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November 30, 2009

TT: Here we go

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be officially "published" on Wednesday. That's a formality, of course: it's been available from online booksellers for a month and started showing up in bookstores three weeks ago. Over the long holiday weekend, Pops appeared on Michiko Kakutani's top-10 list in the New York Times and was prominently featured in the the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Kansas City Star, the Los Angeles Times, and my own paper, The Wall Street Journal. For the past week, it's been Amazon's top-selling jazz book.

All this good news notwithstanding, December 2 is still a big day for me, not least because that's when my coast-to-coast book tour gets going. I leave for Boston in the afternoon after making two radio appearances, and on Thursday night I'll be speaking at the Boston Athenaeum. After that I'll be in and out of New York City through December 18, when I wrap up my tour in New Orleans and head home to Smalltown, U.S.A., for the holidays.

In case you didn't see it in this space the other day, here's a complete and updated list of the personal appearances I'll be making in December. Come out and see me!

* * *

• BOSTON, DECEMBER 3: Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., 6 p.m.

• NEW YORK, DECEMBER 7: Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle, 1972 Broadway, 7:30 p.m.

• LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 8: Los Angeles Public Library, 630 W. Fifth St., 7 p.m.

• BALTIMORE, DECEMBER 9: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St., 6:30 p.m.

• PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 10: Philadelphia Free Library, 1901 Vine St., 7:30 p.m.

• CHICAGO, DECEMBER 15: Highland Park Library, 494 Laurel St., 7 p.m. (note the time change)

• ST. LOUIS, DECEMBER 16: Maryville University (with Left Bank Books), Buder Commons, 650 Maryville University Drive, 7 p.m. (note the address change)

• NEW ORLEANS, DECEMBER 17: Garden District Bookshop, 2727 Prytania St., 5:30 p.m.

Posted November 30, 12:00 AM

TT: From the horse's mouth

Marc Myers, whose JazzWax has become one of the most widely read and influential jazz sites on the Web, interviewed me about Pops earlier this month. This week he's posting a five-installment series devoted to that interview.

Here's part of today's installment:

JW What did Armstrong understand about simplicity that was lost on so many other musicians?

TT Simplicity is absolutely central to Louis' development as an artist. Louis started out as a young virtuoso who was in love with the sound of his own horn. When you can play anything you hear, you want to hear yourself play. Louis apprenticed with King Oliver, who ingrained in him the centrality of melody to the jazz musician. Armstrong's exposure to Oliver and his view of melody made him feel that it was not only appropriate to embrace simplicity but also vital to appeal to audiences in an immediate way.

JW But Oliver was certainly less technically gifted than Armstrong.

TT That's true. Yet it's Oliver who made Armstrong believe it was far better to be simple than complicated. Armstrong internalized these lessons at age 21, and he lived by them throughout his career....

To read the whole thing, go here.

Posted November 30, 12:00 AM

TT: A week of Satchmo snapshots (1)

To celebrate the publication this week of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, I'll be posting Armstrong videos every day.

In today's video, an excerpt from a 1958 Timex All Star Show telecast, Armstrong, Ruby Braff, and Jack Teagarden perform "Jeepers Creepers," originally recorded by Armstrong in 1939:

Posted November 30, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Ain't nobody played nothing like it since, and can't nobody play nothing like it now. My oldest record, can't nobody touch it. And if they say, 'Which record do you like the best?' I like them all, because I didn't hit no bad notes on any of them."

Louis Armstrong (quoted in Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong)

Posted November 30, 12:00 AM

November 27, 2009

TT: Scenes from a marriage (cont'd)

Scott Martelle, who profiled me earlier this year in Publishers Weekly, has now written a Pops-related interview that will appear in Sunday's Los Angeles Times. It's crammed full of good quotes, and it also contains a description of me that is causing a fair amount of mirth in my household:

Teachout...is a heavyset man with a wide, expressive smile and glasses that make him look owlish. He speaks in long, discursive paragraphs, his diction precise, his tone a bit arch and bearing no hint of Missouri, where he grew up in a small town.

HE Do I really sound arch when I talk?

An excruciatingly long pause

SHE Welllllllll...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 27, 12:00 AM

TT: When artists dry up

As I noted in my review of The Starry Messenger, Kenneth Lonergan went eight years between plays, and many of his admirers, myself among them, had long since started to fear that he was falling victim to the same curse of sterility that previously struck down such artists as Ralph Ellison and Aaron Copland, both of whom fell silent at the peak of their careers and subsequently found it impossible to create new works.

What causes gifted artists to dry up unexpectedly--and are there artists who should dry up? That's the subject of my "Sightings" column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. If the subject interests you, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 27, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory."

Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (trans. Edward MacCurdy)

Posted November 27, 12:00 AM

November 26, 2009

TT: Lost in the stars

I review two shows in Friday's Wall Street Journal, Kenneth Lonergan's The Starry Messenger and the Broadway transfer of Fela! The first is extraordinary, the second very good. Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, the Journal decided to post my Friday column on the paper's Web site in advance of its appearance in print, so here's an excerpt.

* * *

Eight years ago, Kenneth Lonergan was an artist of seemingly infinite promise, a writer with three plays and a movie under his belt, all of them memorable. Then Hollywood knocked him off the tracks, and of late his career has been looking more like a cautionary tale. "Margaret," Mr. Lonergan's second film, was shot in 2006 but is still stuck in post-production--he was reportedly unable to complete a final cut. Meanwhile, the premiere of his fourth play, "The Starry Messenger," was announced twice and cancelled twice in the past four seasons, first by San Diego's Old Globe Theatre and then by the Off-Broadway New Group.

Now "The Starry Messenger" has opened Off Broadway, preceded by a string of alarming reports suggesting that Mr. Lonergan and his cast had a rocky time in rehearsal. No doubt they did, but you wouldn't know it from seeing the finished product. Like "You Can Count on Me," the 2000 film that first brought its author-director to the attention of a national audience, "The Starry Messenger" is an engrossing study of the toll that prolonged disappointment exacts on the human spirit, performed with consummate skill by an ensemble cast led by Matthew Broderick and staged with unassuming finesse by Mr. Lonergan himself.

Mr. Broderick plays Mark, a 46-year-old astronomy teacher who dreamed as a young man of "becoming a real astronomer--a practicing astronomer," then came to the reluctant conclusion that he wasn't good enough to make the cut. Trapped in the smothering dailiness of family life and an unsatisfying job, he stumbles headlong into an affair with Angela (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a 28-year-old Puerto Rican nurse with a young child whose father refuses to marry her. Anne (J. Smith-Cameron), Mark's wife, knows nothing of the affair but is all too aware of the reasons for his unhappiness: "You decided that everybody you were working with was more talented than you...You told me that. And I never forgot it. It was the most terrible thing I ever heard anybody say about themselves."...

