About Last Night: August 2009 Archives

TT: Almanac

"Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist."

Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

Posted by About Last Night on August 3, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Back to the world

Tonight I attend the third performance of The Letter in Santa Fe. On Tuesday I'll fly back to Connecticut, and the next day I fling myself into the maelstrom of summer theater in New England. Lest you think I exaggerate, I'm seeing Westport Country Playhouse's revival of Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves on Wednesday afternoon and Goodspeed Musicals' Camelot that same night, then writing and filing my review of both shows the following morning. Somewhere along the way, I also hope to get some sleep.

Needless to say, you won't be hearing much from me in this space until next week. I'll leave you in the capable hands of CAAF and OGIC. In the meantime, suffice it to say that my stay in Santa Fe has been magical--the whole thing scarcely seems real--and I can't yet come to grips with the prospect of returning to my regular life. I know I'll enjoy it once I get there, but right now I wish I could stay in Santa Fe long enough to see the last three performances of The Letter. I seem to be developing a taste for taking curtain calls!

More after it happens.

Posted by About Last Night on August 3, 2009 12:27 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Dance upon it

Remember that Charles Dickens anecdote from a while back? The short version: Dickens, a famed writer already in middle age, reconnects by letter with a woman he once loved passionately. She tells him that in the decades since he's seen her she's grown "toothless, fat, old and ugly." He demurs. They meet. He is repelled to find that she is, in truth, toothless, fat, old and ugly. He places a character based on her in the novel he's writing, Little Dorrit. The portrait isn't flattering.

I may be overly sensitive about this story. A couple weeks ago, Lowell and I were watching the recent BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit and at least two or three times when Flora, the character based on Mrs. Winters, came on screen I'd say something like, "SHE TOLD HIM SHE WAS TOOTHLESS, FAT, OLD AND UGLY. WHAT DID HE EXPECT?!?!?"

Now I'm reading the novel for the first time and enjoying it. The BBC adaptation is about 14 hours long, and even at that length they had to elide and compress quite a bit. They did an artful job of it, but still it's a pleasure to have the fullness of psychology and circumstance that Dickens put in there. One of these places of added dimension is in the meeting of the protagonist Arthur Clennam with Flora. In the BBC version, this scene is mostly comic (Flora is played by Ruth Jones, who is wonderfully funny). In the novel, the meeting is comic -- but tinged with a real melancholy. Here is the description of Clennam's feelings when Flora, now "very broad" and simpering, enters the room:

Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam's case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson's money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, 'Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.'

Posted by About Last Night on August 3, 2009 5:24 PM | Permalink

CAAF: Loose notes

"But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall

At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,

Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise."

Philip Larkin, "On Being Twenty-six"

Posted by About Last Night on August 3, 2009 5:32 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Posted by About Last Night on August 4, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: Dorothy goes to Hollywood

dorothy-parker-with%20dog.jpg A great post on TCM's blog examines Dorothy Parker's career as a screenwriter in Hollywood, including the 15 films she worked on with partner Alan Campbell. I knew Parker hated her time in Hollywood -- as the post's writer Moira Finnie notes, friends of Parker's would later tell of coming across her at Hollywood parties crying into her drink, "I used to be a poet" -- but Finnie goes beyond the usual anecdotes to look more particularly at the scripts Parker wrote and doctored. While she finds that "it's difficult to discern a clear thread of Parker's incisive wit" in the scripts, she does unearth sparkles of it here and there:

For Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), Dorothy Parker (without Campbell, apparently), was asked to spruce up the finished Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison script about the wrongly accused factory worker (Robert Cummings) running for his life from the police and the real fifth columnists. A memorable scene featuring some vexatious circus freaks debating whether or not they should hide the fugitives (a reluctant Priscilla Lane and Cummings), the dialogue among the romantically minded Bearded Lady, the argumentative Siamese Twins and the belligerent dwarf was written by Parker, to Hitchcock's delight. Parker was even persuaded to appear in the film as a passenger in a scene with Hitchcock in a car passing by as the desperate kidnap victim Lane struggled with Cummings by the side of the road (seen above). "My," Dorothy's character murmurs, "they must be terribly in love."

Related: At Jacket Copy, what Parker told the Paris Review about her time in Hollywood.

Posted by About Last Night on August 4, 2009 12:33 PM | Permalink

CAAF: The classics

Re-reading Michael Schmidt's The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets. It's a fascinating book -- although in places it can read like 25 pounds of learning in a five-pound sack. A hazard of classical scholarship, I'd guess. A hazard of my own degree in, er, pop scholarship? I cannot read the following sentences without flashing on the linked-to image:

Orpheus married Eurydice on his return from the heroic journey with Jason and the Argonauts, having had sufficient adventure by then to want a quiet life. He and his bride settled in Thrace among the wild Cicones.

Please tell me I'm not the only one!

Posted by About Last Night on August 4, 2009 2:01 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"You accept certain unlovely things about yourself and manage to live with them. The atonement for such an acceptance is that you make allowances for others--that you cleanse yourself of the sin of self-righteousness."

Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront

Posted by About Last Night on August 5, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Mike Nichols and Elaine May appear as the mystery guests on What's My Line? on June 26, 1960:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Posted by About Last Night on August 5, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

CAAF: I am a Badger

My 20th high-school reunion is this weekend, and I'm rushing around this morning packing my bags for the trip back to Wisconsin. I think you're supposed to dread class reunions but other than wishing my bangs were a half-inch longer, that I wasn't mid-breakout, and that I had, um, exercised more diligently for the past 20 or so years, I'm looking forward to it in a pretty uncomplicated way: Friends! Home! Bars! Cheese! I hardly get back to my hometown, Appleton, these days -- my parents moved from there when I was 19 -- but it's still a main place with me: Not home exactly (that's the bungalow with Lowell), but an epicenter.

The novel I'm writing is set in a sort-of Appleton; a city both like and unlike the place where I grew up. It's strange because I inhabit that town imaginatively almost every day, but in other fundamental ways I no longer know the other city, the living city, as well as I wish I did -- both because of what I've forgotten and because the city itself has grown, changed, moved on. And the faux Appleton that's built up in my head is pervasive (persuasive?). This morning I was thinking about where I'd get coffee on this trip; I'll be staying at a hotel downtown, and I thought, "Oh, you'll just walk down to that little bakery down the street." Then I remembered that the bakery doesn't exist; I made it up.

