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April 30, 2007

CD

Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony, Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Telarc). Handsome, shapely performances of the Fifth Symphony, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and Serenade to Music, recorded in breathtakingly vivid digital sound. I can't think of a better single-CD introduction to Vaughan Williams, for these three works are utterly characteristic and immediately winning. Also included is an elegant little performance by the Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus of the Tallis hymn tune on which RVW based his best-known composition (TT).

Posted April 30, 3:04 PM

PLAY

Biography (Pearl, 80 St. Mark's Place, through May 20). Cheers to the Pearl Theatre Company for reviving S.N. Behrman's 1932 play about a Neysa McMein-like portrait painter who decides to write a tell-all memoir, thus throwing one of her priggish ex-lovers into a snit. Biography is a forgotten gem of American high comedy, and this scintillating off-Broadway revival does it justice (TT).

Posted April 30, 1:12 PM

TT: Getaway

If you're a Manhattan drama critic, April is most definitely the cruellest month. Broadway producers are rushing to get their big-budget shows open in time to be eligible for this year's Tonys, meaning that I have to be on the aisle night after night. I've been seeing too many musicals and hitting too many deadlines, so when a three-day gap opened up in my schedule, I grabbed a Zipcar, hit the road, and didn't stop until I got to Plymouth, Massachusetts.

My destination was a homey little waterside bed-and-breakfast located half a block north of Plymouth Rock, a ten-ton chunk of granodiorite that is said to be the rock upon which William Bradford and the Pilgrims trod when they got off the Mayflower in 1620. Whether or not the rock in question is in fact the rock in question has long been a matter of widely varying opinion, but it was identified as such in 1741, and in 1920 the state of Massachusetts put up an elegant Doric portico designed by McKim, Mead, and White in order to protect it from the depredations of chisel-wielding idiots.

I don't know how crowded Plymouth gets when the tourist season is at its height, but on weekday afternoons in late April, you can visit Plymouth Rock pretty much all by yourself. It's a sobering experience. Rarely does one get a chance to view such a place in solitude, there to reflect on the struggles of the first American settlers, who were so determined to live free that they risked all they had to do so.

Later that day I learned of the death of Mstislav Rostropovich, the Russian cellist and conductor. One must not grieve overmuch at the loss of a man who lived so full a life, but it's still hard to imagine a world without Slava. I heard him give a recital in Kansas City in the late Seventies, the years of his prime, and I have indelible memories of the dazzling panache with which he charged through Benjamin Britten's Cello Sonata, a work that had been written especially for him a decade earlier. It's not one of Britten's most memorable efforts, but when Rostropovich played it, you couldn't help but think it was a five-star masterpiece.

In old age Rostropovich devoted himself to conducting, which was never his strong suit, but his youthful recordings of Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme and the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto, which was written for him in 1959, leave no possible doubt that he was one of the greatest instrumentalists of the twentieth century. Amazingly enough, he was also, like Fritz Kreisler, a very good pianist, and he accompanied his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, with the utmost flair and imagination in recital and on record. (Many of their best recordings have been reissued on this three-CD set.)

Rostropovich was more than just a great musician, of course. He was one of a handful of well-known Russian artists who were willing to put their lives on the line to protest Soviet tyranny. Allan Kozinn tells the story in his New York Times obituary:

When [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn came under attack by Soviet authorities in the late 1960s, Mr. Rostropovich and Ms. Vishnevskaya allowed him to stay in their dacha at Zhukovka, outside Moscow. He was their guest for four years, and Mr. Rostropovich tried to intercede on his behalf, personally taking the manuscript of "August 1914" to the Ministry of Culture and arguing that there was nothing threatening to the Soviet system in it. His efforts were rebuffed.

Mr. Rostropovich's own troubles began in 1970 when, out of frustration with the suppression of writers, artists and musicians, he sent an open letter to Pravda, the state-run newspaper, which did not publish it. Western newspapers did.

"Explain to me, please, why in our literature and art so often people absolutely incompetent in this field have the final word," he asked in the letter. "Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and express his opinion about what he knows, what he has personally thought about and experienced, and not merely to express with slightly different variations the opinion which has been inculcated in him."

After the letter was published, Mr. Rostropovich and Ms. Vishnevskaya were unable to travel abroad and faced dwindling engagements at home....

It was not until 1974 that they were allowed out of the country again. That year they were given two-year travel visas. In the West, Mr. Rostropovich told interviewers that he missed his homeland and longed to return but that he would not do so until artists were free to speak their minds.

"I will not utter one single lie in order to return," he said in 1977. "And once there, if I see new injustice, I will speak out four times more loudly than before."

Talk is cheap, and modern-day America is full of artists who bloviate at endless and enervating length about public affairs. How many of them, I wonder, would be prepared to do what Rostropovich did? As I read of his passing last week, I looked out the window of my room at the full-size replica of the Mayflower docked across the street in Plymouth Harbor, and asked myself whether I had it in me to walk away from my comfortable life for the sake of freedom. I like to think I would, but I've never faced such a choice, and very likely never will. People occasionally tell me that some piece of mine was "courageous," to which I invariably respond that there's nothing brave about writing a review. Courage is what the Pilgrims had--and what the Rostropoviches had.

Needless to say, my little trip to New England entailed more than sober reflection on the price of liberty. Among other things, I dined exceedingly well at Marguerite's and Super Duper Weenie, and I made the acquaintance of a perfectly charming young woman from Massachusetts who designs jewelry for a living. I also got well and truly lost in Providence, Rhode Island, a city whose signage is illogical, counterintuitive, and generally half-witted, but the less said about that, the better.

All in all, it was great fun while it lasted, but it didn't last long enough: I drove back to New York on Saturday to attend press previews of Legally Blonde and LoveMusik, about which more in Friday's Wall Street Journal. Now I'm back in the saddle again, wishing I weren't. Even the best job in the world can get to be a bit much when April rolls around.

Posted April 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"If you can't imagine that Cupid makes you fall in love, you have no business existing."

Mark Morris, interview with Ara Guzelimian (courtesy of Playbill)

Posted April 30, 12:00 AM

April 28, 2007

TT: Read all about it

The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my "Sightings" column about Ornette Coleman's Pulitzer Prize, which appears in today's paper:

This year's Pulitzer Prize for music went not to a classical work but to an album of improvised jazz, Ornette Coleman's "Sound Grammar." That's a first. Wynton Marsalis won a Pulitzer in 1997, but that was for "Blood on the Fields," a three-hour-long composition for three jazz singers and a big band. "Sound Grammar," by contrast, consists of eight unrelated tunes by Mr. Coleman recorded live by his quartet at a 2005 concert.

Should "Sound Grammar" have won? Was it even eligible? The Pulitzer is supposed to go to a "distinguished musical composition by an American in any of the larger forms including chamber, orchestral, choral, opera, song, dance, or other forms of musical theatre." Whatever its other virtues, "Sound Grammar" is clearly not a large-scale composition, nor does it break any new stylistic ground for the celebrated and influential avant-garde saxophonist. Mr. Coleman has been making records since 1958, any number of which were far more memorable than this one.