Is it really possible to write an interesting play about yet another frustrated family man of a certain age who seeks to plug the hole in his soul by having an affair with a younger woman? That's like asking whether it's possible to write yet another interesting symphony in the key of E minor. It says much about the nature of Mr. Lonergan's gifts that for all the seeming obviousness of the plot of "The Starry Messenger," you'll never be able to guess what happens next. He is a theatrical alchemist who transforms the commonplace by portraying it with quiet honesty and charging it with moral complexity....

The designers of the Broadway transfer of "Fela!" have turned the staid interior of the Eugene O'Neill Theatre into a riotous facsimile of a corrugated-iron Nigerian dance hall that appears to have been jointly decorated by Romare Bearden and Paul Klee. The music played inside, a savory stew of big-band jazz, James Brown-style funk and African percussion known to its devotees as "Afrobeat," is an ideal backdrop for the flat-footed, hip-swiveling dancing of the hottest chorus in town. All that's missing from this bio-musical about the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the Nigerian pop star and political activist, is a plot, and an act and a half goes by before its absence becomes obtrusive....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Praise be

Like most mere mortals, I have the unfortunate habit of grousing about things for which I should by all rights be abjectly grateful. This has been a stressful and exhausting year, far too much of which I've had to spend in departure lounges and window seats, and there were a few times along the way when I wondered whether I'd bitten off more than I could chew. Yet I knew perfectly well that anyone who gets to publish his latest book, have his first opera premiered, and celebrate his second wedding anniversary--all in the space of twelve fast-moving months--has no business complaining about anything whatsoever. Today I'm as thankful as it's possible to be, and I hope I have the good sense to remain so for some time to come.

I love the opening lines of My Favorite Year, Richard Benjamin's movie about a young writer for a weekly TV series not unlike Your Show of Shows: "Nineteen fifty-four. You don't get years like that anymore. It was my favorite year."

I hope I will always feel that way about 2009.

* * *

The last scene of My Favorite Year:

Posted November 26, 12:00 AM

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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Orphans' Home Cycle, Part 1 (drama, G/PG-13, too complicated for children, will be performed in rotating repertory with second and third parts of cycle starting on Dec. 3 and Jan. 7 respectively, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)
• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• My Wonderful Day (farce, PG-13/R, unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, then reopens Dec. 15 at the Soho Playhouse, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MILLBURN, N.J..:
• On the Town (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, reviewed here)

Posted November 26, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

O Lord, that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness!
For thou hast given me in this beauteous face
A world of earthly blessings to my soul,
If sympathy of love unite our thoughts.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Posted November 26, 12:00 AM

November 25, 2009

TT: Snapshot

Paul Hindemith conducts the Chicago Symphony in the first movement of his Concert Music for Strings and Brass, Op. 50:

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

Posted November 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Edward Woodward, R.I.P.

When I read the obituaries for Edward Woodward last week, my mind went back to an essay I wrote in 1986 about The Equalizer, the stylish TV series in which he starred a quarter-century ago. This piece, which appeared in National Review, was one of the first things I wrote for a magazine that I really liked, and I've no idea why I didn't include it in the Teachout Reader.

I especially like this part:

Over a churning electronic soundtrack, we see a jerkily edited sequence of New York nightmares. A young woman unsuccessfully attempts to board a subway car at Columbus Circle and a punk slithers out from behind a column as the train pulls away. A man pounds frantically on the door of a telephone booth as a big black car screeches toward him. One stark image bears down savagely upon the next. All at once the soothing image of a man in deep shadow fills the screen. He is The Equalizer, the Nietzschean superman come to make safe the mean streets of the Big Apple....

The dream of the Übermensch as urban savior has always gone over big in America. Superman fantasies can be easily found in the hard-boiled detective novel, many of our movies, and most of our comic books. But television, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues, has generally preferred to let duly appointed authorities clean up the streets. It's all right to be a maverick, a cop with an independent streak, but a current institutional affiliation in reasonably good standing is almost always a must. Shows that posit the helplessness of the police in the face of urban crime have never been popular on American television, which prefers to reassure rather than frighten. So it is intriguing that each episode of The Equalizer should enact the desperate notion that the center cannot hold without the occasional benign intervention of a fearless vigilante....

The show is clearly aimed at a sophisticated audience of baby-boomers, and the assumption that this audience would appreciate so straight-forwardly moralistic a denouement is a telling one. The baby-boomers, despite their notoriously touchy consciences, are still looking for simple answers to complex questions, and commercial television has long been in the business of supplying them. The Equalizer caters gracefully to subway-riding boomers who wonder nervously when their turn to be mugged will come up. Nothing stimulates the desire for order quite like advancing age.

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

The opening title sequence to The Equalizer. The music is by Stewart Copeland:

Posted November 25, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions."

Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

Posted November 25, 12:00 AM

November 24, 2009

TT: Once more, with feeling

If you haven't seen Michiko Kakutani's New York Times review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, go here to read it.

Not long after the Times review appeared on the paper's Web site yesterday afternoon, Pops became the best-selling jazz book on Amazon. I don't know how long it will stay that way, so if you haven't gotten around to doing your bit, why wait? Christmas is just around the corner.

UPDATE: In addition to raving about "Pops" today, Kakutani has put it on her list of the ten best books of 2009.

Posted November 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Words to the wise

• Jane Wilson, about whom I have written more than once in this space and elsewhere, has a show of new paintings and watercolors up at DC Moore Gallery through December 23. Busy as I am, I didn't hesitate to carve out time to see it as soon as it opened, for Wilson is one of my favorite American artists. Imagine a cross between Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter and you'll get an inkling of what Wilson is up to in her near-abstract yet miraculously specific skyscapes, in which the fleeting manifestations of clouds and light are refracted through the transforming prism of an artist's eye. I can't praise Wilson more highly than to say that one of her small-format watercolors, Breaking Light, hangs in the Teachout Museum. I look at it every day.

DC Moore is at 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. For more information, go here.

• Maria Schneider, the most gifted of contemporary jazz composers, brings her big band to the Jazz Standard tonight for their annual Thanksgiving residency. They'll be there through Sunday, playing a mixture of old and new tunes, and what I wrote about them in 2007 still goes:

Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

No show on Thursday. Otherwise, two shows nightly, plus an additional late-night set on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are essential. For more information, go here.