In honor of the trip, and of homelands that both are and aren't, here are two parts from James Tate's "I Am a Finn," taken from his book Distance from Loved Ones, which you should have along with his selected poems (which is to say, this is a longish excerpt; please don't be angry with me, Mr. Tate!):

I am standing in the post office, about
to mail a package back to Minnesota, to my family.
I am a Finn. My name is Kasteheimi (Dewdrop).

Mikael Agricola (1510-1557) created the Finnish language.
He knew Luther and translated the New Testament.
When I stop by the Classé Café for a cheeseburger

no one suspects that I am a Finn.
I gaze at the dimestore reproductions of Lautrec
On the greasy walls, at the punk lovers afraid

to show their quivery emotions, secure
in the knowledge that my grandparents really did
emigrate from Finland in 1910--why

is everyone leaving Finland, hundreds of
thousands to Michigan and Minnesota, and now Australia?
...

But I should be studying for my exam.
I wonder if Dean will celebrate with me tonight,
Assuming I pass. Finnish literature

really came alive in the 1860s
Here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
no one cares that I am a Finn.

They've never even heard of Frans Eemil Sillanpää,
Winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature.
As a Finn, this infuriates me.

Photo from Wiener Fest 2009 in Whitelaw, WI. Taken by Sarah Filzen.

Posted by About Last Night on August 5, 2009 11:53 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There are only two roads that lead to something like human happiness. They are marked by the words: love and achievement."

Theodor Reik, A Psychologist Looks at Love

Posted by About Last Night on August 6, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on August 6, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Lieblingized

A. J. Liebling is making me laugh out loud, a lot. His not-so-funny subject is wartime in Europe, specifically his brief life on a tanker that brought him from England to America in December 1941. His shipmates are a gaggle of Norwegians. He figures the chances of a German torpedo attack on them to be about 90 to one. What nobody's expecting is the news they hear on December 7:

There is a difference of thirteen and a half hours between the time in Hawaii and Great Britain, and I was asleep before Grung, the radioman, picked up the first bulletin about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I heard the news when I went up on the bridge next morning. Bull, the third officer, pumped my hand and said, "We both allies now!" It felt more natural to be a belligerent on a belligerent ship than that anomalous creature, a neutral among belligerent friends.

Liebling's observations of day-to-day human behavior during wartime are touching, even heartening. He's drawn to the most life-goes-on strains of men's responses to existential threat. A pilot on his ship who lost seven motorboats at Dunkirk remembers the port best for the motorbike races the soldiers there ran and bet on. The exigencies and uncertainties of war make people only more vividly themselves.

And what selves the Norwegian shipmen are. There's the steward who's keeping clear of schoolteachers:

The fellow, who was wearing a white jacket, was obviously a steward. He was of medium size but had long arms, so the jacket sleeves ended midway between elbow and wrist, baring the tattooing on his wide forearms. On the right arm he had a sailor and his lass above the legend, in English, "True Love." The design on the left arm was a full-rigged ship with the inscription "Hilse fra Yokohama," which means "Greetings from Yokohama." His head was large and bald except for two tufts of red hair at the temples, looking like a circus clown's wig. He had a bulging forehead and a flat face with small eyes, a turned-up nose, and a wide mouth. As soon as I got my breath, I said, "Passenger," and he took me in charge with a professional steward's manner, which, I afterward learned, he had acquired while working for a fleet of bauxite freighters that often carried tourists. The bauxite freighters had operated out of a port the steward called Noolians, and most of the tourists had been vacationing schoolteachers from the Middle West. Fearing emotional involvement with a schoolteacher, he had switched to tankers. "Tankers is safe," he said. "No schoolteachers." His name was Harry Larsen.

And the captain of few words:

At meals with Captain Petersen I had plenty of time for eating, because there was not much conversation. Once he said, as he began on his first plate of cabbage soup, "I have an uncle in New York who has been fifty-two years with the Methodist Book Concern." Twenty minutes later, having finished his second helping of farina pudding, he said, "He came over in a windyammer." On another occasion he said, "We had a Chinaman on the ship once. When we came to Shanghai he couldn't talk to the other Chinamen." After an interlude during which he ate three plates of lobscouse, a stew made of leftover meats and vegetables, he explained, "He came from another part of China." And once, taking a long look at the shipowner's portrait, he said, "I went to see an art gallery near Bordeaux." After eating a large quantity of dried codfish cooked with raisins, cabbage, and onions, he added, "Some of the frames were that wide," indicating with his hands how impressively wide they were. Once, in an effort to make him talk, I asked him, "How would you say, 'Please pass me the butter, Mr. Petersen,' in Norwegian?" He said, "We don't use 'please' or 'mister.' It sounds too polite. And you never have to say 'pass me' something in a Norwegian house, because the people force food on you, so if you said 'pass' they would think they forgot something and their feelings would be hurt. The word for butter is smor."

"Westbound Tanker" is collected in Just Enough Liebling. I'm happy to be only halfway through it. I got onto Liebling after reading James Marcus's interview with Pete Hamill, who edited the new Library of America edition of Liebling. (If you're reading The House of Mirth, as you should, you'll be way ahead of me on this.)

Posted by About Last Night on August 6, 2009 1:50 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early."

Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm

Posted by About Last Night on August 7, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Can jazz be saved?

Next to nothing has been written in the print media about "Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National Survey," a recent study conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts which shows, among other alarming things, that the median age of the audience for live jazz performances in America skyrocketed from twenty-nine in 1982 to forty-six in 2008. This is, to put it mildly, very bad news for jazz musicians, and I've taken a closer look at what it might mean in my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal.

Is jazz dying of old age? If so, is its demise inevitable--or can it be reversed? Pick up a copy of tomorrow's Journal and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 7, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Double exposure

No sooner did I come back from the road than I returned to it: I saw two shows on Wednesday, Westport Country Playhouse's How the Other Half Loves and Goodspeed Musicals' Camelot, and in today's Wall Street Journal I give them both thumbs-up reviews. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Thanks to the success of Matthew Warchus' recent Old Vic staging of "The Norman Conquests," Alan Ayckbourn is hot on Broadway--at last. But he's been hot in America's regional theaters for a whole lot longer, and nowhere more so than at Westport Country Playhouse, which is currently presenting its third Ayckbourn revival in three consecutive seasons. Like its predecessors, "How the Other Half Loves," the 1969 play that was Ayckbourn's second commercial hit, is directed by John Tillinger and stars Geneva Carr, Cecilia Hart and Paxton Whitehead. "How the Other Half Loves" hasn't been seen on Broadway since 1971, and judging by this explosively fizzy production, I'd say it's well past time for a return engagement.