So what's going on here? Let's start with a little history....

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted April 28, 12:00 AM

April 27, 2007

TT: Blasts from the past

"Contentions," Commentary's Web site, is making five of my older essays available over the weekend for free reading: "The Problem of Shostakovich" (1995), "Taking Sinatra Seriously" (1997), "Living With Art" (2004), "I.B. Singer and Me" (2004), and "Culture in the Age of Blogging" (2005). To peruse any or all of them, go here.

Posted April 27, 9:45 PM

TT: The delights of insomnia

I just took a peek at the "About Last Night" world map and saw that we've recently been visited by readers in the following cities:

• Anchorage, Alaska

• Coburg, Australia

• Constanta, Romania

• Managua, Nicaragua

• New Delhi, India

• Surrey, Prince Edward Island, Canada

• Tye, Texas

• Zapopan, Mexico

We've also had visitors from unidentified cities in Kuwait and South Korea.

From both of us to all of you...hello out there! Come back soon!

Posted April 27, 4:12 AM

TT: Poor Richard

Once again, this week's Wall Street Journal drama column covers two plays in New York, one on Broadway (Frost/Nixon) and one off (Biography). This time, they're both winners:

Whatever else he was or wasn't, Richard Nixon must surely have been the strangest human being ever to serve as President of the United States. Deformed by unappeasable ambition and visibly ill at ease in his own skin, he was the polar opposite of the blow-dried, focus-grouped mannequins who now dominate American politics. Roger Ailes, who worked as a media consultant for Nixon's 1968 campaign, summed him up in one steel-shod sentence: "He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be President.'" Such a creature was made to be put on stage, and Frank Langella plays him to the hilt and back again in Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon," a slick, superficial and staggeringly entertaining British docudrama about the making of the 1977 TV interviews in which David Frost persuaded Nixon to admit his involvement in the Watergate cover-up and apologize for having "let the American people down."

Mr. Langella's performance is all the more remarkable given the fact that he bears no resemblance whatsoever to Tricky Dick. Weirdly enough, he looks much more like Gore Vidal, and the Nixonesque voice he assumes in "Frost/Nixon" is not so much an impersonation as a very free caricature. He's so far off the mark that it takes about five minutes to get used to him--but once you do, you'll hang on his every twitch....

S.N. Behrman used to be one of the hottest names on Broadway, but that was a million years ago. I'd never seen any of his 20-odd plays on stage until Tuesday, when the Pearl Theatre Company revived "Biography," which ran for 267 performances in 1932 and thereafter dropped from sight. Very much to my surprise and delight, it turns out to be a winner, a scintillating light comedy wrapped around an unexpectedly tough core of emotional seriousness....

This was my first visit to the Pearl Theatre Company, and I was decidedly impressed by the outstanding performances of the ensemble cast, which has been tautly directed by J.R. Sullivan. But the real star of the show is the script. Like the Mint Theater Company's equally fine Off Broadway revival of Rachel Crothers' "Susan and God," this marvelous production serves as a highly pleasurable reminder that more than a few of the now-forgotten American stage comedies of the '30s are still capable of charming modern audiences....

No link, so do what you gotta do. Buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my column, plus the rest of the Journal's coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted April 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Jazz wins a Pulitzer

This year's Pulitzer Prize for music went to a jazz album, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar. Did it deserve to win? Was it even eligible? And what are the implications of the Pulitzer jury's decision to break with past practice and give the prize to a recording instead of a musical composition?

I'll be grappling with all these questions in my next "Sightings" column, which appears in Saturday's Wall Street Journal--and the answers may surprise you. Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section to see what I have to say.

Posted April 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever."

Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

Posted April 27, 12:00 AM

April 26, 2007

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)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

Posted April 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Writers are always selling someone out."

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Posted April 26, 12:00 AM

April 25, 2007

TT: Still in the barrel

Forgive my continued silence, but I'm still busy writing for money. I'll be back when the checks clear!

Posted April 25, 1:09 AM

TT: Almanac

"Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Posted April 25, 12:00 AM

April 24, 2007

TT: Man at work

This is a three-deadline, three-show week and I'm already a day behind, so...see you tomorrow!

Posted April 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Living is abnormal."

Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros

Posted April 24, 12:00 AM

April 23, 2007

TT: Our (new) old selves again

After a week of tweaking, adjusting, practicing, and otherwise getting used to our new publishing platform, I'm pleased (and relieved) to say that "About Last Night" once more looks the way it's supposed to look. Making the switch to Movable Type wasn't fun, but it turned out to be more than worth the trouble. Alas, Our Girl was out of Chicago on business last week and thus hasn't had a chance to learn the technical ropes, but Doug McLennan and I hope to have her up and running within a few days.

The only problem we haven't yet managed to fix is that our alternate URL, www.terryteachout.com, is still bouncing to the main ArtsJournal page instead of "About Last Night." I don't know why. The techies don't know why. Nobody knows why. But we're all working on it....

I'm also pleased to announce that the right-hand column has been updated, and I also added a half-dozen new blogs to "Sites to See." Check it all out.

Now, back to blogging!

Posted April 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Eight isn't enough

I wrote a review of Desmond Stone's biography of Alec Wilder for the New York Times Book Review in 1996:

Alec Wilder spent his life looking for cracks to fall through. Though he wrote three songs that became standards ("I'll Be Around," "While We're Young" and "It's So Peaceful in the Country"), most of his "popular" music was too delicate and introspective to please a mass audience; though he composed hundreds of works for some of America's greatest instrumentalists, these "classical" pieces were too strongly colored by jazz and popular music to win critical acceptance. Today, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking book "American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950," surely the wittiest work of musical analysis ever written--and one that characteristically has nothing whatsoever to say about Wilder's own songs, even such miniature masterpieces as "I See It Now" and "Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden's?"...

Wilder's narcissistic shyness (he was precisely the sort of person for whom the term "passive-aggressive" was coined) didn't stop him from moving to New York in the early 1930's and setting up shop as a songwriter and arranger, but it did place severe limits on his ability to get ahead in the hard-nosed world of commercial music. As one contemporary recalled: "His music sounded different, he dressed differently, he acted differently....He just wrote what he wanted and the devil take recording supervisors, radio executives and bandleaders."

No less problematic was his interest in writing music that moved freely from jazz to classical and back again, the first fruit of which was a series of three-minute cameos for five woodwinds, harpsichord, bass and drums. The limpid melodies, piquant scoring and fey titles ("Jack, This Is My Husband," "It's Silk, Feel It") of Wilder's octets delighted musicians and befuddled everybody else. Recorded in 1939 and 1940 by a crack group of studio players, the octets reinforced their composer's reputation for uncommercial eccentricity, but also won him influential fans...

I've been praising Wilder's octets for years to anyone who'd listen, but only seven of them have ever been reissued on CD. The rest remain firmly ensconced in limbo, and so far as I know, no one in the world has any plans to make them available again. (Are you listening, Hep Records?)