Posted November 24, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The people are a sovereign whose vocabulary is limited to two words, 'Yes' and 'No.' This sovereign, moreover, can speak only when spoken to."

E.E. Schattenschneider, Party Government: American Government in Action

Posted November 24, 12:00 AM

November 23, 2009

TT: Sometimes Macy's does tell Gimbel's!

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong got a rave from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times:

With "Pops," his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins's excellent 1988 study, "Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong," and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier's patronizing 1983 book, "Louis Armstrong: An American Genius."

Mr. Teachout...writes with a deep appreciation of Armstrong's artistic achievements, while situating his work and his life in a larger historical context. He draws on Armstrong's wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician, who like a Method actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful.

At the same time, Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong's gifts: "the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike," his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his "dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone," in another trumpeter's words, which left listeners feeling as though they'd been staring into the sun. The author--who worked as a jazz bassist before becoming a full-time writer--also uses his firsthand knowledge of music to convey the magic of such Armstrong masterworks as "St. Louis Blues," "Potato Head Blues," "West End Blues" and "Star Dust."...

I think this must be the first time that anyone has ever called me a "cultural historian" in print.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 23, 1:49 PM

TT: A sight to see

My friend Laura Lippman sent me this snapshot of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on display at a bookstore in New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport.

Another friend in Washington, D.C., sends along this report:

You'll be pleased to know that Pops is being showcased in the front window display of Politics and Prose, along with Ted Kennedy's autobiography, Jonathan Safran Foer's latest, and some other books.

You meet the most interesting people in a bookstore window....

Posted November 23, 12:28 PM

TT: Vote for me!

The dust jacket of the American edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, designed by Mark Robinson, is one of the six nominees in the "Best Famous Faces" category of Amazon's Best Cover of the Year competition.

If you like the cover of Pops as much as I do, vote for it by going here.

Posted November 23, 12:00 AM

TT: The receiving end

As if putting up with one set of reviews in a single year hadn't been enough, I'm now in the process of finding out what my colleagues think of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. So far the news has been highly gratifying, and over the weekend I scored another pair of raves.

The English edition of Pops is already out, and Robert Sandall called it "terrific" in the Sunday Times of London:

Teachout is especially good at exposing the difficulties that Armstrong experienced with critics and fellow musicians after he became famous. On his first tour of Britain in 1932 he was on one hand hailed as an innovator--"as modern as James Joyce"--and on the other dismissed as a circus act. The Daily Express man complained that "he looks and behaves like an untrained gorilla". Another commentator mocked his "clean-shaven hippopotamus physiognomy."

As time went by, opinion became even more polarised. Philip Larkin lauded him as "more ­important than Picasso"; Le Corbusier called him "equilibrium on a tightrope". Meanwhile, a growing chorus of reviewers objected to the film roles, hit records and funny-guy stage patter. "Now he is a one-man show: comedian, jivester, and lastly musician," was a widely voiced put-down. These jibes hurt. Armstrong was a far more shaded character than his sunny public persona let on. Teachout's access to a previously unavailable archive of taped conversations and writings has allowed him to construct the most complete picture yet of a well-studied subject. In particular he captures Armstrong's deep ambivalence to his predicament as a black celebrity in an industry run by whites....

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, Ted Gioia, a much-admired jazz critic and historian who is also a professional jazz pianist, reviewed the American edition of Pops in the new issue of the Weekly Standard. The complete text of his review is only available to subscribers, but here are some pertinent excerpts:

Finally--almost four decades after Armstrong's death in the summer of 1971--we have a biography that does justice to the man and his music....

Teachout is an astute critic who knows jazz deeply--and has even played it as a bassist--but is largely immune to the increasingly inward-focused attitudes that hinder the effectiveness of so many contemporary critics. He has previous biographies of H. L. Mencken and George Balanchine to his credit, and has written strong, supple criticism of dance, theater, and cinema. In short, Teachout seems perfectly suited to tackle this seminal figure whose career rarely stayed within the usual boundaries of jazz.

Teachout captures this broader context with great skill. His rich cast of characters includes not only musicians and record industry figures, but criminals and monarchs, TV personalities and movie stars. We follow Armstrong at a 1932 performance with King George V in attendance, tossing off the intro "This one's for you, Rex"--then playing (unthinkingly?) "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal, You!" Elsewhere, we get a detailed look--the best I have read anywhere--of Armstrong's dealings with the Mob. This artist first made his reputation in Al Capone's Chicago, and even at the end of his life, his financial situation was affected by underworld influences. At other points we encounter Sammy Davis Jr., Johnny Cash, Leonard Bernstein, Bing Crosby, and Pope Pius XII, among other names worth dropping. My favorite anecdote tells of Herbert von Karajan berating the Vienna Philharmonic because its players can't maintain a tempo as well as Armstrong's band.

Teachout delivers a taut and well-paced work that is astute in its critical judgments and gripping in its chronicle of the trumpeter's life and times....

I warned Mrs. T (who is new at this game) that the other shoe is bound to drop sooner or later, but so far, so good.

I've also been keeping an eye on the reader reviews of Pops posted on Amazon. Twenty-three had appeared as of this morning, all but one of them favorable. Some are smart, others less so, while a couple are decidedly, even amusingly off the wall. My guess, though, is that the average customer rating posted on Amazon's Pops page is more important to potential buyers than any individual review, and as of this morning it stands at four-and-a-half stars out of a possible five.

As for print-media reviews, everybody in the business is wondering how much they matter these days. Probably not as much as they used to, and very possibly not much at all, though nobody knows for sure. All I can tell you is that good ones don't hurt, and they're a hell of a lot more fun to read than bad ones.

Posted November 23, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"I nodded and went out. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder."

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (courtesy of Mrs. T)

Posted November 23, 12:00 AM

November 20, 2009

TT: Home, at last

This has been a wonderful week for New York-area theater, so busy that it took two columns in The Wall Street Journal for me to get it all in. Today I review two openings, the New York premieres of the first installment of Horton Foote's The Orphans' Home Cycle and Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room or the vibrator play. The first is a masterpiece, the second a piece of...well, something else altogether. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Horton Foote, who died in March at the age of 92, had to wait until the very end of his life to win general recognition as one of America's greatest playwrights. The tide was turned by a sterling pair of Off-Broadway revivals, the Signature Theatre Company's 2005 production of "The Trip to Bountiful" and Primary Stages' 2007 production of "Dividing the Estate," that opened the eyes of a new generation of theatergoers to Foote's low-keyed mastery. When "Dividing the Estate" transferred to Broadway the following year, he scored his first commercial success on the New York stage--just in time for him to revel in it. Would that Foote could have lived to attend the New York opening of the first part of "The Orphans' Home Cycle," co-produced by Signature and Connecticut's Hartford Stage, where all three installments were seen earlier this year. It will, I suspect, be remembered as the most significant theatrical event of the season, the kind of show you tell your grandchildren that you saw.