"How the Other Half Loves" was the first of Mr. Ayckbourn's "conceptual" comedies, in which a near-surrealistic piece of stagecraft puts a new spin on a more or less traditional farce plot. Here we have two different couples whose separate living rooms are portrayed in the same stage space (you can tell who lives where by the furnishings). Like most of the playwright's sleight-of-hand narrative tricks, this one is harder to explain than it is to grasp when you see it played out before your eyes, but try to imagine a who's-sleeping-with-whom farce whose first and second acts are performed simultaneously and you'll get the idea....

It's been sixteen years since "Camelot" was last seen in New York, and none of the show's three Broadway revivals managed to stay open for more than a few weeks. Why has the 1960 Alan Jay Lerner-Frederick Loewe musical about the legend of King Arthur, whose original production ran for 873 performances, failed to establish itself as a Broadway perennial? Don't ask me: "Camelot" is a charmer, not as fine as "My Fair Lady" but more than satisfying in its own right, and Goodspeed Musicals' elegant new small-scale production, ably directed by Rob Ruggiero, makes a strong case for its continuing viability.

Most of the same production team that was responsible for Goodspeed's superlative 2007 revival of "1776" has come back for "Camelot." Michael Schweikardt, the set designer, has brought off yet another feat of creative compression, squeezing "Camelot" onto the shallow stage of the company's 130-year-old riverside theater so efficiently as to create the illusion that the 398-seat house is twice as large as it is...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 7, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

PLAY

How the Other Half Loves (Westport Country Playhouse, Westport, Conn., closes Aug. 15). If The Norman Conquests whetted your appetite for the blacker-than-it-looks comedy of Alan Ayckbourn, this fizzy regional revival of his 1969 who's-sleeping-with-whom farce about three unhappily married couples will fill the bill with ease. Catch it while you can (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 8, 2009 10:22 PM | Permalink

CD

Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall--The Private Collection: Mussorgsky and Liszt (RCA Red Seal). Stupendously vivid performances of the Liszt B Minor Sonata and Pictures at an Exhibition (the latter in Horowitz's own beefed-up transcription) recorded live at Carnegie Hall in 1948 and 1949 and released here for the first time. Connoisseurs of transcendental virtuosity need not hesitate (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 8, 2009 10:23 PM | Permalink

BOOK

Richard Stark, The Seventh/The Handle/The Rare Coin Score (University of Chicago, $14 each). Three more titles in the University of Chicago's uniform edition of the out-of-print Parker novels of Richard Stark (alias the late, lamented Donald E. Westlake) are out this week. All are lean, laconic, tough-minded installments in the endlessly rereadable saga of the ultra--professional burglar you hate to like. Nine down, six to go (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 8, 2009 10:31 PM | Permalink

DVD

Film Noir Classic Collection, Vol. 1 (Warner Home Video, five discs). Having just written the libretto for an opera noir, I'm struck by how many of the people I met along the way knew little or nothing of the Hollywood film genre on which The Letter was based. If you're one of them, the best way to get up to speed is to acquire this immaculately chosen box set, which contains five classics of film noir, John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy, Edward Dymytryk's Murder, My Sweet (a film version of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely), Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past, and Robert Wise's The Set-Up. It's all here: the chumps, the dames, the hard-edged backchat, the shadow-stained cinematography, the fear and hopelessness, enacted by the likes of Jane Greer, Sterling Hayden, Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan, and Audrey Totter. Treat yourself to a long weekend of despair (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 9, 2009 9:19 AM | Permalink

NOVEL

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor. This 1948 novel about life on a Florida air base nine months before D-Day won the Pulitzer Prize, then slipped through the cracks and has yet to resurface--yet it's by far the best American novel written by a World War II veteran, the only one that can stand up to direct comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. Tough-minded and stoic, richly detailed yet tautly controlled, Cozzens' portrait of men and women preparing for war is an unrecognized classic of twentieth-century fiction. Still in print, amazingly enough (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 9, 2009 9:20 AM | Permalink

GALLERY

Milton Avery (DC Moore Gallery, 724 Fifth Ave., up through Oct. 3). Paintings, watercolors, and drawings by the American Matisse, a witty, lyrical modernist whose deceptively simple style influenced Mark Rothko (who called him "a great poet-inventor") and the color-field artists. Avery never quite passed the approved-by-MoMA test, and it's been years since New Yorkers last had an opportunity to see a large-scale exhibition of his work, so this gallery show is likely to be a must (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 9, 2009 9:21 AM | Permalink

DVD

Colorado Territory. In 1949 Raoul Walsh, one of the all-time great action directors, remade High Sierra, the 1941 proto-noir crime film that turned Humphrey Bogart into a star, retrofitting it as a western and replacing Bogart with Joel McCrea. Unlikely as it may sound, Walsh actually managed to improve on the original (which he also directed) the second time around. Like High Sierra, Colorado Territory is a laconic portrait of a lonely, aging gunman at the end of his tether, and the fact that McCrea, the quintessential white-hatted good guy, is playing against type adds to the film's emotional complexity. This near-forgotten classic has just been released on DVD for the first time as part of the Warner Archive reissue series. It's a must (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 9, 2009 10:14 AM | Permalink

CAN JAZZ BE SAVED?

"Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. But there's no sense in pretending that it didn't happen, or that contemporary jazz is capable of appealing to the same kind of mass audience that thrilled to the big bands of the swing era. And it is precisely because jazz is now widely viewed as a high-culture art form that its makers must start to grapple with the same problems of presentation, marketing and audience development as do symphony orchestras, drama companies and art museums..."

Posted by About Last Night on August 9, 2009 10:10 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He recognized that common, much litigated type of human disagreement in which each party to it insists on reducing his opponent's position or contention to its bare essentials--yes or no; did he, or did he not, still beat his wife?--while asserting the right to state his own position or contention with every circumstantial distinction preserved. High indignation and conflicting strong senses of righteousness resulted."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted by About Last Night on August 10, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: In and out

I zipped through New York over the weekend, sticking around just long enough to collect, open, and answer a month's worth of accumulated snail mail. Today Mrs. T and I head north to the Berkshires, where we'll be launching a three-week New England summer-theater tour by seeing Shakespeare & Company's Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage Company's A Streetcar Named Desire. Needless to say, I wish we were taking a month-long trip to nowhere instead, but even when I'm worn out--which I am--I still enjoy spending my nights on the aisle.

I doubt I'll be doing a whole lot of blogging this week, but I did roll over the top-five and "Out of the Past" modules of the right-hand column, so you might want to take a look at all the latest picks.

