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May 18, 2012
TT: Almanac
"PLATITUDE. An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true."
H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques
Posted May 18, 2012 12:00 AM
About...
ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS MORE ABOUT "POPS" ABOUT TERRY'S PLAY AND OPERA LIBRETTI The production will then transfer directly to Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., where it will run Oct. 3-Nov. 4. To order tickets, go here. To read more about Satchmo at the Waldorf, go here. To read an excerpt, go here. To see a video of excerpts from the 2011 Orlando production, go here. 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. Dicapo Opera Theatre will give The Letter its New York premiere on February 7, 2013. For more details, go here. To read Terry's reports on the writing, staging, premiere, and reception of the original production 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). MUSEUM DVD PLAY FILM BOOK
Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).
CD SCRIPT
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 critic-at-large 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, will be produced
this summer by Shakespeare & Company of Lenox, Mass., with John Douglas Thompson playing the dual role of Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser. Performance dates are Aug. 22-Sep. 16. To order tickets, go here.
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TOP FIVE
Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940 (Jewish Museum, up through Sept. 23). A wide-ranging, thoughtfully curated, and unusually beautiful show of fifty paintings and works on paper by the most underappreciated of post-impressionist masters. Very strongly recommended, especially if you suffer from the sorely mistaken notion that Vuillard's later portrait were created merely to please his high-society clients (TT).
Mr. Charles Laughton. Now on home video for the first time, an ultra-rare kinescope of a Christmas special originally telecast by NBC in 1951 in which Laughton presented a shortened version of the much-admired program of prose and poetry readings that he performed throughout America during the Forties and Fifties. Not only is it hugely entertaining, but it's touching--almost hurtfully so--to see what network TV executives once thought suitable for mass consumption (TT).
Man and Superman (Irish Rep, 132 W. 22, closes June 17). George Bernard Shaw's marvelously excessive 1905 philosophical comedy, skillfully trimmed from five hours to three and staged by David Staller with the kind of propulsive comic force that makes a long evening feel short. The cast is first-rate, but the play's the thing (TT).
Damsels in Distress. At long last, Whit Stillman is back, this time with a poignant little low-budget romcom about college life whose protagonists, a band of invincibly innocent young women led by Greta Gerwig, endeavor to socialize and redeem the young men they love by starting an international dance craze. (Well, sort of.) Fey, whimsical, talky, and quintessentially Stillmanesque, Damsels in Distress proves that the writer-director of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco didn't lose his feather-light touch by taking a twelve-year-long vacation (TT)
Charlie Louvin with Benjamin Whitner, Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers (Igniter/HarperCollins, $22.99). A hair-raisingly frank memoir by half of the greatest vocal duet in the history of country music. Ira Louvin was the hell-raiser with the sky-high tenor voice who got all the ink, but it was his brother Charlie who lived to tell the tale of how the Louvin Brothers went from picking cotton in Georgia to singing on the Opry--and how Ira cracked up along the way. Satan Is Real may be ghostwritten, but it sounds completely authentic, and every page will hold your attention (TT).
Out of the Past
Louis Jordan 1938-1950 (Fremeaux & Associés, two CDs). Imported from France, a near-perfect selection of thirty-six 78 sides by the singer-saxophonist and his Tympany Five, the jumping combo whose hard-swinging brand of populist jazz helped to set the musical agenda for rhythm and blues and early rock and roll. Not to worry--most of the big hits are here ("Choo-Choo Ch'Boogie," "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby," "Saturday Night Fish Fry"). If Jordan's joyous music doesn't make you smile and/or pat your foot, you need an intervention, or maybe a lobotomy (TT).
Horton Foote, Horton Foote's Three Trips to Bountiful: Teleplay, Stageplay, and Screenplay. Originally written for live TV in 1953, The Trip to Bountiful, the poignant story of an old woman trapped in Houston who longs to visit her rural home one last time, was adapted by Foote for the stage and, in 1983, the screen. This invaluable 1993 volume, published by Southern Methodist University Press, contains all three scripts, accompanied by interviews with Foote and his various collaborators. I can't think of a better way to study the differences between the three media--or to deepen your familiarity with a once-obscure play that is now rightly regarded as an American classic (TT).
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