Created by Foote at the suggestion of Michael Wilson, the artistic director of Hartford Stage and the director of this production, "The Orphans' Home Cycle" is a triptych carved out of a cycle of nine plays originally written between 1974 and 1997. It's the story of a quarter-century in the life of a Texas family, and the family is Foote's own, a flock of displaced people who are uprooted, scattered and damaged by the coming of modernity. The title alludes to Marianne Moore's poem "In Distrust of Merits": The world's an orphans' home. Shall/we never have peace without sorrow? At the center of the saga is Horace Robedaux, a fictionalized version of Foote's real-life father (beautifully played as a child by Dylan Riley Snyder, as a teenager by Henry Hodges and as an adult by Bill Heck). Cast adrift by the death of his own alcoholic father and the remarriage of his mother to a resentful man who loathes his stepson, Horace becomes a stranger in a familiar land, searching for a peace that continually eludes him....

Not having seen the second or third parts, I can't yet evaluate the total effect of the cycle as a whole, but "The Story of a Childhood" has the narrative sweep that you look for in major novels, coupled with the electric immediacy that only live theater can supply....

Sarah Ruhl writes retchingly coy plays that pretend to be transgressive--a sure-fire recipe for success of a sort. "In the Next Room or the vibrator play" (trendy capitalization and punctuation by Ms. Ruhl, not me) is an all-too-typical example of her method. It's a fictionalized history play about a 19th-century American physician (Michael Cerveris) who discovers that "hysterical" women experience miraculous recoveries when he induces "paroxysms" by stimulating their nether regions with his brand-new invention, an electric vibrator....

"In the Next Room" is a sentimental wallow studded with sniggering jokes that too often appear to be made at the expense of Ms. Ruhl's innocent characters, none of whom is believably Victorian in speech or carriage. The result is the theatrical equivalent of a jelly donut with vinegar-flavored frosting...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 20, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."

Frank Zappa (quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Jan. 18, 1978)

Posted November 20, 12:00 AM

November 19, 2009

TT: Little girl, you've had a busy day

I saw five shows this week, all of them important, so The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to give me a bonus column in today's paper so that I could write at greater length than usual. Today I report on the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's My Wonderful Day, a New Jersey revival of On the Town, and the first Broadway revival of Ragtime. All are good, the first two extraordinarily so. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Is America finally catching up with Alan Ayckbourn, England's most popular playwright? I sure hope so. The success of the Broadway revival of "The Norman Conquests" raised Mr. Ayckbourn's profile by several notches in this country, and the Off-Broadway production of his latest play, "My Wonderful Day," is bound to benefit from that development--as well it should. Not only is "My Wonderful Day" one of the wittiest and most pristinely crafted of Mr. Ayckbourn's dark farces, but the Brits Off Broadway festival has wisely imported his own production, which was first seen in October at Mr. Ayckbourn's home base, Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre. Like the play, it's a gem, a textbook example of how to stage a comedy effectively, and anyone fortunate enough to see it will wonder why Mr. Ayckbourn's parallel career as a director is largely unknown on this side of the Atlantic.

"My Wonderful Day" starts off quietly: Laverne (Petra Letang), a cleaning woman, brings Winnie (Ayesha Antoine), her nine-year-old daughter, to the house of one of her clients, a middle-aged TV pitchman named Kevin (Terence Booth) whose wife (Alexandra Mathie) has just discovered that he's sleeping with his young secretary (Ruth Gibson). As Winnie looks on in silent amazement--and amusement--things go from bad to worse to absolutely appalling. Yet Mr. Ayckbourn, as is his wont, takes care to make Kevin not just a comic beanbag but an unfeeling brute, thereby turning what in less skilled hands might have been no more than an amusing romp into a poignant, sharp-eyed portrait of a marriage gone sour....

"On the Town," the 1944 sailor-suit musical that made Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green somewhat rich and very famous, is a masterpiece that has never gotten the respect it deserves. The original Broadway production was a hit, but the 1971 and 1998 revivals both flopped, and the 1949 film version, whose benighted makers scrapped most of Bernstein's songs and all of Robbins' dances, was a travesty. Now, though, New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse has given us a production of "On the Town" staged by Bill Berry that gets everything right, all the way down to the last detail, and the results are lovely and amazing to behold....

Paper Mill's "On the Town" is better than any musical now playing on Broadway, "South Pacific" included. It belongs there....

If you saw Stafford Arima's excellent staging of "Ragtime" at Paper Mill four years ago, you won't be greatly surprised by the new Broadway revival of the musical version of E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel about life in turn-of-the-century America. Marcia Milgrom Dodge's production, which originated last season at Washington's Kennedy Center, is a slimmed-down, pageant-style rendering of "Ragtime" played on an open stage surrounded by cast-iron catwalks. I don't know whether Ms. Dodge saw the Paper Mill revival, but she was clearly thinking along similar lines, and the results are just as effective, maybe even more so....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 19, 12:00 AM

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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• 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)
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, extended through Jan. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (musical, PG-13, comic sexual situations, closes Nov. 29, reviewed here)

Posted November 19, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"It is a funny thing about life, if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it: if you utterly decline to make due with what you get, then somehow or other you are very likely to get what you want."

W. Somerset Maugham, "The Treasure"

Posted November 19, 12:00 AM

November 18, 2009

TT: Such language, son!

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I taped two excerpts from Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong for the "Writers Reading" section of Vanity Fair's Web site. That reading is now available as a podcast, and you can listen to it by going here.

Yes, Mom, your beloved Satchmo was known to talk dirty from time to time, and I quote him verbatim in these excerpts. So if you don't want to hear me talk dirty, don't listen.

Posted November 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Snapshot

Vladimir Horowitz plays Scriabin's Vers la flamme, Op. 72, at his New York apartment:

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

Posted November 18, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Only a mediocre writer is always at his best."

W. Somerset Maugham, introduction to The Portable Dorothy Parker

Posted November 18, 12:00 AM

November 17, 2009

TT: Never too late

Mrs. T and I finally got around to watching Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise for the first time the other day. You may wonder why two devoted film lovers waited so long to see a film universally regarded as one of the supreme achievements of European cinema. Alas, I don't have a good answer other than "Sir, you MAY wonder," but at least I can echo the words of Evelyn Waugh, who made the following entry in his diary in 1946:

What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of Portrait of a Lady.

