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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: And to all a good night

December 25, 2003 by Terry Teachout

My mother and I just finished watching Holiday Inn and Meet Me in St. Louis on TV. Holiday Inn is a much-loved film whose shining parts are greater than their slightly commonplace sum: Astaire and Crosby, “Say It With Firecrackers,” and two terrific Irving Berlin songs, “You’re Easy to Dance With” and “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” that got lost in the looming shadow of “White Christmas.” Meet Me in St. Louis, on the other hand, might just be the most underrated of all the great movie musicals. Sure, it’s a bit heavy on the Hollywood nostalgia, but Judy Garland is at her purest and best, Vincente Minnelli’s direction is unobtrusively right, and the score–the score! Was there ever a movie that contained three songs as fine as “The Boy Next Door,” “The Trolley Song,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”? (Yes, I know, Top Hat, but that film exists in a realm beyond comparison.) Even the orchestrations, by Conrad Salinger, are exquisite.


I enjoyed tonight’s double feature so much that it almost made me forget how irritated I was by a story I read in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal about how red and green are sooooo pass

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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, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [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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