In addition, I'd like to draw your attention to Live 2.0, a new site launched by Jim McCarthy, the founder of Goldstar Events, a California-based company that sells half-price tickets to live performances in major cities throughout America. Live 2.0 is a blog-like Web-based magazine in which Jim and his contributors write about various aspects of the vexing problem of attracting young people to live performances. I met Jim two years ago when I wrote a column for The Wall Street Journal about Goldstar, and I was intrigued by his hard-headed approach to audience development. We kept in touch thereafter, and Jim interviewed me for Live 2.0 when I was on the West Coast a couple of months ago, partly about The Letter and partly about the challenges currently facing the classical-music business. You can read the interview by going here.

Regular readers of this blog and my "Sightings" column for the Journal will already be familiar with the line of argument advanced in my Live 2.0 interview, which is closely related to what I had to say in last Saturday's column about the future of jazz in America. Even so, you may find it interesting to read about how The Letter was specifically designed to encourage media-savvy under-40 types to take an interest in opera.

I especially like this exchange:

If you could give one piece of advice to everyone in the opera business, what would it be?
Put a sign in every office that reads as follows: MOST PEOPLE THINK THEY DON'T LIKE OPERA. YOU WON'T CHANGE THEIR MINDS BY TELLING THEM THEY SHOULD.

I still think that's good advice.

Posted by About Last Night on August 10, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: First out of the box

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out on December 2, just got a thumbs-up review--with a big red star--in the latest issue of Publishers Weekly:

It may seem odd to speak of someone of Louis Armstrong's stature as needing recuperation, but his popularity has long been held against him by jazz purists and other music critics. Teachout brings a fresh perspective that, while candid about the ways "Pops" could hold himself back artistically, celebrates his ambition and capacity for renewal. The other knock against Armstrong is that if white Americans loved him so much, he must have been an "Uncle Tom," a notion Teachout neatly demolishes. While Armstrong was keenly aware of the social realities of his time, his relentless work ethic was fueled by an equally intense optimism. (His patience, however, was not infinite; he publicly criticized President Eisenhower as having "no guts" for failing to enforce desegregation--one of the few celebrities who could be so outspoken without suffering substantial backlash.) Teachout's portrait reminds us why we fell in love with Armstrong's music in the first place....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 10, 2009 7:56 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"He understood well enough that he belonged to that undistinguished majority of men for whom it should no doubt be a mortification that work was an end in itself, not a necessary detested means to make a living, certainly not a shrewd enterprise whose motive and hope was some blissful future state of living without work. His bliss was here and now; there was no pastime like the press of business."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted by About Last Night on August 11, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

OGIC: Reader redux

Quick, who's your all-time favorite writer? When was the last time you read one of his or her books? Last weekend a friend who'd started The Portrait of a Lady on my enthusiastic recommendation said she was enjoying the book, and it struck me that I haven't read it myself in 20 years--roughly half my lifetime, and most of my adulthood. Soon I realized that I haven't read any James novel in three or four years, at least. What am I even talking about when I call him my favorite writer? That was a different person who read most of those books.

This evening I picked up Portrait again and read a few pages. The last time I read anything James wrote before 1886 must have been fifteen years ago. If the later fiction is what you're used to, the difference is startling. The 1880 Portrait (my edition is from the revised 1907 New York Edition) has the beginning of an essay:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not--some people of course never do,--the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime.

As if creatures of delicate sensibilities, we're lowered into the story gently and the reassuring presence of the narrator never feels very far away. Later, James will omit the overt layer of narration and plunge us into the midst of things. As in The Wings of the Dove.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

In short, the first pages make it clear that the James of The Portrait of a Lady is not any longer the James I know. Not after spending years in graduate school poring over The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and "In the Cage."

So who was it who got hooked on that other James? Let's have a look at what she underlined.

It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even of instruction.

The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering.

She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.

The apparent answer: a very young female person--one of a million--who identified in a hopeful way with Isabel Archer, "her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals," and all. (At least through the first half of the novel; the underlining ceases soon after Osmond starts really closing in.) No more surprising is the lessened sympathy I feel for Isabel now, not to mention for the slightly absurd 20-year-old who thought she might be like her.

Posted by About Last Night on August 11, 2009 11:18 AM | Permalink

OGIC: A laugh and a pang

This is awesome.

Donald E. Westlake, you are missed.

That is all.

Posted by About Last Night on August 11, 2009 9:58 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"There never could be a man so brave that he would not sometime, or in the end, turn part or all coward; or so wise that he was not, from beginning to end, part ass if you knew where to look; or so good that nothing at all about him was despicable."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted by About Last Night on August 12, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

The opening scene of Tom Stoppard's 1990 film version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directed by Stoppard and starring Gary Oldman and Tim Roth:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Posted by About Last Night on August 12, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

DVD

The Last Days of Disco. The Criterion Collection has finally brought out a DVD of Whit Stillman's darkly witty 1998 film about the messy love lives of a group of young New Yorkers who frequent a club not unlike Studio 54. Yes, it's funny, and yes, it's an unsparing critique of contemporary American culture--one that's all the more effective for having been played for laughs. In light of Stillman's prolonged and inexplicable post-Disco silence, the reappearance on home video of the last and best installment of his indie-flick trilogy about the sexual revolution and its discontents is cause for rejoicing. What I'd really like is for him to make another movie, but since that doesn't seem to be in the cards, I'll settle for revisiting this one (TT).

Posted by About Last Night on August 12, 2009 6:47 PM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Camelot (musical, G, closes Sept. 19, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN WESTPORT, CONN.:
• How the Other Half Loves (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on August 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Lord Acton stopped on a half truth; and that, the less important half. Power corrupts all right. If you have enough of it, it may, in the end, absolutely corrupt you; but you only need the least little bit, a modicum of power, the power of a staff officer, to do a good job corrupting other people."

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Posted by About Last Night on August 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Brief encounters

Massachusetts in a nutshell: two towns, two shows, two days. Today I write and file Friday's Wall Street Journal drama column, eat breakfast, check out of my home away from home in Lenox, then drive back to Connecticut and Mrs. T.

I'm still too tired from my opera-related adventures to do much more than stick to the schedule, but on Wednesday I managed to work in a side trip to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, where I saw Dove/O'Keeffe: Circles of Influence. I like Georgia O'Keeffe well enough and love Arthur Dove passionately, and nothing I saw at the Clark caused me to modify either of those opinions. (O'Keeffe's paintings are too pretty for my taste.) Most of the Doves on display at the Clark are a bit less than his best, but "Fog Horns" is a masterpiece of synesthesia, and I fiercely coveted a triptych of tiny gouaches dating from the early Forties.

