Archives for June 2004

Like most baby boomers, I’ve never quite managed to get over the feeling that I’m entitled to be less busy in the summer, not more. In fact, I’m barely keeping ahead of the next deadline, and though it’s true that my recent illness threw me off my stride, I’d be up well past my ears even if I hadn’t been sick.

I saw two shows on Saturday, for instance, and yesterday I put in eight straight hours cleaning up the copyedited manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which I have to return to Harcourt today so that they can publish it in November. In addition, I’m writing two newspaper pieces, one for Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal and another for the Washington Post, and tomorrow I write my drama column for the Journal. I’ll be in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday to see Ballett Frankfurt and Mark Lamos’ new production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (both at the Kennedy Center), after which I rush back to New York on Friday to hear Joao Gilberto at Carnegie Hall that evening. The whole cycle starts up again on Saturday, when…

But enough about me. You get the idea–I’m busy as hell–and while I’ll do my best to blog whenever I’m in town, I expect that the hitherto semi-invisible Our Girl in Chicago will be more or less in charge of “About Last Night” for the better part of the next couple of weeks. I’ve missed her genial presence in this space of late (as have many of our fellow bloggers), so be sure to send her lots of encouraging e-mail!

And now, a concise rundown of recently consumed art:

– I saw two plays over the weekend. The first was Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, the latest from the author of Intimate Apparel. The second was Charlie Victor Romeo, a performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six flights–five commercial, one military–that crashed. Both will likely figure in my Wall Street Journal drama column this Friday, so read all about ’em then.

– I also went to the Triad on Saturday night to hear Mary Foster Conklin and Mark Winkler sing the songs of Matt Dennis (“Angel Eyes,” “Everything Happens to Me”) and Bobby Troup (“Route 66,” “Meaning of the Blues”). Conklin, one of New York’s top cabaret singers, presented a one-woman Dennis show earlier this year at Danny’s Skylight Room, while Winkler, a Los Angeles-based performer best known on this side of the continent as one of the writers of Naked Boys Singing!, recently released a CD called, logically enough, Mark Winkler Sings Bobby Troup. The two hadn’t shared a stage prior to last Saturday night, and I’m delighted to say that their shows fit together with tongue-in-groove exactitude. “Songs of Matt Dennis & Bobby Troup” was, I’m told an experiment. If so, it’s one that begs to be repeated–frequently. Watch this space for details.

– Now playing on iTunes: not a damn thing, thank you very much. I need some silence so that I can concentrate on getting Piece Number One written and shipped off to the Journal so that I can get out of here in time to meet Maud downtown for a quickish lunch, followed by a doctor’s appointment, followed by more writing, followed by a nervous breakdown. (Just kidding.) Cross your fingers, please.

“The world is full of restaurants that were excellent a year ago.”

Woody Herman (quoted in Gene Lees, Leader of the Band)

Busy as usual–I’m still playing catch-up after my sick week–but at least everything I’m doing is worthwhile in one way or another. Most recently:

– Last night I saw New York City Ballet dance what is known to balletomanes as “the Greek program”: a triple bill of George Balanchine’s Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, each one set to a commissioned score by Igor Stravinsky. The company doesn’t dance the Greek program very often, and it’s always an event. I brought a jazz musician who’s just getting into ballet at my behest. He’d already seen Apollo, which he finds a bit puzzling, but he couldn’t say enough good things about Orpheus and Agon. (Neither can I.)

As for me, this was the first time I’d been to NYCB since turning in the manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, and it happens that I’ll be devoting most of the weekend to copyediting queries and my own final revisions, so it was nice to spend an evening with Mr. B just before settling down to polish the book I wrote about him.

– After I got home, I watched Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, a film I hadn’t seen since its theatrical release five years ago. (A friend of mine has a refrigerator magnet that says, “Time Flies, Whether You’re Having Fun or Not.”) Unlike Sexy Beast, another indie flick of the same vintage that I recently viewed and found rather less impressive than my memories of it (though Ben Kingsley is every bit as good as I’d thought), The Limey holds up and then some. A devastating neo-noir look at what the Sixties wrought, it’s the only film of Soderbergh’s since sex, lies, and videotape that’s made me think there’s more to him than his reputation.

– I’ve been reading Nolan Porterfield’s Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler. It’s an extreme rarity, an academic biography about an American popular musician that is both lucidly written and critically convincing. Published in 1979, it remains one of the very best books of its kind.

