who finds Gould's myriad eccentricities offputting, listen to this CD with an open mind and prepare to be surprised (TT).

NOVEL: John P. Marquand, Sincerely, Willis Wayde. Babbitt with a backstory. This undeservedly forgotten 1955 blockbuster follows a New England businessman along the twisty road that leads from youthful idealism to mature vengefulness. Less subtle than Point of No Return, Marquand's masterpiece, it offers a harsher, explicitly satirical view of life among the capitalists, and though Marquand's Lewis-like portrayal of his anti-hero's philistinism is a bit heavy-handed, I can't think of a more convincing fictional description of the high price of getting what you think you want (TT).

Posted January 20, 12:07 PM

DRAMA KINGS

"These five biographies of theater luminaries outshine the rest..."

Posted January 20, 11:41 AM

FINE ART OF DISTINCTIONS

"Historically, a director's staging of a play has had the same legal status as a singer's interpretation of a song, but John Rando, the director of Urinetown, thinks it should be protected by copyright and subject to royalty. Whether or not the directors of the Akron and Chicago productions of Urinetown stole his ideas, this claim is clearly defensible..."

Posted January 20, 11:38 AM

BALLET? NEVER HEARD OF IT

"No classics, no stars, only a handful of long-lived institutions...so why take a chance on dance? And therein lies the challenge of reviving dance in America: Anyone who seeks to launch a new company, or revitalize an old one, must start by figuring out how to make large numbers of Americans want to see something about which they no longer know anything..."

Posted January 20, 11:35 AM

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.

Terry writes about the other arts, too--books, ballet, painting and sculpture, film and TV, whatever happens to catch his eye or ear. In addition to his drama column, Terry writes "Sightings," a biweekly column about the arts in America, for the Saturday Wall Street Journal, and his work also appears in National Review and other magazines. His Wikipedia entry is here.

Laura Demanski is a Chicago-based writer with experience as an editor, critic, graduate student, and teacher. Laura's book reviews appear in the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune. Naturally drawn to the medium-hot centers of this world, she is a fierce advocate of her adopted Second City but still feels at home when she visits her one-time stomping grounds of Manhattan. A serious media addiction helps her keep close tabs on the red-hot from her comfy but happening city by the lake. She worries she should shoulder more guilt about her guilty pleasures--which include pro hockey, cop and lawyer shows, Las Vegas, and the colorful adventures of Travis McGee--but they're all just so damn pleasurable. More presentably, she's into Romantic poetry, Henry James, landscape painting, modern dance (with and without shoes, if you know what she means), and Edward Gorey. But she's not always sure she doesn't have some of those items in the wrong column.

Carrie A.A. Frye is a writer living in Asheville, North Carolina. She has lived in the mountain city for about a dozen years but retains strong traces of a Wisconsin accent. A graduate of Amherst College, she has worked as a reporter, editor and copywriter, but only because positions as a dancer, ship naturalist, and super-spy were unobtainable. Her reading habits are omnivorous, with literary fiction, mysteries, books on bugs, accounts of Polar exploration, and science fiction/fantasy all fair game for discussion. She mourns Buffy, loves Project Runway and has an appalling weakness for movies where people either break into song or onto Broadway. She also knows a lot of unexpected things about sports. Before joining "About Last Night" she was the proprietor of the litblog Tingle Alley.

Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that "in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one....the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves." We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people--maybe most--approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.

Posted January 20, 11:33 AM

Posted January 20, 11:28 AM

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS

Terry recently finished writing Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, forthcoming in 2009 from Harcourt. He wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado.

His latest book is All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, published by Harcourt. A Terry Teachout Reader, a collection of Terry's essays about American art and culture, was published in 2004 by Yale University Press. The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, published in 2002, is now available in paperback. You can read excerpts from reviews of All in the Dances, A Terry Teachout Reader, and The Skeptic here.

Terry has also written a memoir, City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, edited A Second Mencken Chrestomathy and Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959, contributed to The Oxford Companion to Jazz, and written introductions to Paul Taylor's Private Domain: An Autobiography and Gene Lees' Waiting for Dizzy. You can buy any of these books by clicking on the titles.