I also took a brisk stroll through the Clark's permanent collection, which I find pleasing but not especially exciting, though it contains one show-stopper, Turner's "Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water." This is a painting worth seeing as often as possible, and since I generally make it up to Williamstown once a year, that's about how often I see it. The older I get, the more intensely Turner delights me, which undoubtedly says more about me than it does about him.

339933.JPG.jpeg I also got my first look at "Sleigh Ride," a well-known painting by Winslow Homer that for some reason had previously escaped my attention. I can't think why--it has an arrestingly modern quality of the kind that rarely fails to catch my eye. All I can tell you is that it leaped off the wall at me yesterday morning, and that I'm still thinking about it as I write these words.

Would that I had more to report about my two-day stay in Massachusetts, but you'll have to look at tomorrow's drama column to see what I thought of Twelfth Night and A Streetcar Named Desire, and beyond that I didn't contrive to cram in any additional art-related experiences. Man cannot live by beauty alone. Sometimes he needs to sleep late.

Posted by About Last Night on August 13, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot (special memorial tribute to Les Paul)

Les Paul and Mary Ford appear on CBS' Omnibus on October 23, 1953, to explain multitrack recording. The host is Alistair Cooke:

Paul's New York Times obit is here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 13, 2009 5:40 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one's office for a job."

Tennessee Williams (quoted in Kenneth Tynan, Profiles)

Posted by About Last Night on August 14, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: What's up, Bard?

Direct from the Berkshires to The Wall Street Journal, today's drama column is devoted to Shakespeare & Company's Twelfth Night and Barrington Stage's A Streetcar Named Desire, both of which are excellent. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Did William Shakespeare invent screwball comedy? Not exactly, but "Twelfth Night," among the dizziest and most farce-like of his romantic comedies, bears a definite family resemblance to the damn-the-torpedoes craziness of such classic examples of the genre as "Bringing Up Baby" and "The Lady Eve." Nor does Jonathan Croy's staging for Shakespeare & Company seek to paper over the similarities. Instead, Mr. Croy and his cast revel in them, hurtling through "Twelfth Night" with knockabout abandon and flinging laughter in all directions. No matter how rough a day you may have had at the office, a visit to Lenox to see this production will send you home with an ear-to-ear smile on your face.

While this is the first time that Mr. Croy has directed a mainstage play for Shakespeare & Company, he starred in the company's brilliant versions of Tom Stoppard's "Rough Crossing" (2007) and Charles Morey's "The Ladies Man" (2008), and his "Twelfth Night" crackles with the lunatic energy of those full-tilt farces. I don't know when I've seen anything funnier than his staging of the swordfight between Viola (Merritt Janson) and the fatuous Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ryan Winkles), a piece of slapstick so precisely calculated and perfectly realized that it comes close to stopping the show. Almost as ludicrous is the near-demented lust with which the exquisite Countess Olivia (Elizabeth Raetz) chases the hapless Viola (who is disguised as a boy) all over the stage, eventually nailing her with an eye-popping kiss that clearly causes its recipient to reconsider the strength of her commitment to heterosexuality.

At the same time, much of the strength of this production lies in the transparent simplicity of its presentation. The open Elizabethan-style stage of the Founders' Theatre is decorated with nothing more than six pennants and a catwalk. The costumes are colorful and traditional. No tricky directorial concepts are sprayed over the text--Mr. Croy is content to let Shakespeare be Shakespeare--and the actors respond by giving of their best, with results that are not merely funny but also emotionally true....

Now that I've seen two productions of "A Streetcar Named Desire" directed by women, I've come to the belated conclusion that the play makes perfect dramatic sense--when a woman is at the helm. Julianne Boyd, who directed Barrington Stage Company's new revival of Tennessee Williams' best-known play, has taken the same straightforward approach that Bonnie J. Monte brought to the version that she mounted for the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey last season, with equally rewarding results. Blanche DuBois, not Stanley Kowalski, is the star of Ms. Boyd's show, and Marin Mazzie, like Laila Robins before her, gives us a Blanche you can believe in, a middle-aged woman who knows that she's still sexy but can't accept the earthy consequences of her fleshly longings. Christopher Innvar is no less believable as Stanley, playing him not as Superman in a bowling shirt but as the kind of traveling-salesman type you could imagine meeting in a bar...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 14, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Good enough to eat

A friend sent me this snapshot of an exhibit in Barcelona's Chocolate Museum. I think Satchmo might have appreciated it!

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: In the details

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which comes out in December, is about to go to the printer. This means that I still have a few more days in which to make changes in the text--though not large or frivolous ones. The Unwritten Law of Last-Minute Fixes is that they should only be made to correct actual factual errors, so I've been rereading Pops with a gimlet eye to see if anything slipped past me.

On Friday I made three one-word fixes:

• In the prologue, I made a change in this sentence:

Armstrong was deserted by his father before he was born, raised by a part-time prostitute, and sentenced at the age of eleven to the Colored Waif's Home, an orphanage-like reform school, for firing a pistol on New Year's Eve.

I changed before to when.

Elsewhere in the book, I quote Armstrong as saying that his father "left us the day we were born." I don't know how this inconsistency escaped the attention of the half-dozen people who've read the manuscript of Pops, but I finally spotted it last week and fixed it at once.

• In the second chapter, I made a change in this sentence:

Born in 1885, Oliver [Joe "King" Oliver, Armstrong's mentor] was a dark-skinned butler turned musician who got his start playing in brass bands.

I changed butler to yardman.

The various Oliver-related sources that I consulted disagreed on this point, but late last week I tracked down a definitive primary source, a 1959 oral-history interview with Oliver's wife that was cited in an end note to Bruce Boyd Raeburn's New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, published earlier this year. According to Stella Oliver, her husband worked as a "yard boy," not as a butler. I shouted with joy when I ran across that note while re-reading Raeburn's book.

• In the ninth chapter, I made a change in this sentence:

After the publication of Jazzmen, which Armstrong called "absolutely perfect" in a letter to one of the book's contributors, the revival of interest in New Orleans jazz took wing.

I changed after to with because of the next sentence in Pops: "It came too late to help Oliver, but [Jelly Roll] Morton, who had been unceremoniously dropped from Victor's roster of artists in 1930, was now invited back to record 'High Society,' 'I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say,' and 'Oh, Didn't He Ramble' with an all-star band whose members included Sidney Bechet and Zutty Singleton."