For this reason, I am delighted--nay, ecstatic--to announce that some anonymous benefactor lurking in cyberspace has celebrated Wilder's centenary (he was born on February 16, 1907) by making eight of the Wilder Octet recordings available as podcasts.

Click on the links below and you can listen to:

• Concerning Etchings

• Dance Man Buys a Farm (the reference is to Artie Shaw)

• A Debutante's Diary

• The House Detective Registers

• It's Silk, Feel It!

• Little White Samba

• Neurotic Goldfish

• Sea Fugue Mama (the reference is to "Want some sea food, Mama," a line from a 1939 pop song called "Hold Tight" whose lyrics are, ahem, cunningly naughty)

For the record, the rest of the octets have similarly fetching titles: "The Amorous Poltergeist," "Bull Fiddles in a China Shop," "The Children Met the Train," "Footnotes to a Summer Love," "Her Old Man Was Suspicious," "His First Long Pants," "Kindergarten Flower Pageant," "A Little Girl Grows Up," "Pieces of Eight," "Please Do Not Disturb the House Detective," "Remember Me to Youth," "Seldom the Sun," "She'll Be Seven in May," "Such a Tender Night," "They Needed No Words," and "Walking Home in the Spring."

Give a listen. I guarantee you'll be charmed.

UPDATE: Mr. Anecdotal Evidence is also a fan of Wilder's octets.

Posted April 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant."

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Posted April 23, 12:00 AM

April 22, 2007

DVD

Of Mice and Men. Like so many middlebrow "classics" of the Thirties and Forties, John Steinbeck's best-known novel plays better than it reads. Lewis Milestone's handsomely photographed 1939 film version, adapted by Steinbeck himself from the stage version he wrote two years earlier (with the unacknowledged assistance of George S. Kaufman), is an unexpectedly impressive piece of work. Burgess Meredith is perfect as George--he never gave a better performance--and though you'll have to brush aside countless half-remembered parodies to see how good Lon Chaney, Jr., is as George, it's worth the effort. The music is by Aaron Copland, and it's every bit as powerful as his better-known scores for Our Town and The Heiress (TT).

Posted April 22, 12:30 PM

April 20, 2007

BOOK

Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California, $29.95). The last word on the man who made Mickey Mouse talk. No gossip, no nonsense, just an authoritative, lucidly written chronicle of Disney's life and work by a critic-historian-blogger who knows as much about animated cartoons as anyone alive. Don't waste time on Neal Gabler's Disney biography--this is the real right stuff (TT).

Posted April 20, 10:28 PM

CD

Hollywood String Quartet, Beethoven Late Quartets (Testament, three CDs). Felix Slatkin, Leonard's father, was a superbly gifted Heifetz-style violinist who served as concertmaster of the Twentieth-Century Fox orchestra and, after hours, led an ensemble of Hollywood studio players good enough to stand up to direct comparison with the Budapest Quartet. Their 1957 Capitol recordings of the late quartets of Beethoven, now available once again after a long hiatus, rank among the finest chamber-music recordings ever made. Rarely have Beethoven's most sublime inward utterances been played with such awesome technical finish--or interpreted with such self-effacing seriousness (TT).

Posted April 20, 10:21 PM

TT: Little Miss Wrong

I report on two plays in today's Wall Street Journal drama column, one off-Broadway (Blackbird) and one out of town (The Life of Galileo). One thumb down, one thumb up:

Forbidden love has always been a favorite topic of playwrights, who like nothing better than to add an extra touch of drama to the old, old story. Unfortunately--or not--the list of officially proscribed romantic partners grows shorter every day, thus making it harder to portray any relationship, however outré, as illicit. Once the merest hint of homosexuality was enough to send a delicious shudder through most any audience, but that was then. David Harrower's "Blackbird," in which we are invited to contemplate the coupling of a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl, is ever so much more up to date....

This is where I'm supposed to say that I found "Blackbird" challenging, disquieting, disturbing...you know the litany. No doubt some trendy critic will even call it transgressive. But what I find most disturbing about "Blackbird" is that in the absence of any moral frame for the events Mr. Harrower is describing, it's hard to see a point to his play beyond mere prurience....

Bertolt Brecht wrote three different versions of "The Life of Galileo," and each time he added a fresh layer of moral complexity to his fictionalized stage biography of the Italian scientist who proved that the earth orbits around the sun, then recanted his discovery in order to escape the fires of the Inquisition. The first version is a Marxist parable of Reason Enlightening the World. In the second, written after Hiroshima, Brecht rethought his blind faith in science as the engine of human happiness; in the last verson, written after he returned to East Germany and was forced to choose between supporting a totalitarian regime or having his theater company shut down, he sharpened his portrayal of Galileo's self-protective opportunism.

After "Mother Courage," "The Life of Galileo" is Brecht's finest play, but it doesn't get done nearly often enough in this country (so far as I know, it hasn't been staged in New York since 1991). That's why I made a point of going to Philadelphia's Wilma Theater to see the American premiere of David Edgar's new translation. This production, directed by Blanka Zizka, is a lively, plain-spoken modern-dress staging devoid of the heavy-handedness that can make Brecht awfully hard to swallow....

As per usual, no free link. To read the whole thing, buy today's paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you two-click access to my column, plus the rest of the paper's extensive, excellent arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I often wonder whether a frumpy old woman can ever be quite fair in her estimate of a young & lovely one."

Edith Wharton, letter to Bernard Berenson (Dec. 19, 1921)

Posted April 20, 12:00 AM

April 19, 2007

TT: As I was saying

It seems I was a day ahead of the news....

Posted April 19, 10:19 AM

TT: Kitty Carlisle Hart, R.I.P.

First Pat Buckley, now Kitty Carlisle Hart: the old order passeth, which makes me feel more than usually middle-aged.

As a child I watched Kitty Carlisle on To Tell the Truth, the classic game show that introduced me to the word "affidavit," and a little later I saw A Night at the Opera for the first time and was amazed to find that the distinguished and amusing lady who sat on a TV panel every afternoon had once been a movie star of sorts. Later on I played Beverly Carlton in a college production of The Man Who Came to Dinner and discovered to my further amazement that she was the widow of its co-author, Moss Hart.

It hardly seemed possible that such a self-evidently historic person as Kitty Carlisle Hart (as she now styled herself) should still be alive when I finally made it to New York twenty-two years ago, but she sure enough was, having outlived her far more famous husband to become one of the last surviving relics of an age in which I would have preferred to live. What's more, she kept on ticking all the way to the end, appearing in cabaret and constantly popping up on the town.

I never met the Widow Hart, but I did sit behind her two years ago at a matinée performance of the grisly Broadway revival
of The Glass Menagerie that starred Jessica Lange and Christian Slater. After intermission I saw her seatmate-companion fumbling with the assisted-listening device that Mrs. Hart had been using to hear the actors. Clearly she'd been having trouble getting it to work. Having recently watched Broadway: The Golden Age, the thought occurred to me that she had most likely seen Laurette Taylor in the original production, and I briefly thought of tapping her on the shoulder and saying, "Don't bother--you're not missing anything." Alas, I didn't have the nerve, and so missed an opportunity to amuse a legend.