Waugh was only forty-two when he wrote those lines. At fifty-three, my reaction to seeing Children of Paradise is to say, What joy to have more masterpieces ahead of me!

* * *

The English-language theatrical trailer for Children of Paradise:

Posted November 17, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Dreams, life, they're the same thing. Otherwise life's not worth living."

Jacques Prévert, screenplay for Children of Paradise

Posted November 17, 12:00 AM

November 16, 2009

TT: After the fact

On Saturday I saw five copies of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong at the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Second Street and Broadway in Manhattan. It was the first time that I'd seen Pops in a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A little later in the day I heard from my friend Ariel Davis, who saw Pops in a store on the Upper East Side, snapped a picture of the display, and e-mailed it to me.

I published my first book in 1989, and I've been around the track several more times since then, so I can't honestly say that it thrilled me to the marrow to see yet another book of mine on sale. What pleased me most was the excitement of Ariel, who moved from Alabama to New York a couple of years ago and subsequently worked as one of my research assistants on Pops. "I'm beside myself seeing my name in print!" she tweeted.

While anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm the least blasé of people, I suppose it's inevitable that such experiences should sooner or later cease to be exciting to the professional writer. Dostoevsky said it: "Man gets used to everything--the beast!" It's been a long time since I got a charge out of seeing my name in print. Even so, I have yet to reach the level of detachment attained by Paul Hindemith when he decided that he was too busy to attend the world premiere of his Symphonia Serena in Dallas in 1947. "Why should I go to hear my own works?" he said to a friend.

Geoffrey Skelton, Hindemith's biographer, tells the rest of the story:

In the end he did consent to go, though only because he had a certain musical problem on his mind and thought that he could best work it out in the train, where he would be undisturbed. Carl Miller, who gave me the clearest account of this episode which is one of the favourite and most widely recalled ones at Yale, said that his students were amazed when he came into the classroom, grinning from ear to ear. "Why aren't you in Dallas?" they asked. "Because I had solved my problem by the time I got to New York," he said. "So I got out of the train and came back home."

I admire Hindemith's sangfroid--sort of--but I don't share it. To be sure, I'm pretty damn busy myself these days. Not only am I seeing shows most nights between now and the time when I hit the road for the first leg of my book tour, but I'm in the process of deciding on the subject of my next book, and Paul Moravec and I are also talking over various possibilities for our second opera. Yet it never occurred to me for a moment not to stop by Barnes & Noble on Friday, and when my friend told me how excited she was to see Pops on sale in her neighborhood bookstore, I thought at once of the morning in 1977 when my very first piece of professional writing, a concert review, was published by the Kansas City Star. I got up early that day, drove to the nearest honor box, popped in a quarter, pulled out a copy of the Star, and turned as quickly as I could to the page where my six-inch review was printed.

The eighteen-year-old H.L. Mencken did the same thing on February 24, 1899, the morning after he filed his first two stories for the Baltimore Herald. "I was up with the milkman the next morning to search the paper," he recalled in Newspaper Days, "and when I found both of my pieces, exactly as written, there ran such thrills through my system as a barrel of brandy and 100,000 volts of electricity could not have matched."

I remember, Ariel. Oh, how I remember.

Posted November 16, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"In that part of the book of my memory before which little can be read, there is a heading, which says: 'Incipit Vita Nova: Here begins the new life.'"

Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova (trans. A.S. Kline)

Posted November 16, 12:00 AM

November 15, 2009

YOU NEVER SAW ART TATUM SWEAT

Posted November 15, 2:09 PM

November 13, 2009

TT: Still crazy after all these millennia

Two thumbs-up reviews in today's Wall Street Journal: I raved about Goodspeed Musicals' revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the off-Broadway transfer of Avenue Q. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Some musicals are funnier than others, but few of the most memorable ones rise or fall on the strength of their jokes. "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," which opened on Broadway in 1962 and has been playing somewhere or other ever since, is an exception. It's the funniest musical ever written, give or take...well, nothing. The book, by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, could be performed without the songs and still work--and the songs are by Stephen Sondheim! To see "A Funny Thing," even in a fair-to-middling production, is to be enraptured, and Goodspeed Musicals' revival, directed and choreographed with whirlwind flair by Ted Pappas, leaves nothing at all to be desired in the make-'em-laugh department....

Except for "Comedy Tonight," Mr Sondheim's songs are rarely heard outside the context of the show, and most critics, myself previously included, typically fail to appreciate the contribution that they make to the total effect of "A Funny Thing." This time, though, I got it: Mr. Sondheim's neatly turned rhymes and clean, crisp harmonies, especially in "Free," play cleverly against the plot, adding a pinch of sweetness that sharpens the savor of the knockabout humor....

If you didn't catch it the first time around, "Avenue Q" is a parody of "Sesame Street" whose characters, a gaggle of underexperienced, overeducated college grads, move to New York City in search of fame, fortune and entry-level jobs, none of which they find. The show remains both fresh and timely--I know plenty of twentysomethings who are having at least as much trouble getting work as did their older brothers and sisters--and its digs at political correctness are, if anything, even more pointed today.

Most of the "stars" of "Avenue Q" are head-and-torso puppets that are manipulated by the performers in full view of the audience. Anika Larsen, who was playing Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut when "Avenue Q" ended its Broadway run, has made the transfer to New World Stages as well, and she proves to be equally adept as a puppeteer and as a singing actor...

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 13, 12:00 AM

TT: You never saw him sweat

Like most columnists, I try to keep up with anniversaries, but the centennial of Art Tatum's birth--October 13--slipped past me. No wonder, since scarcely anyone seems to have taken note of it, whether in print or on stage. Yet Tatum, who died in 1956, is still the most admired pianist in the history of jazz, and it seems likely that he will hang onto that status for decades, even centuries, to come. On the other hand, he isn't especially well known to the general public, at least not by comparison with Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington.

Why isn't Tatum a household name? Is it because jazz itself is no longer as popular as it used to be? Or might there be something about his elaborately virtuosic style that has kept him out of the public eye? I'll be exploring this question in my "Sightings" column for Saturday's Wall Street Journal. If you're curious, pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper and see what I have to say.

* * *

UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Art Tatum plays his jazz interpretation of Dvorak's "Humoresque" on The Faye Emerson Show in 1950:

Posted November 13, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"A difference in taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Posted November 13, 12:00 AM

November 12, 2009

TT: More Pops-related news

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong just got a rave from Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, an influential e-mail industry newsletter:

An exhilarating biography of an American original that also charts the way the U.S. and popular entertainment changed from 1921 to 1971....