Posted January 20, 11:21 AM

January 19, 2007

TT: Melancholy farce

Today's Wall Street Journal contains the first of a series of theatrical reports from the road. This time around I review a Cherry Orchard in Boston and a Noises Off in Washington:

It says much about the artistic health of Broadway that none of Anton Chekhov's plays has been seen there since 2000, and that two decades have gone by since "The Cherry Orchard" was last produced there (unless you count the Russian-language road-show version that ran for a week and a half in 1997). So when Boston's Huntington Theatre cast Kate Burton as Madame Ranevskaya in Chekhov's last and greatest play, I knew I had to go see it--and her. Nowadays Ms. Burton is best known as a TV star, but she is also one of the finest stage actresses we have, and in "The Cherry Orchard" she made an impression so strong and vibrant that I can still see her clearly in my mind's eye a week after the fact....

The Marxist reading of "The Cherry Orchard" as a snapshot of Russia on the eve of much-needed revolution was fashionable throughout much of the 20th century, but has grown less stylish of late. "You can never make a play this great about politics," says Nicholas Martin, the Huntington's artistic director, who has chosen instead to stress the comic side of "The Cherry Orchard." He gets his laughs and then some, but the broadness of his straightforward staging, which borders at times on slapsticky crudity, seemed to me to veer rather too far in the opposite direction....

I don't know if "Noises Off" is the funniest play ever written, but it's definitely the funniest play I've ever seen, and Washington's Arena Stage has given it a perfect revival. I mean it: I can't think of a single way in which this production could possibly have been improved....

No link, naturally, so get yourself a Journal and read the whole thing there, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, thereby giving you immediate access to my column and all the rest of the Journal's Friday arts package. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Chris Wheeldon takes a chance

In my next "Sightings" column, to be published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I examine the hottest dance story of the month, if not the decade: Christopher Wheeldon's recently announced decision to leave New York City Ballet and launch his own classical ballet company. Yes, Wheeldon is the biggest choreographic talent to come along since Mark Morris--but is that fact alone enough to guarantee the kind of heavy-duty charitable cash flow necessary to bankroll a twenty-member dance troupe? Or might he possibly have something else in mind?

For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal, where you'll find my column in the "Pursuits" section.

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

TT: Almanac

"One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Posted January 19, 12:00 PM

TT: My day

I'm sitting in my hotel room in Washington, D.C., having just eaten a very good breakfast downstairs. Last night I chatted with Our Girl on the phone, then read the first chapter of Bleak House before putting out the light, thus embarking on the fulfillment of one of my New Year's resolutions. This morning I spent an hour surfing the Web and catching up on my e-mail, then read the Washington Post on paper, something I almost never do anymore. In a few minutes I'll head for the Phillips Collection, where I plan to pass the middle part of the day looking at art, followed by a couple of hours' worth of writing. Tonight I'll be seeing the Signature Theatre Company's new production of Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.

The sky is blue, the wind is blowing, and for some reason I find that a sentence from one of Justice Holmes' letters is running through my head: "Life grows more equable as one grows older; not less interesting, but I hope a little more impersonal. An old man ought to be sad. I don't know whether I shall be when the wind is west and the sky clear."

Enjoy your day. I plan to.

Posted January 19, 10:42 AM

ABOUT TERRY'S OPERA

Terry is collaborating with Paul Moravec on The Letter, an operatic version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play. It was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and will open there on July 25, 2009. Here is an ongoing series of progress reports on the writing and production of The Letter.
______________

Lend me your ears (and eyes)
Men at work
Men at work (II)
Men at work (III)
Men at work (IV)
For better and worse
Men at work (V)
Men (

January 31, 2007

TT: Almanac

TT: As good as a mile

TT: Another old friend

January 30, 2007

TT: Lost in the ozone

TT: Almanac

January 29, 2007

TT: Almanac

TT: Not blogging but working

January 26, 2007

TT: The very best we have

TT: Almanac

January 25, 2007

TT: Old home week

TT: So you want to see a show?

TT: Almanac

January 24, 2007

TT: Small package

TT: Almanac

OGIC: My town, more than just an ursine cult

TT: New kid on the block

January 23, 2007

TT: Man's man

TT: Almanac

January 22, 2007

TT: Words to the wise

TT: Almanac

January 20, 2007

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

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

DRAMA KINGS

FINE ART OF DISTINCTIONS

BALLET? NEVER HEARD OF IT

ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS

Sites

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS

January 19, 2007

TT: Melancholy farce

TT: Chris Wheeldon takes a chance

TT: Almanac

TT: My day

ABOUT TERRY'S OPERA