The New York Times obituary of Kitty Carlisle Hart is here. For a lovely tribute by Stephen Holden, the Times' smartest critic, go here. The Times also ran a nice little piece today about Pat Buckley's place in Manhattan's "nouvelle society," which you can read by going here.

Posted April 19, 10:04 AM

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)
• A Moon for the Misbegotten* (drama, PG-13, adult situations, reviewed here, closes June 10)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 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)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON:
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

Posted April 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I suppose there is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul."

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Posted April 19, 12:00 AM

April 18, 2007

TT: Free bilge

Courtesy of Broadway Stars, the Web site that posts links to theater-related news stories, reviews, and commentary, you can now read my Wall Street Journal pan of The Pirate Queen for free:

Has there ever really been a musical so bad that it was funny? (I mean an actual show, not "Springtime for Hitler.") "Taboo" and "In My Life" both began promisingly, but my sense of humor was swamped by their sheer awfulness well before intermission. "The Pirate Queen," on the other hand, is a gift that keeps on giving: It starts out dumb, then gets dumber, and at no time does anything other than preposterous ever take place on stage or in the orchestra pit....

To read the whole thing, go here. (This link is only good for one week, so act promptly!)

Posted April 18, 10:41 AM

TT: Yes, we noticed

One of the as-yet-inexplicable side effects of changing publishing platforms has been that anyone trying to visit "About Last Night" via www.terryteachout.com, our alternate URL, is getting bounced to the main ArtsJournal page instead. Stand by--we're working on it!

Posted April 18, 9:49 AM

TT: Are you sitting down?

When I moved to the Upper West Side apartment in which I now live, I went to Staples and bought myself a cheap but functional swivel desk chair. It disintegrated a year or so ago, and I replaced it with one of my spare dining chairs, an ancient wooden folding chair with a cane seat. This was supposed to be a temporary expedient, but like many men, I don't much care for shopping, so I never got around to buying a real desk chair. I spend roughly half of my waking hours sitting at my desk, though, and after months of hard use, the folding chair finally started to give out on me as well. Not wanting to be like Glenn Gould, who continued to use his homemade adjustable piano chair long after the bottom had fallen out of it, I decided that I had to get a new chair at once.

After spending three years sitting in a swivel chair with wheels, I knew I wanted something simpler and less mobile, and now that I've turned my apartment into a miniature museum, I figured that it ought to be aesthetically pleasing as well. Since the Teachout Museum is mostly devoted to American art, and since I'm a midcentury modernist at heart, it hit me that the time had come at last to add a piece by Charles and Ray Eames to my collection. After much thought, I came to the conclusion that an Eames molded plywood dining chair could easily do double duty as a desk chair, so I broke down and bought one last week. I've been sitting in it (and looking at it) with the utmost pleasure ever since.

It was Our Girl who first got me interested in the Eameses. She owns an Eames lounge chair that I've envied fiercely ever since I first laid eyes on it. My little desk chair is a vastly more modest affair, but I love it anyway, and it goes perfectly with the two Fairfield Porter lithographs that hang over my work space. Come see it, OGIC!

Now if only I can find a midcentury-modern couch small enough to fit into my living room and comfortable enough to sit in pleasurably....

Posted April 18, 9:24 AM

TT: Monkey business

I wasn't able to post last Friday's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser due to circumstances beyond my control, so here it is, a little late but none the worse for wear. I reviewed two new Broadway revivals, Inherit the Wind and A Moon for the Misbegotten:

Most people know what they think they know about the Scopes "monkey trial" from having seen "Inherit the Wind," the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee that ran on Broadway for two years, was made into a movie in 1960 and has since been performed by every professional, semi-professional and unprofessional theater company in the English-speaking world. But "Inherit the Wind," which has just been revived on Broadway in a big-budget production starring Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy, isn't what it appears to be. Far from being a fact-based docudrama about what happened when the state of Tennessee outlawed the teaching of evolution in its public schools, it's a fictionalized account of the trial that plays fast and loose with the facts in the case of Tennessee v. Scopes. You don't have to be a Holy Roller to be exasperated by its cartoonish absurdity--or disgusted by its repulsive smugness....

Bryan is turned into an oafish opportunist, Scopes into a secular saint, the citizens of Dayton into a slack-jawed gaggle of mouth-breathing morons, and Darrow into a homespun cracker-barrel agnostic with a heart of gold and a weakness for noble curtain speeches: "You don't suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you? Tomorrow, sure as hell, somebody else'll have to stand up. And you've helped give him the guts to do it!" To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to listen to such tripe without snickering. I don't, and I didn't.

It's impossible to stage "Inherit the Wind" in anything like a dramatically serious way, and Doug Hughes, the director, hasn't even tried. Nothing that happens in this production bears any obvious relationship to recognizable human behavior. Each performance is a caricature, starting with that of Mr. Plummer, who plays Henry Drummond, the character based on Darrow (everyone in "Inherit the Wind" is given a transparent pseudonym). He oozes the kind of charm that makes you want to go straight home and scrub yourself with a pumice stone. As for Denis O'Hare, cast as a smart-alecky reporter bearing the suspiciously familiar-sounding moniker of E.K. Hornbeck, I'll say only that in the course of researching my biography of H.L. Mencken, it somehow escaped my notice that he bore any resemblance whatsoever to Pee-wee Herman....

How bad can a good play be? Pretty awful, actually. Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten" opens with an hour and a half of exposition so superfluous that you itch to trim it with a meat ax, all delivered in the kind of stage-Irish accents that should have gone out with John Ford. But just when you're thinking your watch has stopped, the play gets started, and soon you forget about everything but the tragedy of Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan (Kevin Spacey and Eve Best), two sinfully proud, irreparably damaged people who can't bring themselves to let down their guard and love one another. No, it's not as good as "Long Day's Journey into Night," "Ah, Wilderness!" or "The Iceman Cometh," but "A Moon for the Misbegotten" definitely works, even in so ill-conceived a staging as the Old Vic production that just arrived from London for a two-month run on Broadway....

Howard Davies, the director, must have ordered his cast to play the first act for excruciatingly obvious laughs, while Bob Crowley's set, which is dominated by a surrealistic-looking farmhouse apparently located somewhere in the Dust Bowl, looks as though it had been intended for a German production of "The Grapes of Wrath" rather than a show set in rural Connecticut circa 1923. Ignore all that and concentrate on Ms. Best. She's miscast--Josie is supposed to be big and ugly--but so magnetic that it doesn't matter....

No free link. To read the whole thing, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to last week's drama column, plus the rest of the paper's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted April 18, 8:42 AM

TT: What goes around

This is part of a piece I wrote for Crisis immediately after the Columbine massacre:

It is not enough simply to say that violent movies drive young men mad, since people have been killing other people on the silver screen ever since The Great Train Robbery. Nor is today's violence uniquely explicit. When Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee at Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat--and when, later on, you see her hideously scarred face--the effect is as shocking as anything in Pulp Fiction. Yet no one has suggested that such films permanently warped the psyches of Eisenhower-era children. Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about the way violence is presented in contemporary movies. But what?