With wit, authoritative musical knowledge and solid research, Terry Teachout lovingly chronicles Armstrong's career delivering happiness from his emergence in 1921 as a premier New Orleans jazz musician through his later fame as a popular entertainer...

In public, Armstrong ignored his critics because, as he stated, "showmanship does not mean you're not serious." In the privacy of his own home, though, he was more candid. Using Armstrong's personal writings and hours of tape recordings, Teachout reveals the scathing opinions Pops held of those knocking him and his success.

Audiences may have seen Armstrong as perennially happy and uncomplicated, but Teachout makes us aware of many crises behind the scenes. He discusses the influence of mobsters in jazz clubs and dance halls, the demeaning daily reality of segregation during Armstrong's early touring years and the in-fighting among leading jazz performers....

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

More bookshelf sightings: as of this morning, you can find Pops at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, Massachusetts, and five copies were on the shelves last night at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., where I'll be speaking in January. Watch this space for details.

Posted November 12, 11:37 AM

TT: On the shelves

A reader writes to say that he saw Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on sale in Pleasantville, New York--the first bookstore sighting that's been reported to me. (I'm out in the woods of Connecticut's "quiet corner" with Mrs. T and haven't been near a bookstore for the past week.)

If you should see Pops in a bookstore, would you kindly shoot me an e-mail? I'd like to monitor how quickly it starts to turn up across the country.

Posted November 12, 12:35 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 (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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, extended through Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• 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)
• The Understudy (farce, PG-13, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)

Posted November 12, 12:00 AM

TT: Second edition

Over the weekend I read an interview with an eighty-nine-year-old trumpet-playing World War II fighter pilot named Jack Tueller. In 1939 he played for Louis Armstrong, who gave him the following piece of professional advice:

Always play the melody, man. Look at them, see their age group, play their love songs, and you'll carry all the money to the bank.

I wish I'd been able to put that quote into Pops!

Posted November 12, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory."

Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming

Posted November 12, 12:00 AM

November 11, 2009

TT: Snapshot (in memoriam)

William Schuman's "When Jesus Wept," the second movement of New England Triptych, performed by Thomas Lee and the 2008 5A Texas All-State Symphonic Band. The tune is by William Billings:

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

Posted November 11, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world."

Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, Dec. 25, 1862

Posted November 11, 12:00 AM

November 10, 2009

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR

Posted November 10, 9:33 AM

TT: It's out!

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is now available for immediate online purchase and shipping from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you haven't bought any Christmas presents yet, you know what to do.

Posted November 10, 8:46 AM

TT: A rave for Pops

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is reviewed in the December issue of The Atlantic:

Teachout, an estimable critic, biographer, and former jazzbo, draws on newly available recordings and writings to limn the fullest portrait to date of the most popular and beloved figure in 20th-century music. This volume candidly explores the intersection of messy life events (drug use, marital strife, embouchure woes, and a public, segregation-prompted lambasting of President Eisenhower), personal paradoxes (a moody, profane, passive disposition at odds with the signature smile and deeply charismatic persona), and great art. It also offers shrewd analyses of many Armstrong compositions, including the chart-topping yet critically dismissed later works....

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Ready or not, here I come!

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is sending me on a coast-to-coast tour in support of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Here are the readings that I'll be giving in December:

• BOSTON, DECEMBER 3: Boston Athenaeum, 10½ Beacon St., 6:00 p.m.

• NEW YORK, DECEMBER 7: Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle, 1972 Broadway, 7:30 p.m.

• LOS ANGELES, DECEMBER 8: Los Angeles Public Library, 630 W. Fifth St., 7:00 p.m.

• BALTIMORE, DECEMBER 9: Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St., 6:30 p.m.

• PHILADELPHIA, DECEMBER 10: Philadelphia Free Library, 1901 Vine St., 7:30 p.m.

• CHICAGO, DECEMBER 15: Highland Park Library, 494 Laurel St., 6:00 p.m.

• ST. LOUIS, DECEMBER 16: Left Bank Books, 399 N. Euclid Ave., 7:00 p.m.

• NEW ORLEANS, DECEMBER 17: Garden District Bookshop, 2727 Prytania St., 5:30 p.m.

I'll also be doing quite a bit of radio along the way. Watch this space for details.

Posted November 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Like they used to

Last week I posted a photograph of the Signet paperback edition of Louis Armstrong's Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. It was published in the good old days when most mass-market paperback covers were designed in such a way as to suggest that the contents were thoroughly lurid.

In honor of the upcoming publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, one of my computer-savvy readers decided to do a bit of tinkering with the cover of the Signet edition of Satchmo. I was so delighted by the results that I decided to post them here as well.

I wish I could claim that Pops is that juicy! At least I can assure you that some of Armstrong's letters are very definitely for adults only....

Posted November 10, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Posted November 10, 12:00 AM

November 9, 2009

TT: It was twenty years ago today

One Saturday morning twenty years ago I got a call from Michael Pakenham, my boss at the New York Daily News, for which I was then writing foreign-policy editorials. "It looks like the Berlin Wall may be coming down," Michael said. "A million people are protesting in East Berlin. Get to the office as fast as you can. We've got to rip up the editorial page and get something into tomorrow's paper." I'd planned to spend the day taking it easy. Instead I watched history being made. Back then I was a suburbanite, so I jumped in my car, drove straight to Manhattan, and went to work. I can't remember exactly what Michael and I wrote that morning, but I do know that we wrote it in a frenzy of delight.

Five days later, on November 9, the wall was opened. I never thought I'd live to see that great day come to pass. I'll never forget it as long as I live.

* * *

Arts & Letters Daily has posted a superb compilation of wall-related links.

Posted November 09, 11:45 AM

TT: Consider the source

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong has been picked for the December Indie Next Great Reads List, a monthly list of twenty new books recommended by the American Booksellers Association to its member stores. Here's a sneak peek at the Indie Next capsule review of Pops, which was written by James Wilson of Octavia Books in New Orleans:

Terry Teachout has written an amazing biography of New Orleans' native son Louis Armstrong. Drawing on newly available primary sources, he weaves together a biography that is both illuminating and inspirational. Armstrong's contributions to jazz, pop culture, and breaking the color barrier are well told in a crisp, clean prose. Highly recommended!

High and gratifying praise indeed, coming as it does from the birthplace of jazz.

Go here to see the rest of the December list.

