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

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS 
Terry's latest book is Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and JR Books in England. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance. He contributed an essay to Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books (as did OGIC) and wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. more

MORE ABOUT "POPS" 
To read reviews of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, watch TV interviews and listen to radio interviews and podcasts about the book, and find out the answers to frequently asked questions about Armstrong and Pops, click on the link. more

ABOUT TERRY'S FIRST OPERA 
Terry collaborated with Paul Moravec on The Letter, an operatic version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play that was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera in 2006 and opened there on July 25. To see excerpts from the opera, go here. To read Terry's reports on the writing, production, premiere, and reception of The Letter, click on the link. more

TERRY'S TWITTERS 

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

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TOP FIVE

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

ORIGINAL CAST ALBUM 
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Ghostlight). Now on CD, the score of the first Broadway musical ever to make fully effective and idiomatic use of rock. Michael Friedman's hard-edged, guitar-driven emo-style songs are tuneful, smart, and catchy (especially "Ten Little Indians"). Nor is there the slightest trace of slickness: this is real rock, not the synthetic kind. See the show by all means, but the best of it is right here (TT).

BOOK 
David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Updated and Expanded (Knopf, $40). There's still no room for Whit Stillman or Parker Posey in the newly revised fifth edition of the most idiosyncratically interesting of all books about movies, which says much about the author's increasingly quaint big-is-best perspective: David Thomson continues to believe that Hollywood has the power to make America a better place, and fears that it is no longer fulfilling its culture-shaping potential. Fortunately, you can easily ignore that aspect of the book and concentrate instead on its crisp, wholly personal, and unfailingly illuminating appraisals of everyone from Humphrey Bogart to Orson Welles. Thomson may be old-fashioned, but that doesn't make him predictable, much less irrelevant (TT).

BOOK 
Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (Simon & Schuster, $35). Who knew that the private life of the man who made The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth would turn out to be so scandalous? Yet DeMille's three mistresses are only a small part of this solidly written, impeccably researched biography, which traces with satisfying skill the nineteenth-century roots of the director's grandiose, often cartoonish style of epic filmmaking. It's one of the best Hollywood biographies to come along in recent years (TT).

PLAY 
A Life in the Theatre (Gerald Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45, closes Jan. 2). David Mamet's 1977 two-man play about a pair of actors, one young and one old, who are battling for dominance over one another, now on Broadway in a production graced by a superlative performance from Patrick Stewart. Though his acting is unmistakably English in tone--Americans expect a faster pace in Mamet--Stewart is fully alive to the complicated mixture of envy and rue that his character feels as he watches his younger, more talented colleague (T.R. Knight) take flight. The results are poignant and compellling (TT).

DVD 
Me & Orson Welles (Warner). Richard Linklater's 2009 film, now out on home video, is a witty, ingenious, perfectly cast, brilliantly designed, and astonishingly well informed backstage rom-com about the Mercury Theatre's 1937 Broadway production of Julius Caesar. It didn't get nearly as much attention as it deserved when it was released, and I saw it purely by chance on an airplane a couple of months ago. Catch up with it now and prepare to be both charmed and enthralled. I don't know when I've seen a better movie about what it feels like to put on a play (TT).

Out of the Past

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

CD 
Mitchell's Christian Singers, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1 (1934-1936) (Document). The rough-hewn, sometimes startlingly dissonant a cappella harmonies of this vocal quartet, which traveled from North Carolina to Carnegie Hall in 1939 to sing at John Hammond's first From Spirituals to Swing concert and subsequently got written up in Time, have since caught the ears of everyone from Bob Crosby to Maria Muldaur. The first volume of Document's comprehensive reissue of the group's 78 recordings contains its best-known side, "Traveling Shoes," plus plenty of other gospel songs that swing and shout like nobody's business (TT).

NOVEL 
John P. Marquand, So Little Time. All but forgotten today, this 1943 study of a disappointed playwright who married up and sold out is also a powerfully evocative snapshot of America on the eve of World War II. It's not a great book by any means, and Marquand would work the same turf more effectively in Point of No Return and Women and Thomas Harrow, but I can't think of another American novel that does a better job of suggesting what it felt like to watch the world sliding toward catastrophe (TT).

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