As it happens, Marvin himself offered a partial but nonetheless compelling answer to that question. "When I play these roles of vicious men," he told an interviewer, "I do things you shouldn't do and I make you see that you shouldn't do them." Today, any actor or director who dared say such a thing would sound hopelessly naive, but Marvin had earned the right to speak plainly: an ex-Marine who was grievously wounded in combat in World War II, he knew that violence has consequences. Not so his jejune successors, in whose morally weightless films violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote's eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces--but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I still feel that way.

Posted April 18, 1:04 AM

TT: Pat Buckley, R.I.P.

Pat Buckley died on Sunday. She is said to have been one of the models for the "social X-rays" portrayed in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. I knew her slightly, but not as a New York socialite--I don't move in those circles. Our acquaintance was of a different kind: Pat was the wife of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose National Review-related dinner parties she superintended. We met twenty years ago at one of those gatherings, an experience I wrote about for National Review Online's condolence page, which also contains links to various other tributes posted on NRO:

The first time I sat at Pat Buckley's dinner table, I found her...well, more than a little bit intimidating. I was fresh out of the Midwest and had never met anyone quite like her. She seemed to have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. No sooner were we introduced than I started wondering whether my socks matched--but then she went out of her way to make me feel at ease, and before I knew it, I'd lost my heart. Was the elaborate hauteur of her public manner a game she played to amuse herself and her loved ones? I've no idea--I didn't know her well enough--but to me she was never anything but charming, caring, and wonderfully kind, and I adored her. I can no more imagine a world without Pat than I can imagine a world without champagne.

Her New York Times obituary is here.

Posted April 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Those I'm not fond of have not, as a rule, considered 'warmth' my distinguishing quality. I never could serve myself up in the same sauce to friends & to acquaintances."

Edith Wharton, letter to Mary Berenson (Oct. 17, 1920)

Posted April 18, 12:00 AM

April 17, 2007

TT: Another prize gone wrong

David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer Prize for drama yesterday. Here's part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:

"It's a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters' suffering with a double spoonful of sugar. Not that their plight is less than deadly serious. Becca and Howie are a nice suburban couple whose son was killed when he darted in front of a car. Izzy, Becca's kid sister, is a spunky ne'er-do-well who suddenly finds herself pregnant without benefit of clergy. Nat, their mother, is no stranger to sorrow: her third child, a heroin addict, hung himself. All this might have been the stuff of domestic tragedy, but Rabbit Hole fails to scratch the surface of Becca's decorous middle-class grief. Instead, we spend too much time chortling at Izzy's haplessness and Nat's tactlessness--and we're never surprised by anything anyone says or does.

"Such are the comfortable, comforting ways of post-Oprah TV drama, and the familiar presence of Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly in the cast serves still further to make Rabbit Hole the kind of show you can see any day of the week in your very own living room...."

Go figure.

UPDATE: For the scoop on how Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer, go here.

Posted April 17, 9:58 AM

TT: Almanac

"The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction."

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Posted April 17, 9:52 AM

April 16, 2007

CD

Russell Oberlin, Handel Arias (DGG). Arias from Messiah, Israel in Egypt, Rodelinda, Radamisto, and Muzio Seevola, sung by the most perfect countertenor voice ever to be overheard by a microphone. Precious little of Oberlin's priceless recorded legacy has made it to CD, and this amazing 1959 album is among the most glittering jewels (TT).

Posted April 16, 2:07 PM

BOOK

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W.W. Norton, $35). An uncategorizable, unputdownable, utterly frank nine-hundred-page stroll through the bloody history of modernity, in which James serves up pithy, quote-driven miniature essays about key and not-so-key figures ranging from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, skewering countless hypocrites along the way. A splendidly readable exercise in cultural reclamation (TT).

Posted April 16, 2:06 PM

CD

Songs of Ned Rorem (Other Minds). The fabulously rare 1964 Columbia LP of Rorem's best songs, now on CD for the very first time. They're all here: "Early in the Morning," "My Papa's Waltz," "Visits to Saint Elizabeth's," "The Lordly Hudson," and two dozen others, selected and accompanied by the composer and sung by Charles Bressler, Phyllis Curtin, Gianna d'Angelo, Donald Gramm, and Regina Sarfaty. Get this one right now (TT).

Posted April 16, 2:03 PM

PLAY

Talk Radio (Longacre, 220 W. 48). Eric Bogosian's 1987 play about the coke-snorting host of a call-in show is now a period piece, but it remains an effective vehicle for a charismatic actor, and Liev Schreiber fills the bill to overflowing in this Broadway revival. His performance is slicker than the one Bogosian gave twenty years ago at the Public Theater, but it's no less remarkable in its own polished way (TT).

Posted April 16, 2:01 PM

CD

Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall 1971 (Reprise). The oft-bootlegged 1971 concert, now available legitimately and in excellent sound. No band, just the man himself singing seventeen of his best early songs, including "Cowgirl in the Sand," "Don't Let It Bring You Down," "Helpless," "I Am a Child," and "On the Way Home." I'm not especially nostalgic about the late Sixties or early Seventies, but Young's shivery voice and uncomplicated acoustic-guitar playing remain as mysteriously involving today as they were all those years ago (TT).

Posted April 16, 1:58 PM

BOOK

H.L. Mencken, A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources. Published in 1942 and still in print, this million-word behemoth, organized by topic instead of author, is wrongly remembered for its eccentricities, including a suspiciously extensive selection of nasty remarks about Jews and an assortment of anonymous "proverbs" that sound as though they came straight from the mouth of the editor himself. In fact, Mencken's New Dictionary contains a vast number of well-chosen, precisely attributed quotations on every imaginable subject, ranging widely among both familiar and obscure sources. It's that rarity of rarities, a reference book with a personality, and the passage of time has done little to diminish its usefulness--or charm (TT).

Posted April 16, 1:44 PM

CD

Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra/Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (BMG). Virtuosic, incisive, commandingly shaped performances by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony of Bartók's two orchestral masterpieces, digitally remastered so immaculately that no apologies of any kind need be made for the superlative early-stereo sound. If you find the great Hungarian modernist intimidating, this desert-island CD is likely to change your mind (TT).

Posted April 16, 1:44 PM

THE JOAN DIDION SHOW

"I found it hard to shake off the disquieting sensation that Ms. Didion, for all the obvious sincerity of her grief, was nonetheless functioning partly as a grieving widow and partly as a celebrity journalist who had chosen to treat the death of John Gregory Dunne as yet another piece of grist for her literary mill..."

Posted April 16, 1:42 PM

COMPOSER WITH A HARMONICA

"If film music is the invisible art form, then Ennio Morricone is one of its least visible giants. To be sure, no one familiar with his work is in the slightest doubt of his immense stature. But Morricone, like most film composers, is not nearly so well known in America as is his music..."

Posted April 16, 1:40 PM

TT: You're probably wondering...