Posted November 09, 12:00 AM

TT: A kind of poet

Mrs. T and I recently got around to watching Turner Classic Movies' Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me, a Clint Eastwood-produced two-hour documentary full of priceless archival footage. It's being telecast in honor of the upcoming centennial of the birth of the author of the lyrics (and, on occasion, the music) to such classic songs as "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive," "Autumn Leaves," "Blues in the Night," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "Days of Wine and Roses," "Early Autumn," "Emily," "Jeepers Creepers," "I Remember You," "I Thought About You," "I Wonder What Became of Me," "I'm an Old Cowhand," "I'm Old Fashioned," "Laura," "Moon River," "One for My Baby," "Something's Gotta Give," "Skylark," and "That Old Black Magic."

Though Mercer is my favorite lyricist, I didn't write anything about The Dream's on Me because I'd already said what I had to say about him in "Too Marvelous for Words," an essay that I published in Commentary in 1994. Here is part of that piece, which has never been collected or reprinted since its original appearance.

* * *

Mercer's brand of lyricism--unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication--is unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like "Skylark" (1942): Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won't you tell me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone's waiting to be kissed? In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity....

Mercer was one of the few major American songwriters who were not big-city Easterners--he came from Savannah, Georgia--and to some extent his style reflects this difference of cultural background. At the same time, though, he was more than a homespun versifier who just happened to write popular songs. His creative impulse, unlike that of Ira Gershwin or Cole Porter, was essentially lyrical, and this quality intensified as he grew older--so much so that in such later songs as "Days of Wine and Roses" (1962), the melody, memorable though it may be, is not needed in order to heighten the poetic quality of the words: The days of wine and roses/Laugh and run away,/Like a child at play,/Through the meadowland toward a closing door,/A door marked "Nevermore,"/That wasn't there before....

Gene Lees paradoxically asserts that Mercer "was more than a poet, he was a lyricist." Like all paradoxes, this one sheds light without offering a definitive answer to the question it implies. My own published view, if less suggestive, has the virtue of being more clear-cut:

For all the utilitarian considerations that brought [his songs] into being, their aesthetic appeal is considerable, and the more I reflect on Mercer's achievement, the more I am inclined to think that he deserves to be considered not merely as a writer of supremely well-crafted song lyrics, but as one of the most gifted poets this country has produced.

Continued immersion in and reflection on Mercer's work has done nothing to change my opinion--though I would hasten to add that even his most frankly poetic lyrics are best heard in tandem with the melodies that inspired them. Hence they occupy the same equivocal position as, say, Bernard Herrmann's film scores, which are the products of a collaborative process and cannot be properly evaluated outside the context of that process. It is revealing that Mercer published no poetry, presumably because he felt he had no gift for writing it. Only in the crucible of collaboration did his talents manifest themselves completely.

Does this diminish the significance of his achievement? Must he necessarily be considered a lesser artist than a writer who works exclusively on his own? To make such a claim, after all, is by extension to relegate all forms of collaborative art to a lower level of excellence simply because of the process by which they came into being. Is Citizen Kane an inferior work because Orson Welles created it in collaboration with Herrmann, the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, and the cinematographer Gregg Toland? Conversely, is Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is the Ocean?" a better song than "Days of Wine and Roses" simply by virtue of the fact that Berlin wrote both words and music?

For me, the answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no--but whether or not that makes Johnny Mercer a true poet is another matter, and one about which he himself had nothing to say. Perhaps, though, one might look to one of his own lyrics, "One for My Baby," for an answer:

You'd never know it,
But buddy, I'm a kind of poet,
And I've gotta lotta things to say.
And when I'm gloomy,
You simply gotta listen to me,
Until it's talked away.

Who can doubt that the man who wrote these lines was at the very least "a kind of poet"? Or that the world will continue to listen to the things he had to say long after most of the full-fledged "poets" of our own day are dead and forgotten?

* * *

Johnny Mercer and the Hi-Los sing Mercer's "Jamboree Jones" on The Rosemary Clooney Show in 1956:

Johnny Mercer: The Dream's on Me will be replayed on TCM on November 18 (Mercer's hundredth birthday) and December 19. Go here for details.

The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, a handsome coffee-table book that reprints all of Mercer's lyrics, has just been published by Knopf.

Mosaic Select: Johnny Mercer, a three-CD box set, contains seventy-nine of the recordings that Mercer made as a singer between 1942 and 1947 for Capitol Records, the label that he co-founded.

Mercer also makes a cameo appearance on the version of "Lazy River" recorded by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong in 1960 for their only duet album, Bing & Satchmo. (You can download "Lazy River" individually from Amazon or iTunes.)

My favorite album of Mercer's songs is Nancy LaMott's Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer.

Posted November 09, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?"

Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Posted November 09, 12:00 AM

November 6, 2009

TT: All the way home

I review two off-Broadway shows, The Understudy and Nightingale, in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is great fun, the second so-so. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

I've been having trouble figuring out Theresa Rebeck--and I've had a lot of opportunities to try. She writes a new script (or two) every year, and most of her plays make it to New York sooner or later, which means that somebody out there must like them. Yet time and again Ms. Rebeck has served up the same disappointing dish, a smart, glib confection that starts off fresh, then goes flat at the halfway mark. So it's both a delight and a relief to report that "The Understudy" is a raucously funny farce that makes it all the way to the finish line, though the two halves of the play, each of which is effective in its own right, don't fit together, at least not neatly.

As the title suggests, Ms. Rebeck's new play is a backstage comedy about a frustrated actor with highbrow tendencies (Justin Kirk) whose inability to get work leaves him with no choice but to take a job as understudy to Jake (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), a second-tier action-movie hero who is diversifying his resumé by appearing on Broadway in a previously unpublished play by Franz Kafka. (The "Kafka" play is actually by Ms. Rebeck, and it's a hoot.) This being a farce, there's a king-sized catch: Roxanne (Julie White), the stage manager, is also the ex-fianceé of Harry, the understudy, who left her at the altar six years before without warning, explanation or good reason....

Farce is the trickiest of theatrical genres, but the first half of "The Understudy" is a little masterpiece of comic clockwork in which the craziness mounts steadily from scene to scene....

Lynn Redgrave needs no endorsements from critics, least of all me. She is one of the greatest actors of her generation, and it is always a blessing to see her on stage, whatever the circumstances. They aren't exactly propitious in "Nightingale," her new one-woman play, a part-true, part-imagined portrait of her maternal grandmother into which Ms. Redgrave has also woven a strand of personal reminiscence....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Posted November 06, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors."

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Posted November 06, 12:00 AM

November 5, 2009

TT: Julian Hope, R.I.P.

