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"The possibility of venting or distilling friendly or unfriendly feelings through the medium of literary criticism is what makes that art such a skewy one."
Vladimir Nabokov, interview with Alvin Toffler (Playboy, January 1964)
Posted November 4, 2011 12:00 AM
ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS MORE ABOUT "POPS" ABOUT TERRY'S PLAY AND OPERA LIBRETTI Terry collaborated with Paul Moravec on Danse Russe, a backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring that was premiered by Philadelphia's Center City Opera Theater on April 28, 2011. To read more about Danse Russe, go here and here. To view excerpts from the opera and see Paul and Terry talk about its creation, go here. Terry previously collaborated with Paul 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, 2009. 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.
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A list of new things we've liked (subject to unexpected and wildly capricious updating). BOOK CD PLAY FILM CATALOGUE
Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).
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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.
Terry's latest book is Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S., JR Books in England, Larousse in Brazil, and United Press/Alpina in Russia. He is currently at work on Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. He wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback editions of Richard Stark's Flashfire and Firebreak and Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance, and he contributed notes on recordings by Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, and Oscar Peterson to Jazz: The Smithsonian Anthology.
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.
Terry's first play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, was premiered on September 15, 2011, at Orlando Shakespeare's Mandell Theatre in Orlando, Florida. To read more about Satchmo at the Waldorf, go here. To read an excerpt, go here.
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TOP FIVE
Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Vintage, $17 paper). This splendid 2010 biography of the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune, now available in paperback, is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of American magazine journalism. Though Brinkley isn't the most scintillating of stylists, he's got all the facts at his fingertips and sets them forth them in a sober yet eminently readable way. I don't know when I last read another biography that I wished had been longer (TT).
A Minister's Wife (PS Classics). The original-cast recording of the Lincoln Center Theatre production of this musical version of George Bernard Shaw's Candida is a major event. I called it "the most important new musical since The Light in the Piazza" when I reviewed the show in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, and now you can revel at leisure in Joshua Schmidt's astringent yet tuneful score. If you didn't see A Minister's Wife on stage, make haste to hear it on record (TT).
Lemon Sky (Keen Company, Clurman Theatre, 410 W. 42, closes Oct. 22). Lanford Wilson's 1970 coming-of-age play, like the rest of his prolific output, has faded from view in recent years, but Keen Company's letter-perfect off-Broadway revival makes a powerfully compelling case for this Glass Menagerie-derived tale of a sensitive teenage boy whose long-delayed reunion with his divorced father proves to be wrenchingly disrupting. How good was Wilson? Judging by this superlative production, it's time for a full-scale reconsideration of his work (TT).
The Last Picture Show (Film Forum, 209 W. Houston, closes Thursday). Peter Bogdanovich's classic 1971 study of small-town life in postwar America is now showing at Manhattan's Film Forum in a brand-new print. Eileen Brennan, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, and Cybill Shepherd are all amazingly, even startlingly true to life. Yes, they really did make better movies in the Seventies, and this was one of the very best of the lot (TT).
Debra Bricker Balken, John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury (Yale, $40). The catalogue of the Portland Museum's superlative exhibition of Marin's late paintings and watercolors, which runs through Oct. 10, is itself a first-class effort, a penetrating study of a great painter whose work is no longer widely known save to students of American modernism. Might a Marin revival be in the offing? Between this show and the watercolor retrospective now on display at Atlanta's High Museum, it's starting to look like a real possibility. Read Balken's book and find out what you've been missing (TT).
Out of the Past
John Williams, Stoner (New York Review Books, $14.95 paper). This darkly stoic novel, which tells the story of a Missouri farm boy who became a professor of literature, is reminiscent of and directly comparable in quality to Willa Cather's O Pioneers! Originally published in 1965, it is an insufficiently heralded masterpiece, one of the most remarkable novels to be published in this country in the Sixties. Don't look to Stoner if you want to have your heart warmed, but anyone strong enough to look straight into the dual abyss of marital estrangement and frustrated aspiration will find it extraordinary in every way (TT).
The Essential Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, 1945-1948 (Sony, two CDs). Bluegrass took shape in these classic recordings, the best of which also feature Lester Flatt on guitar and lead vocals and Earl Scruggs on banjo--a supergroup by any conceivable standard. Listen first to "It's Mighty Dark to Travel" and you'll hear in three electrifying minutes exactly what Monroe and his colleagues contributed to the history of American music (TT).
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