...why Our Girl and I vanished from cyberspace last week, and why "About Last Night" looks so different today. The reason is that our old publishing platform has gone kaplooie. In recent weeks, ArtsJournal.com, our host, has been switching over to a new platform called Movable Type. OGIC and I were planning to make the transition in nice, easy installments, but instead we've had to jump ship early, and we're still finding our way around the control room of our new vessel.

The bad news is that this unexpected transition is taking place at a moment when I'm up to my ears in work. I've learned the basics of the new operating system, but OGIC doesn't know them yet, and it'll be a couple of days before I have time to fill her in. I didn't have time to code and post last week's drama-column teaser, either, so it won't be going up until some time tomorrow. I'm still tweaking the design of our new page, which doesn't look as nice as we'd hoped, though most of our archives have already been transferred to Movable Type, while the rest should be available later this week.

The good news is that normal posting, or something like it, will resume on Tuesday. Don't be surprised if things go wrong along the way, but Doug McLennan, the tutelary spirit and presiding genius of ArtsJournal.com, assures me that Movable Type is infinitely better than our old system. Once OGIC and I get the hang of it, all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well. In the meantime, please be patient--we'll get everything fixed sooner or later!

In case you're wondering, the URL of "About Last Night" remains the same, and all our old links remain fully operational. You don't have to do anything different to keep on visiting us every day, just like always.

See you tomorrow.

Posted April 16, 1:22 PM

TT: Almanac

"Every change in the place where you grew up is an insult, a run in the homespun fabric of recollection."

Terry Teachout, City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy

Posted April 16, 1:15 PM

April 13, 2007

TT: Almanac

"No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men."

Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic

Posted April 13, 12:06 PM

TT: Is it real, or is it Glenn Gould?

In this week's "Sightings" column, which appears in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, I take up the interesting case of the digitized "re-performance" of Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations that is about to be released by Sony Classical. (You can read more here about the technology used to make this recording.) Yes, it's convincing--but what does it say about our musical culture when we become so obsessed with old records and dead performers that we lose sight of the here and now?

For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and turn to the "Pursuits" section.

Posted April 13, 12:04 PM

April 12, 2007

OGIC: Catalog

A brief catalog of recent enthusiasms, artistic and otherwise:

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. I've owned this book since high school and it's accompanied through the years, to New England, New York, Chicago, and everywhere I've lived for shorter stretches. But I hadn't read it until last month, when I was driven to it by reading one too many of the glowing reviews of Zachary Leader's new Amis biography, soon to be available here in the States. Now I wonder what took me so long, especially given the book's giant reputation. And, large though it may be, the reputation doesn't even do the book full justice; it credits the main veins of mordant humor and hilarious disaffection that run through it, but not necessarily Jim's genuine and affecting vulnerability. For the sake of those of you who have not yet indulged in Sir Kingsley's first and most famous work, I'll forgo discussing the fairly bizarre ending other than to say that it gives every indication of belonging in a different book, though in a way more interesting than detrimental.

2. Knitting with Malabrigo kettle-dyed worsted wool yarns from Uruguay. Before I started knitting three months ago, I hadn't the faintest idea how seductive yarn could be--potent little bunches of pure color, texture, inspiration. Knitting shopping rocks, and knitting itself is not far behind.

3. The Lives of Others: Finally caught up with the much ballyhooed film about artists under surveillance in 1980s East Germany, and it's just as good as everyone says. While it's fantastically illuminating of the endlessly variegated ways of being a loyal or a skeptical subject of the state, its main achievement is a personal portrait of a soul in flux. That portrait sits quietly alongside the sometimes noisy melodrama involving the other characters, a drama in which it's certainly implicated but from which it's essentially separate. I left the movie theater with E. M. Forster echoing in my head: Only connect.

4. What else? Playoff hockey.

Posted April 12, 12:31 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)
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 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)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

Posted April 12, 12:30 PM

April 11, 2007

TT: Almanac

"Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry's business."

Basil Bunting (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Posted April 11, 12:29 PM

April 10, 2007

TT: Almanac

"The retelling of the story of a novel, the summary of an historical or philosophical book, the selection of representative passages and the attempt to communicate the quality of a poet, is the most boring part of the reviewer's business, but it is an absolutely essential part. The reader should be given a chance to judge whether or not he would be interested in the book, irrespective of what the reviewer may think of it; and it is an indispensable discipline for the reviewer, or any critic, to give the gist of the book in his own words. The reviewer, when he sets about this task, is quite likely to find that there is more in the book, or less in it, or something different in it, than he imagined when he first went through it. If the author is incoherent or woolly, the critic will be able to detect it. If the reviewer is incompetent, his incompetence will be evident to his more acute readers when they find out he cannot tell them what is in the book."

Edmund Wilson, "The Literary Worker's Polonius"

Posted April 10, 12:28 PM

April 9, 2007

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"I laid out the cards and began playing solitaire. Jim sketched. I thought of Uncle Roger, who was footing the bill: what I had said to him that day eight years ago, when he promised to give me my freedom and asked me what I was going to do with it? I'd said I wanted to stay out late and eat whatever I liked anytime I wanted to. And I wanted to meet people I hadn't been introduced to. And I wanted to guess right...

"I looked around the Prefecture in the morning light. It was cold; I shivered. The paraffin stove that was supposed to heat the room had gone out and smelled awful. Everyone concerned was asleep; Jim, the Corsicans, even the guard was dozing. Was I fulfilling my childhood dreams? Well, I'd certainly stayed out late and eaten what I liked. And I was meeting people I hadn't been introduced to. That was for sure. In at least two cases--Jim and Crazy Eyes--I had guessed right.

"I was now more or less in jail.

"Uncle Roger, I thought, you can't say I'm not trying."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted April 09, 12:27 PM

TT: Off duty

I'm severely frazzled from excessive deadline-related activity, so I'm taking the week off from the blog (except for the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings). Instead of lucubrating about the world of art, I plan to spend a few days unwinding at one of my Secure Undisclosed Locations. E-mail received in my absence will go unanswered until my return, so don't bug me!

Our Girl has promised to keep the ball rolling for the remainder of the week. Inundate her with encouraging words, please.

See you next Monday.

Posted April 09, 12:26 PM

TT: Almanac

"It is true that of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age."

Thornton Wilder, The Woman of Andros

Posted April 09, 12:25 PM

April 6, 2007

TT: Bilge on Broadway

Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to a pair of East Coast shows. The first is a new Broadway musical, The Pirate Queen. The second is a Baltimore revival, CenterStage's production of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! The first is horrible, the second terrific:

Has there ever really been a musical so bad that it was funny? (I mean an actual show, not "Springtime for Hitler.") "Taboo" and "In My Life" both began promisingly, but my sense of humor was swamped by their sheer awfulness well before intermission. "The Pirate Queen," on the other hand, is a gift that keeps on giving: It starts out dumb, then gets dumber, and at no time does anything other than preposterous ever take place on stage or in the orchestra pit. If it were somewhat shorter, it might actually be worth seeing, but at two and a half hours, I can't recommend it in good faith to anyone who isn't (A) a full-fledged hit-me-again masochist and/or (B) deaf....