Jelly%2BRoll%2BMorton.jpg Once again, it was New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History that set me straight. Raeburn quoted a remark made by Frederic Ramsey, one of the co-authors of Jazzmen, at a 1982 symposium about Jelly Roll Morton:

We had a book that was about to come out in October, that was the one called Jazzmen, and so we whipped up this deal by going to RCA Victor, and on the strength of a book coming out we could have Jelly Roll Morton's New Orleans Jazzmen make a sessions [sic] or two.

The first of the two recording sessions took place on September 14, 1939, shortly before Jazzmen was published. Until I re-read Raeburn's book, I hadn't realized that Morton's Victor sessions were arranged prior to the publication of Jazzmen, so I changed after to with in the interests of chronological clarity and exactitude.

Small stuff? Sure--but the Armstrong literature, including every previous biography, is so full of errors, some small and others dismayingly large, that I felt obliged to try and get everything right. Needless to say, I'm sure that I've made some blunders of my own, but I managed to correct so many other long-standing mistakes in the course of researching, writing, and editing Pops that I feel confident in saying that it will be the most factually accurate account of Louis Armstrong's life ever to have seen print.

In saying this, I know I'm leading with my chin. Jazz scholars will soon be circling Pops like buzzards, looking for fresh carrion. Just the other day I got an e-mail from an Armstrong researcher in Germany who had somehow obtained a set of uncorrected page proofs of Pops. He told me that the book was "fantastic" but added that I'd gotten the title of one of Armstrong's best-known albums wrong. I promptly fired off an e-mail to Larry Cooper, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's copy chief in Boston, asking him to make the fix on the double. Larry wrote back the next day to reassure me that I'd already caught the error myself and fixed it in galleys a couple of months ago. Rarely have I felt such relief!

Forgive my obsessiveness, but now that The Letter is out of the way and Pops has received its first pre-publication review, I've traded one set of jitters for another. When you're writing about a great man, you can't help but feel as though he's looking over your shoulder. Insofar as I can, I want to do justice to Louis Armstrong--and that means, among countless other things, getting the small stuff right.

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Behind the scenes

Bill Evans, the most influential jazz pianist of the postwar era, would have turned eighty on Sunday. In honor of that anniversary, Marc Myers has just posted the first installment of a five-part interview with Laurie Verchomin, who was Evans' lover during the last year and a half of his life. You can read it by going to JazzWax, Marc's blog. It promises to be essential reading.

* * *

The Bill Evans Trio plays "Midnight Mood" live in 1979:

Posted by About Last Night on August 17, 2009 9:44 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Now the world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."

W. Somerset Maugham, Great Novelists and Their Novels

Posted by About Last Night on August 18, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: On the big screen

New York-based cinephiles, take note: In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, opens Friday at the Film Forum for a nine-day run. Nicholas Ray's 1950 study of an angry screenwriter suspected of murder is widely ranked next to Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past as the quintessential film noir, a judgment in which I wholeheartedly concur.

David Thomson, among countless other critics, is a great admirer of In a Lonely Place:

Like any American director, [Ray] had to accept some routine assignments, but in the next few years he added these marvels to his list: In a Lonely Place (with Humphrey Bogart playing an embittered and potentially violent Hollywood screenwriter); On Dangerous Ground (which has Robert Ryan as a brutal cop); and The Lusty Men (where Robert Mitchum is a rodeo veteran who agrees to train the young Arthur Kennedy, but falls in love with his wife Susan Hayward).
None of those films did especially well. They were all black and white. But they are filled with anguish and ecstasy and a kind of framing and lighting and camera movement that steadily deepens the routine script material. In a Lonely Place is less showy than Sunset Boulevard, but it is the truer portrait of Hollywood compromise and hypocrisy....

Certainly it's the greatest performance that Bogart ever gave in front of a camera, and if you've never seen it in a theater, I strongly recommend that you make every effort to do so now. Book your tickets now--I'll be very surprised if this one doesn't sell out.

For more information, go here.

* * *

The theatrical trailer for In a Lonely Place. The singer performing "I Hadn't Anyone Till You" is Hadda Brooks:

Posted by About Last Night on August 18, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Posted by About Last Night on August 19, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

The opening scene of Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," starring Jack Palance, Keenan Wynn, and Ed Wynn, originally telecast live on CBS' Playhouse 90 on October 11, 1956:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Posted by About Last Night on August 19, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: More gold than lead

Last year I wrote a "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal about Studio One Anthology, a six-DVD box set containing seventeen dramas that were originally broadcast live on CBS' Studio One, one of the best-remembered anthology series of what is now known, rightly or wrongly, as the "golden age" of television:

It's said that series TV today is better than ever before, and that the so-called Golden Age of Television mostly amounted to an endless string of low-budget sitcoms, mysteries and Westerns. As the weaker episodes included in "Studio One Anthology" make all too clear, there's something to be said for that skeptical point of view. Most of the original plays that aired on the anthology series of the '50s were mediocre and have been rightly forgotten. But more than a few of them, like "Twelve Angry Men" and "Marty," were very, very good--and network TV in the '50s, lest we forget, was also bringing its viewers such blue-chip fare as Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, Jerome Robbins' "Peter Pan," "An Evening with Fred Astaire" and the wildly zany comedy of Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs.
Back then, of course, CBS, NBC and ABC still aspired on occasion to offer viewers something more than lowest-common-denominator escapism as part of their daily entertainment diet. Now they mostly play it as safe as skim milk, leaving the risk-taking to cable TV. "Studio One Anthology" is a wistful reminder of how much things have changed since the naïve and hopeful days when television was young.

I felt at the time that Koch Vision, which released Studio One Anthology, would have done better to put out a set that cherry-picked a variety of first-rate TV dramas from the Fifties rather than concentrating on a single series. Now the Criterion Collection is planning to do just that. The Golden Age of Television, scheduled for release on November 24 but now available for preordering, is a three-disc set containing eight important live TV dramas originally telecast between 1953 and 1958, including the original versions of Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" and Rod Serling's "Patterns" and "Requiem for a Heavyweight." While TV buffs with very long memories will recall that all eight of these programs were rebroadcast on PBS a quarter-century ago and subsequently issued on videocassette, this will be the first time that any of them has been officially released on DVD.

I wrote about "Marty" in this space two years ago:

The original hour-long TV version...is lean, direct, and characterful, and Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, who play a pair of painfully plain New Yorkers looking for love, are so natural and unaffected that they scarcely seem to be acting at all. It's easy to see why Marty, though it only aired once on network TV, made a deep and long-lasting impression on all who saw it.

Those comments were based on a single viewing of a used and decidedly battered copy of the videocassette version of "Marty." I can't wait to how it looks after being given the Criterion Collection treatment.