The man who made The Letter possible died a few weeks ago, though the news has only just been released.

Lord Glendevon, who went by his given name of Julian Hope, was the grandson and literary executor of Somerset Maugham, who wrote the play on which Paul Moravec and I based our opera. He was a noted opera director in his own right, and so he was enormously encouraging when Paul and I first approached him about adapting The Letter.

Alas, I never met Julian, who was too ill to attend the premiere of The Letter in Santa Fe. Judging by his affectionate obituaries, I missed out on an exceedingly good thing.

Paul, who got to know Julian a bit, passes on this reminiscence:

I met Julian for dinner in New York a few years ago to discuss plans and rights for The Letter. As steward of the Maugham estate, he enthusiastically supported the project and granted permission generously and expeditiously. I liked him immensely. He was a person of unpretentious intelligence and elegant civility, a true gentleman. We stayed in touch by e-mail and telephone as the project evolved, and though I didn't know him well, I still feel as though I've lost a good friend.

Would that I could say the same!

Posted November 05, 1:19 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 (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, closes Jan. 10, reviewed here)
• Finian's Rainbow (musical, G, suitable for children, dramatically inert but musically sumptuous, reviewed here)
• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 3, reviewed here)
• Oleanna (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, violence, reviewed here)
• South Pacific (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)
• A Steady Rain * (drama, R, totally unsuitable for children, closes Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• Superior Donuts (dark comedy, PG-13, violence, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Emperor Jones (drama, PG-13, contains racially sensitive language, extended through Dec. 6, reviewed here)
• 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)

Posted November 05, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror."

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paraliponema

Posted November 05, 12:00 AM

November 4, 2009

TT: If you can't wait until December 2 for Pops...

...you can always order a copy of the British edition, which went on sale last week.

Posted November 04, 2:47 PM

TT: Snapshot

The first movement of Peter Anastos' "Go for Barocco," a George Balanchine parody set to Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto and danced by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo:

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

Posted November 04, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"Blind and meaningless chance seems to me so much more congenial--or at least less horrible. Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair."

Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Posted November 04, 12:00 AM

November 3, 2009

A FINE MESS

Posted November 03, 2:29 PM

TT: Very strange bedfellows

I've been keeping an amused eye on the books, CD, and DVDs purchased by people who order an advance copy of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong from Amazon. Some, like The Skeptic, Gary Giddins' Satchmo, and Robin Kelley's new biography of Thelonious Monk, seem reasonably plausible. Others are...well, less so.

Here are some of the items that have been paired with Pops on Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" module:

• Brian Kellow's Ethel Merman: A Life

• Bob Dylan's Christmas in the Heart

• Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

• Douglas G. Brinkley's The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

• Dave Eggers' Zeitoun

• The Joan Crawford Collection, Vol. 2

• William Maxwell: Early Novels and Stories

• Michael Burleigh's Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism

• Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

• The Letters of Noël Coward

And here's the weirdest co-purchase of all:

• James Wood's How Fiction Works

Posted November 03, 1:42 PM

TT: Still more exciting Pops-related news

Amazon.com has chosen Pops as one of the ten best biographies of 2009.

To see the full list, go here.

Posted November 03, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"The canvas had that overly stunning, almost meretricious, quality of originals. The attention they call to themselves as such, to the oils laid on by a vanished hand, overcharge the aesthetic experience for the viewer, who oftener sees a fetish than a picture."

Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Posted November 03, 12:00 AM

November 2, 2009

TT: Mondays aren't so bad

Publishers Weekly just picked Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong as one of the best books of 2009.

Says PW: "Teachout's forceful reassertion of Louis Armstrong's significance to 20th-century America is a model for writing serious biography about pop culture icons."

To see the complete list, go here.

Posted November 02, 1:00 PM

TT: Real and right

Harcourt sent me the first finished copy of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong last Tuesday. It was an inordinately busy week crammed full of shows and deadlines, but I talked a sympathetic editor into giving me the rest of the day off and spent the afternoon and evening rereading the book. I spent a certain amount of time admiring the index, snuffling for typos--in vain, I'm glad to report--and confirming that the corrections I made on the galley proofs were incorporated into the final version. Mostly, though, I just flipped through the pages of Pops and marveled at how good it looked.

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe the printed book to be well on its way to ultimate extinction. As I put it in a "Sightings" column written in 2006, a year before the introduction of the Kindle:

The printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology--a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite lifespan, and its time is almost up.

On the other hand, I have yet to buy a Kindle, and at the moment I have no plans to do so. This is partly because I prefer to wait until the kinks are ironed out (I've never been a truly early adopter) and partly because, like most middle-aged authors, I remain enamored of the sheer physicality of the old-fashioned printed book. I was intimately involved in the design of Pops--I even chose the typeface, as I have for all my books--and I think it might just be the best-looking book with which I've been involved. The dust jacket is gorgeous, the typography balanced and legible, the photos flawlessly reproduced, the paper pleasing to the touch. All these things add up to a total aesthetic experience that I find immensely gratifying. To put it another way, the printed version of Pops is both a vessel filled with interesting information and an objet d'art that is beautiful in its own right.

So am I really a closet Luddite, a technological Moses who can't bring himself to enter the promised land of the e-book? Maybe. Six years ago I declared myself to be "open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object." Now that technology has finally caught up with me, I find myself unexpectedly unwilling to put my money where my mouth is. Yet I believe no less firmly than ever that the printed book is a technology whose time has come and gone. Am I, then, a hypocrite? Or merely a middle-aged man who, like most middle-aged men, is reluctant to put aside the youthful things that remind me of myself when young?

I hasten to point out that I no longer own any long-playing records or cassettes, and that I spend more time listening to music on my MacBook and iPod than on my CD player. No doubt the time will also come when I spend more time reading books on a Kindle, or something like it, than reading the handsomely bound volumes shelved in my living room. Not for me the self-conscious posturing of those curmudgeonly poseurs who wail Change and decay in all around I see! at every opportunity. Nor would I surprised if my next book, whatever it happens to be and whenever it happens to come out, is published solely in electronic form--yet I can't imagine that the thrill I get from downloading the first "copy" will be half so intense as the one I got last week when I held the first finished copy of Pops in my hands.

Posted November 02, 12:00 AM

TT: Almanac

"One dreams of the goddess Fame and winds up with the bitch Publicity."

Peter De Vries, The Mackerel Plaza

Posted November 02, 12:00 AM

November 1, 2009

FORTY YEARS OF CIVILISATION

Posted November 01, 8:42 PM

SATCHMO AND THE JEWS

Posted November 01, 7:43 PM