"Ah, Wilderness!" is an unabashedly autobiographical play about a turn-of-the-century Irish-American family whose members include a charismatic patriarch, a sensitive young author-in-the-making and a drunken uncle. Any resemblances to "Long Day's Journey into Night" are strictly intentional--only this time O'Neill made it come out happy, portraying the Connecticut childhood he wished he'd had instead of the one that scarred him for life. Yet there's nothing phony about the warmth of "Ah, Wilderness!" Like Thornton Wilder in "Our Town," O'Neill wasn't afraid to show us the shadows with which his not-so-imaginary New England town is dappled, and the result is a nostalgic yet emotionally complex comedy that is at once open-hearted and open-eyed.

"Ah, Wilderness!" requires four sets and a biggish cast, making it hard to produce on a shoestring and meaning that it doesn't get done nearly as often as it should. That's why I made a point of going down to Baltimore last weekend to see CenterStage's revival, which I'm pleased to say is tip-top. Some of the acting is too broad, but all of it works, and Tom Bloom couldn't be bettered as Nat Miller, the small-town newspaper editor who isn't quite as provincial as he looks. Mr. Bloom is genial yet strong--you never feel that he's coasting on his charm--and his performance gives the play a hard core of credibility....

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of today's Journal or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column, plus the rest of the paper's extensive arts coverage. (If you're already a subscriber, the column is here.)

Posted April 06, 12:24 PM

TT: Almanac

"Who can refute a sneer?"

William Paley, Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy

Posted April 06, 12:23 PM

April 5, 2007

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)
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Talk Radio (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• 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)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too complicated for children, reviewed here, closes May 12)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

Posted April 05, 12:22 PM

TT: Almanac

"With Beethoven the parts of the composition were defined by means of harmony. With Satie and Webern they are defined by means of time lengths. The question of structure is so basic, and it is so important to be in agreement about it, that one must now ask: Was Beethoven right or are Webern and Satie right? I answer immediately and unequivocally, Beethoven was in error, and his influence, which has been extensive as it is lamentable, has been deadening to the art of music."

John Cage (quoted in Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham)

Posted April 05, 12:21 PM

April 4, 2007

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"At eleven o'clock that night, in one of my dangerous moods--midnight black, excited and deeply dreading (as opposed to one of my beautiful midnight-blue ones, calm but deeply excited), my nerves strung taut to singing, I arrived alone at the Ritz, only to discover all over again what a difficult thing this was to do. I tended to lose my balance at the exact moment that the doorman opened the cab door and stood by in his respectful attitude of 'waiting.' I have even been known to fall out of the cab by reaching and pushing against the handle at the same time that he did. But this time, however, I had disciplined myself to remain quite, quite still, sitting on my hands until the door was opened for me. Then, burrowing into my handbag, which suddenly looked like the Black Hole of Calcutta, to find the fare, I discovered that I needed a light. A light was switched on. I needed more than a light, I needed a match or a torch or special glasses, for I simply couldn't find my change purse, and when I did (lipstick rolling on the floor, compact open and everything spilt--passport, mirror, the works) I couldn't find the right change. We were now all three of us, driver, doorman and I, waiting to see what I was going to do next. I took out some bills, counted them three times in the dark until I was absolutely certain that I had double the amount necessary, and then pressed it on the driver, eagerly apologizing for over-tipping. Overcome with shyness I nodded briefly in the direction of the doorman and raced him to the entrance. I just won. Panting and by now in an absolute ecstasy of panic I flung myself at the revolving doors and let them spin me through. Thus I gained access to the Ritz. I had once seen a man in the taxi in front of mine jump out and with a lordly wave at the doorman say something like, 'Pay him for me Guillaume, my good man,' and stroll inside. I have never arrived there alone since, without devoutly wishing I was sharing that cab."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted April 04, 12:19 PM

OGIC: Sally Jay is a wild man

Terry's right, I love, love, love The Dud Avocado and couldn't be more pleased that a new edition will soon be out and graced with his introduction (not to mention a perfect cover).

I first discovered Elaine Dundy's novel and its grand, green heroine Sally Jay Gorce--wisecracking, world-wandering descendent of Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer--a couple of years out of college when I was working in New York. My friend Elaine, the editor I assisted at my first job and a reader of impeccable taste, had recommended it. I borrowed her copy, brought it along on a train ride to Albany one weekend, and simply inhaled it. (There's something about discovering a wonderful book on a train trip that draws it even nearer and dearer to my heart. Dawn Powell's Turn, Magic Wheel is another. I really must contrive to ride on more trains.) I was probably around Sally Jay's age, or only a shade older, at the time. To read of her misadventures now, with the perspective of more years and greater experience, is still to be charmed and hugely amused; but it's also one of those stories of youth that makes me feel I wouldn't be 20 again for the world.

But Sally Jay works it all out, and here's to her and to Terry. By way of toasting their impending arrival, a week's worth of tantalizing Dud Avocado fortune cookies starts...right now.

Posted April 04, 12:19 PM

TT: Not-so-trivial trivia

I went to Baltimore last weekend to see CenterStage's revival of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!. The program was full of fascinating information about the play and its author, but it neglected to mention one irresistible piece of trivia for which I unfortunately couldn't find room in my review of the production, which will be appearing in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

Anybody who knows anything about American theater knows that George M. Cohan, Broadway's very own Yankee Doodle Dandy, starred in the original 1933 Broadway production of Ah, Wilderness! It was the first time Cohan had ever acted in a straight play of any significance, and by all accounts he was terrific--but he wasn't the only star of the show. Who played his sixteen-year-old son, the painfully earnest writer-in-the-making that O'Neill based on himself when young?

The answer, I'm staggered to say, is Elisha Cook, Jr., the very same character actor who later moved to Hollywood and spent the rest of his long life playing weirdos and misfits in such well-remembered films as The Big Sleep, Born to Kill, The Killing, The Maltese Falcon, One-Eyed Jacks, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Rosemary's Baby, and Shane.

What's more, it turns out Cook was really, really good in Ah, Wilderness! According to Brooks Atkinson, the veteran drama critic who reviewed Ah, Wilderness! for the New York Times:

As Richard, Elisha Cook Jr. has strength as well as pathos. Mr. Cook can draw more out of mute adolescence than any other young actor on our stage.

Aren't you glad you know that now? I sure am.

Posted April 04, 12:17 PM

TT: Almanac

"The essence of performance is its 'now-ness'--no mind, no memory. Just that brief time when one has the chance to be whole, when seemingly disconnected threads of one's being are woven and intertwined into the complete present. No other. No past. No future. No mind as an entity distinct from the body. Certainly I've experienced memorable performances--but what made them memorable was extraneous to the dancing."

Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham

Posted April 04, 12:16 PM

April 3, 2007

TT: Surprise, OGIC!

