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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for September 11, 2017

Not so far away

September 11, 2017 by Terry Teachout

Twelve years ago, as Hurricane Katrina was wreaking havoc on New Orleans, I briefly turned this blog into a homemade, manually updated aggregator of storm-related blogs and other websites—the first such page, so far as I know, ever to be created. It attracted wide attention and was viewed throughout the world.

To revisit that short-lived exercise in citizen journalism is, as I recalled last year, is a strange experience:

I sound like a whiskery old ham-radio operator reminiscing about the marvels of Morse code. It’s easy to forget that blogging was still revolutionary in the days of Katrina….Nowadays, of course, it would never have occurred to me to turn this site into a “stormblog.” Twitter and Facebook long ago superseded blogs as the medium of choice for snap responses to the news of the day.

I’m leaving Hurricane Irma to Twitter and to the professionals—but I’m paying even closer attention to what they have to say. The reason for my particular attention is that Mrs. T and I spend part of each winter in Florida and have good friends and colleagues who live in several of the cities about which you’ve been reading of late. Not only is Billy and Me, my new play, set to open on December 8 in West Palm Beach, where I spent a month last year directing Satchmo at the Waldorf, but I’ve come in recent years to think of Sanibel Island, to which Irma paid a visit on Sunday, as something of a second home. Mrs. T and I have spent countless hours strolling up and down its shelly beaches, eating in its cozy restaurants, and sitting on the back porch of the beach bungalow that we rent each January, gazing contentedly at the Gulf of Mexico. I wonder what that bungalow looks like today.

I can only begin to imagine the feelings of my Florida friends, some of whom toughed out Irma and the rest of whom fled her capricious wrath as best they could. I reached out to them by e-mail last week, and started hearing back from them last night. My heart aches for them all.

Mrs. T and I have been on the move since Saturday, seeing shows in New Jersey and Philadelphia. Nevertheless, we are much preoccupied with Florida, and I have no doubt that we will remain so for some time to come. It is, of course, too soon to say what effect, if any, the coming of Irma will have on the Palm Beach Dramaworks premiere of Billy and Me. I already know, however, that Hurricane Harvey has forced a change in the schedule for the Alley Theatre’s Houston production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which will open a week earlier than originally planned, on February 23. We hope to be there anyway, and come November we also expect to be down in West Palm Beach, rehearsing Billy and Me.

Where we’ll go from there remains to be seen. We were planning to spend Christmas on Sanibel, something we’ve never done before, then see shows in Coral Gables, Fort Myers, Jupiter, Miami, Naples, Orlando, and Sarasota. All that now rests in the hands of the gods, whose recent behavior reminds me of Gloucester’s terrible outburst in King Lear: As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods./They kill us for their sport. May they prove to have treated the people of Florida more mercifully than Gloucester and the willful king he loved and served.

To all our friends down there, Mrs. T and I send all the love we have in us. You are not far from our minds.

UPDATE: Bill Hayes, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ artistic director and the director of Billy and Me, tells me that the theater survived Hurricane Irma intact.

Sanibel Island also appears to have escaped significant damage. As for our bungalow, it got through the storm without a scratch.

Sixteen years after

September 11, 2017 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKNot long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about where I was and what I did that day:

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age….

Read the whole thing here.

Just because: Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony

September 11, 2017 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAValery Gergiev leads the National Youth Symphony in a performance of the scherzo from Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, composed in 1953. Shostakovich is said to have been portraying Stalin, who died earlier that year, in this movement:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Philip K. Dick on evil

September 11, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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