Posted by About Last Night on August 19, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Two little words

I've been too busy to say anything about the outpouring of responses to my Wall Street Journal column about the shrinking audience for jazz in America. Much of what's been written about "Can Jazz Be Saved?" (though not all) has been angry, and most of it misses the point.

The latest writer to sound off is Nate Chinen, who responded in the New York Times with a piece called "Doomsayers May Be Playing Taps, but Jazz Isn't Ready to Sing the Blues." Chinen's piece, though it lacks the hysterical edge of some of the recent blog postings about my column, sticks fairly closely to what has become the standard line about "Can Jazz Be Saved?" It revolves around two little words:

Mr. Teachout wasn't the first to sound an alarm: the jazz historian Ted Gioia weighed in last month at the Web site Jazz.com. "The most likely--indeed the only plausible--explanation for these numbers is that very few new fans have discovered jazz since the 1980s," Mr. Gioia wrote. "The old fans continue to follow the music, but teenagers and 20-somethings have very little interest in jazz."
But there's a wealth of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, as many jazz bloggers and commentators, responding mainly to Mr. Teachout, have been quick to point out. Try dropping in one night this week at the Village Vanguard, where Jason Moran and the Bandwagon are appearing. Or head to the Stone in the East Village, which is likely to hit sweaty capacity for each set programmed by the young drummer-composer Tyshawn Sorey. Or stop by the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea on Friday night for a show by the Bad Plus. Scratch anywhere past the surface and you might begin to wonder whether the likes of Mr. Teachout and Mr. Gioia don't see young people listening because they don't know where to look.

The words in question are, of course, "anecdotal evidence." We've been hearing a lot of that lately. It seems that everyone who doesn't like what Ted Gioia and I had to say went to a jazz club the other night and saw lots of young people there, which means that jazz is alive, well, and thriving. End of story.

Would that it were so simple! Alas, the trouble with Nate Chinen's piece is that it omits another pair of words that tell a very different story: median age. To quote from my original column:

The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29.

That's not anecdotal evidence. It's a finding from a survey jointly conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Census Bureau, and it knocks a mile-wide hole in Chinen's piece, as well as virtually everything else that's been written to date about "Can Jazz Be Saved?" The fact that the median age of live jazz audiences in America has gone up by seventeen years in the course of the past quarter-century can mean only one thing: live jazz is simply not attracting enough new young listeners to replace the older ones who are staying home or dying off. Period.

As for the question of whether "the likes of Mr. Teachout and Mr. Gioia" know where to look for young jazz fans, I hasten to point out that I've been writing enthusiastically about the Bad Plus ever since 2003, the same length of time as Nate Chinen. I'm also a longtime fan of Medeski, Martin & Wood, another band that Chinen cites in his New York Times piece. More power to both groups, but the fact that they're drawing young crowds is also beside the point. No amount of anecdotal evidence, however seductive it may seem at first glance, will change the fact that the overall audience for live jazz in America is growing older at an alarmingly rapid rate. Anyone who refuses to face that unpleasant fact--or to bother mentioning it in a piece that seeks to reassure its readers that jazz is in great shape--is part of the problem.

One more thing: what's happening to jazz now was happening to classical music a decade and a half ago. That's more or less how long it took for classical performers and presenters to admit the truth about their aging audience and start trying to do something about it. How long will it take before jazz musicians--and journalists--come to the same conclusion?

UPDATE: Says Ted Gioia:

The Times cites "anecdotal evidence" of young people attending jazz events. Meanwhile clubs, festivals, record labels, etc. are shutting down. I guess they need a new infusion of anecdotes.

No kidding.

Posted by About Last Night on August 19, 2009 12:19 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It is cruel to discover one's mediocrity only when it is too late."

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Posted by About Last Night on August 20, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:
• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:
• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Camelot (musical, G, closes Sept. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY
• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY
• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS:
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PITTSFIELD, MASS:
• A Streetcar Named Desire (drama, PG-13/R, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

Posted by About Last Night on August 20, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Posted by About Last Night on August 21, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The new-media crisis of 1949

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The coming of television killed off network radio in a way that's startlingly reminiscent of the effect that the digital revolution is currently having on network TV, the print media, and the music business.

Are there any useful lessons to be learned from what happened to old-time network radio in the quarter-century that preceded its final demise in 1962? I think so, and I've tried to sum them up in my latest "Sightings" column for tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt:

Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That's the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin....

Can the old media shore up their questionable future by looking to the not-quite-so-distant past? To find out, pick up a copy of Saturday's Journal and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 21, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: The heart that Victoria broke

I'm still on the road in New England, where I reviewed the Peterborough Players' Heartbreak House in New Hampshire and the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Ghosts in Stockbridge. Both productions are excellent, but only one of these two classic plays of Vicwardian manners remains viable today. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

You can tell any truth, however hurtful, so long as you say it with a smile. That was the secret of George Bernard Shaw's success, and "Heartbreak House" shows his method at its most theatrically effective. Rarely have England's chattering classes been sketched so savagely, but Shaw tells his brutal truths with such impish charm that you scarcely feel the knife slipping in until the blood starts to flow. Therein lies the strength of the Peterborough Players' production of "Heartbreak House," which Gus Kaikkonen has staged with the lightest possible touch. It plays like a Noël Coward-style comedy of bad manners--until the climactic moment when the ground opens up beneath the feet of the characters.

Written between 1913 and 1919 and set in the first days of World War I, "Heartbreak House" takes place in the country home of Captain Shotover (George Morfogen), a retired sailor of great age who has the alarming habit of popping into a room, saying whatever happens to be on his mind, then popping out again. The captain and his family seem at first glance to be charming to a fault, a veritable fountain of epigrammatic cleverness. One of their guests describes them as "unprejudiced, frank, humane, unconventional, democratic, free-thinking, and everything that is delightful to thoughtful people." Yet mere minutes after these words are spoken, the Shotovers find themselves in the midst of a German aerial bombardment, and they rejoice in the devastation that threatens to consume them and the rest of their delightful kind....

Every member of Mr. Kaikkonen's ensemble cast gives a sharply and memorably drawn performance, starting with Mr. Morfogen, whose Captain Shotover is a fey, shambling sprite...

As a critic, Shaw championed the plays of Henrik Ibsen, and as a playwright he learned from Ibsen's willingness to skewer the hypocrisies of the 19th-century middle class about which he wrote. Yet Shaw was the better artist, and I don't doubt that he knew it. In "The Quintessence of Ibsenism," his 1891 tribute to the man who cleared the way for his own plays of ideas, Shaw described Ibsen's "Ghosts" as "such an uncompromising and outspoken attack on marriage as a useless sacrifice to an ideal, that his meaning was obscured by its very obviousness." I thought of those backhanded words of praise as I watched the Berkshire Theatre Festival's imaginative revival of "Ghosts." In 1881 "Ghosts" swept across the stage like a tornado of frankness, but today it comes across as a preachy piece of bourgeois-baiting...