New York Review Books has a blog called A Different Stripe whose proprietress made an announcement the other day that I've been meaning to pass along:

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, with Terry Teachout's eloquent introduction, will be available in June. Until then, you can see what he said about it in 1996, when he listed it as one of his favorite comedic novels. And his partner at About Last Night has also been a major advocate of the book.

The funny thing is that I'd forgotten the piece in question, in which I also singled out for praise Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution, Bruce Marshall's Father Malachy's Miracle, Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King, and Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jamison, great comic novels all. I guess that's what happens when you write too much!

The bottom line, however, is that The Dud Avocado will be back in print in June, at which time you can see for yourself what I had to say about it. (The cover art of the new edition, by the way, is very sexy.) I proofread the galleys of my introduction a couple of days ago, and I think I got it right, if I do say so myself.

I'd wanted to surprise Our Girl, who loves The Dud Avocado at least as much as I do, but now that the whistle's been blown, I might as well 'fess up in public. Play your cards right, Girl, and I'll see about getting you an advance copy.

As for the rest of you, go here and you can order it now, which I strongly suggest.

Posted April 03, 12:15 PM

TT: Almanac

"To have an affair with a man, and one's very first affair at that, just because he picks you up under rather romantic circumstances on the Champs-Élysées, takes you to the Ritz and things, and above all, because you're impressed with the fact that he has a wife and a mistress already, what could be more predictable? Tourist Second-Year Disorganized."

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Posted April 03, 12:14 PM

April 2, 2007

TT: Present and accounted for

I recently received in the mail an advance copy of the Bill Charlap Trio's upcoming CD, a live album recorded at the Village Vanguard. (Blue Note will be releasing it in May.) I happened to be on hand for one of the sets taped for inclusion in this album. Sometimes the heat of the moment can fool you into thinking that a live performance is better than it is, so I was delighted, though not surprised, to hear that this one was every bit as good as I'd remembered.

I've lived in New York for a quarter-century and spent a considerable number of my nights on the town, so it's not surprising that I've been present at the creation of a fair number of noteworthy live albums. After scanning my memory and my record shelves, I came up with six others: Bill Frisell's East/West, Jim Hall's Magic Meeting, Nancy LaMott's Live at Tavern on the Green, Marian McPartland's Reprise: Marian McPartland's Hickory House Trio, the John Pizzarelli Trio's Live at Birdland, and the Maria Schneider Orchestra's Live at the Jazz Standard: Days of Wine and Roses.

All were memorable occasions, though Nancy's last engagement at Tavern on the Green was and is understandably special, as I explained in a Wall Street Journal column published in 2005:

"Live at Tavern on the Green" is the only recording of any of Nancy's live shows to have been released commercially. It was taped at her final public performance. She was wearing a wig, having lost her bottle-blond hair to chemotherapy. Seven weeks later, she was dead. Yet her sweetly husky mezzo-soprano voice had somehow remained untouched by the terrible disease that would soon take her away from all the things for which she'd longed, and she sang as if she knew she'd never have another chance. When she was done, the Chestnut Room of New York's Tavern on the Green exploded in rapturous applause. That's how I remember it, anyway, and I was there.

Only a handful of people who came to the Chestnut Room on that crisp October night in 1995 knew how sick Nancy was. I was one of them. I had been among the first journalists to write about her for a national magazine, and we became friends after my piece came out. A year and a half later, I watched her perform for the last time, wondering whether she'd make it to the end of the show.

She did, of course--Nancy was a trouper, never more so than on that night--and my memory has assured me ever since that she sang her best the whole evening long. But memories can sometimes tell you only what you want to hear, and I felt a strange fluttering of nerves as I put the CD on the stereo. I didn't need to worry. The voice on "Live at Tavern on the Green" is the same one I heard countless times in 1994 and 1995, warm, soulful and easy to love.

Such experiences are only available to those who get out often enough, and though this one was especially intense, I treasure many more happy memories of the countless evenings I've spent sitting in nightclubs, concert halls, and theaters, waiting for magic to happen. Not all of them--I could have done without Lennon--but going to bad performances is the price you pay for going to good ones, and most of the time I'm more than glad to pay it.

I got lucky twice in a row last week. On Thursday I went up to Symphony Space to hear the Trio Solisti play Mendelssohn's C Minor Trio, Astor Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango, and Paul Moravec's Tempest Fantasy. Paul, who is a friend of mine, was hosting the concert, the last in a series called The Composers Project of which he was the curator. It suddenly occurred to him late that afternoon that he couldn't very well interview himself, so he called me up and asked if I'd do the honors. I said yes, put on my Black Outfit, and caught the next cab north. We improvised an interview segment that came off quite nicely, after which the Trio Solisti and an excellent clarinetist named Alan Kay played the hell out of Paul's piece.

The next night I went down to Lincoln Center's Allen Room to hear Bill Charlap in a concert called "The Birth of Cool." This time all I had to do was sit and listen, and I was looking forward to doing so, for Charlap is my favorite mainstream jazz pianist. Much of the music, alas, was too miscellaneous to suit me: Charlap's preternaturally tight trio was augmented by a long parade of guest artists who were present to pay tribute to such noted musicians of the past as Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Claude Thornhill, and Lennie Tristano, and Lester Young. I don't much care for that kind of program and wouldn't have gone to this one, which felt at times more like a lecture-recital than a gig, if I'd known what to expect.

Even so, you can't spend an evening with Charlap without hearing something beautiful, and I was greatly taken with a super-slow version of "You Go to My Head" in which Mary Stallings and Frank Wess saluted Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Wess, a celebrated Count Basie alumnus, is eighty-four years old and visibly fragile, and he'd had trouble getting off the ground on the first couple of numbers, but the feathery obbligato he played behind Stallings' Carmen McRae-ish vocal was exquisite, while Charlap's velvety piano accompaniment couldn't have been bettered.

I interviewed Charlap five years ago for a New York Times profile, and he said something to me then that I've never forgotten:

People still worry about innovation and modernity a lot, but the best you can do as an artist, what you ought to do, is be yourself, here and now. If that self is avant-garde, so be it. But maybe who you are is something else. The things I like to listen to have purity and are balanced, and I hope my playing is getting more like that. More honest. Maybe that sounds pretentious, but I think jazz is all about being honest. About being who you are, never playing anything you don't mean. At the same time, you're not there to impress people. You want to get your ego out of the way. The music doesn't need it. It's never just about me. That's the best I can say it--I'm trying to get out of the way. The less I'm in the way, the better the music is going to be and the more fun I'm going to have.

I like that--a lot.

Posted April 02, 12:13 PM

TT: Almanac

"Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment. They don't have to be kept in touch with each other. They are a single propensity that has to keep in touch with itself."

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia

Posted April 02, 12:12 PM

April 1, 2007

ART & POLITICS, RUSSIAN-STYLE

"The only book by a modern Russian novelist to be widely known by name in this country is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a work of nonfiction. Nor are contemporary Russian plays, films, or paintings any more familiar to most of us. If art is the modern-day book of life, then that book, so far as Russia is concerned, is shut tight..."

Posted April 01, 12:21 AM