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Read the whole thing here.

Posted by About Last Night on August 21, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

THE NEW-MEDIA CRISIS OF 1949

"Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That's the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin..."

Posted by About Last Night on August 23, 2009 10:09 PM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five."

W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

Posted by About Last Night on August 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Don't bother

Mrs. T and I are going to the beach today, and we won't be back until Wednesday evening. I plan to check my e-mail very sporadically between now and then. If you really, truly need to get in touch with me...good luck.

Posted by About Last Night on August 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Too late! Too late!

Each day I receive a Google Alert e-mail on Louis Armstrong, and each day I wonder as I read it whether someone somewhere has discovered a primary source that contradicts something I've written in Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. So far, so good, but I got a bit nervous over the weekend when I learned that a hitherto-unknown sixteen-page letter written by Armstrong to Mezz Mezzrow in 1932 was being auctioned off by the same firm that's currently selling private tapes of Barbra Streisand's 1960 nightclub debut.

The complete text of the letter can be viewed on line. I was relieved to learn upon reading it that I won't have to tear up Pops at the very last minute in order to shoehorn the letter into the book. Even so, I wish I'd known about it six months ago, for the letter, which Armstrong wrote midway through his first trip to England, fills in several small but significant factual gaps in our knowledge of that important episode in his life. It is also, like all of Armstrong's letters, written in an amazingly vivid and personal style:

The Victor Record Co., has just won the case from the Okeh Record Co. and wired Mr. Collins [Johnny Collins, Armstrong's manager] that all's well and I can start on my new Victor contract which replaces the Rudy Vallee anytime. Gee, Gate, what a victory that is to win from our boy Rockwell [Tommy Rockwell, Armstrong's previous manager, who sued to stop him from switching record labels]. Looka heah, Looka heah. Now just watch those good royalties-dividends-shares-'n' everything else. Ha. Ha. And the contract pop's (MR. COLLINS) made with these people for me, why you've never heard of one like it before. And that includes the ole King of Jazz himself Paul Whiteman. Nice, eh?

Alas, you won't find that paragraph in Pops, nor has it been published anywhere else, though I sincerely hope that a complete run of Armstrong's surviving correspondence will be brought out in book form at some point in the future. (In the meantime, a fair number of his letters can be found here.) Until then I'll be keeping an eye on Google--and hoping that nothing of indispensable importance surfaces for at least another six months, if not longer.

Posted by About Last Night on August 24, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"To be able to sit home and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one's teeth."

Joseph Epstein, "Blood, Sweat, and Words" (In Character, Spring 2009)

Posted by About Last Night on August 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Entry from an unkept diary

• YouTube isn't quite as wonderful as it ought to be, but when it's good, it's really good. The other day, for instance, I discovered that it is now possible to view the first hour and a half of CBS' live coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy--uncut.

The first thing you see is the opening segment of As the World Turns, TV's longest-running soap opera, complete with the original commercials. Then, without warning, the screen is filled with a CBS NEWS BULLETIN slide and you hear the once-familiar voice of Walter Cronkite breaking the bad news:

Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting. More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously: President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy, she called "Oh, no!"; the motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal. Repeating, a bulletin from CBS News, President Kennedy has been shot by a would-be assassin in Dallas, Texas. Stay tuned to CBS News for further details.

What you don't see is Cronkite's face. In 1963 the CBS newsroom in New York was not yet equipped with a "flash studio" that made it possible to air live pictures of whatever newsman was breaking into regular programming. Not for another twenty minutes did the network get its cameras warmed up and running.

No less surprising is the fact that Cronkite was relying exclusively on wire-service copy, which he read more or less straight from the teletype. Dan Rather was on the scene in Dallas, but he wasn't able to talk directly to Cronkite in New York, much less send him pictures. Throughout the next hour, Cronkite was forced to read and re-read wire-service reports and to hold up still photographs of the presidential motorcade, all of them transmitted by AP and UPI. Eventually we see live pictures from inside the Dallas Trade Mart, to which Kennedy had been en route. More than a half-hour after the first bulletin, Cronkite quotes Rather, who finally managed to get through to New York by telephone with an unconfirmed report that Kennedy was dead--but Rather is neither seen nor heard.

Fans of Mad Men don't need to be told how much the world has changed since the Sixties, but I can't think of a more telling example of how TV news has changed than this dusty ninety-minute time capsule.

Posted by About Last Night on August 25, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"Am I happy? Probably not. Having passed the prescribed biblical age limit, I have to think of death, and I do not like the thought. There is a vestigial fear of hell, and even of purgatory, and no amount of rereading rationalist authors can expunge it. If there is only darkness after death, then that darkness is the ultimate reality and that love of life that I intermittently possess is no preparation for it. In face of the approaching blackness, which Winston Churchill facetiously termed black velvet, concerning oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity. But rage against the dying of the light is only human, especially when there are still things to be done, and my rage sometimes sounds to myself like madness. It is not only a question of works never to be written; it is a matter of things unlearned. I have started to learn Japanese, but it is too late; I have started to read Hebrew, but my eyes will not take in the jots and tittles. How can one fade out in peace, carrying vast ignorance into a state of total ignorance?"

Anthony Burgess, You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess

Posted by About Last Night on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Snapshot

Dennis Brain and Denis Matthews perform Beethoven's Horn Sonata:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

Posted by About Last Night on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: On the air

For those who've been following the brouhaha over my Wall Street Journal column about the shrinking adult audience for live jazz in America, I'll be appearing today on Soundcheck, WNYC's daily talk show about music, to discuss what I said--and didn't say--with John Schaefer, the host.

Soundcheck airs live at two p.m. EDT. If you live in the New York City area, you can listen to WNYC via terrestrial radio by tuning to 93.9 FM. Go here for more information on today's episode or to listen live via streaming audio on your computer.

Posted by About Last Night on August 26, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink

TT: Almanac

"I got on with the task of turning myself into a brief professional writer. The term professional is not meant to imply a high standard of commitment and attainment: it meant then, as it still does, the pursuit of a trade or calling to the end of paying the rent and buying liquor. I leave the myth of inspiration and agonised creative inaction to the amateurs."

Anthony Burgess, You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess

Posted by About Last Night on August 27, 2009 12:00 AM | Permalink