– I managed to rearrange my schedule and take Wednesday night off, and spent it rehanging the Teachout Museum in order to make room for a new acquisition, Fairfield Porter’s Ocean I. (Click on the link and scroll down to see a reproduction of the print in its two-color second state–I bought a copy of the first state, printed in three colors.) This ended up being quite an exhausting and comical process, since I had to schlep a heavy box containing the Porter down a long city block, drag it up two flights of stairs, then spend an hour or so rearranging the collection accordingly. Remember how hot it was on Wednesday? Well, I have high ceilings, and it was really hot up there. Consequently, I spent the better part of two hours sweating like an art-loving hog, perched on a rickety ladder in a highly advanced state of undress, which sort of suggests a porno movie for perverts with a sense of humor. On the other hand, the Teachout Museum now looks even more beautiful, so I guess it was worth it, right?

– Now playing on iTunes: Bill Frisell’s arrangement for solo acoustic guitar of “My Man’s Gone Now,” available on Ghost Town. It’s perfect–cool, spare, pensive. I wish he’d make a whole album just like that.

It’s Friday, so I’m in The Wall Street Journal, this time with reviews of two off-Broadway shows, Address Unknown and The Joys of Sex.

Address Unknown is a two-man show starring Jim Dale and William Atherton, both of whom make the most of a fairly obvious script:

Adapted from a 1938 short story that made a big splash long, long ago, “Address Unknown” is a “Love Letters”-type epistolary play about Max Eisenstein (Mr. Dale), a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin Schulse (Mr. Atherton), his Gentile partner and friend, who moves back to Germany in 1932 and promptly develops a massive crush on Hitler. Factor in the title and you can probably figure out most of the rest yourself (I did), not excluding the tricky “surprise” ending, which is strictly from O. Henry. What makes it all work are Messrs. Dale and Atherton, two old pros who act their parts to the hilt, ably enabled by the neat direction of Frank Dunlop and the flawless set (half streamlined, half gem

“She had an idea of the way things should be and edited reality heavily to conform with it.”

Laurie Colwin, Family Happiness (courtesy of Mindy Alter)

“All that I have produced before the age of seventy is not worth taking into account. At seventy-three, I learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. In consequence, when I am eighty, I shall have made still more progress. At ninety, I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 100, I shall certainly have reached a marvelous stage; and when I am 110, everything I do, be it a dot or a line, will be alive.”

Hokusai, A Hundred Views of Fuji

The hoopla over the final episodes of Frasier and Friends reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve watched any TV series at all regularly. I stopped following The Sopranos after 9/11, and no subsequent program has replaced it in my affections. Our Girl got me interested in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but I saw most of that show in large chunks, not week by week. These days, the only thing I watch on TV is movies.

I’m sure this says more about me than it does about television, though I do think it says something about television. In one of the essays reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, “The Myth of

As I returned home last night from seeing (and hearing) the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Bad Plus give the premiere of Violet Cavern, Morris’ new dance, at the BAM Opera House, I thought–not for the first time–that I really couldn’t live anywhere but New York. Fortunately, I know better, and sometimes I don’t even need to be reminded.

When I first got the idea for “About Last Night” some four or five years ago, I had a rather different venture in mind than the one you see before you now. I was rooting around for foundation support with which to launch an arts blog in collaboration with an existing print-media magazine, a venture to which I proposed to devote roughly a third of my time (and for which I would have been paid accordingly). It would have started out as a solo effort, but the original plan was for “About Last Night” to gradually take on other writers, developing over time into a full-fledged Web-based magazine on the arts in America. Accordingly, part of the money I sought was earmarked for a travel budget that would have made it possible for me to report on performances in cities other than New York.

A funny thing happened on the way to this pipe dream–several funny things, in fact. The one I least expected was that blogging would evolve in a completely different direction, in the process supplanting the conventional magazine model with which so many people who were then getting interested in the Web were then obsessed. For better and worse, individual blogs appear to be the way of the near future, though I also suspect that Web-based “newspapers” will soon start to become major media players. Still, I think the idea of a travel budget made and continues to make sense, not least because serious arts coverage in traditional media outlets is fast drying up. Time was when the weekly newsmagazines used to send their staff critics (and yes, they had staff critics) to performances all over the country. I got in on the tail end of that corporate largesse during my brief tenure as the classical music and dance critic of Time, but even then it was painfully obvious that truly national arts coverage was in the process of withering away, at Time and elsewhere.

This is bad news precisely because New York City and the arts are not consubstantial. It’s true that many of the good things that happen in the provinces–and I don’t use that term pejoratively–eventually make their way to Manhattan and its environs. But there are plenty of exceptions, enough that it would be perfectly possible for me to get out of town fifty-two weeks a year and see something fine each week.

The good news is that I do manage to get out of town with some regularity, frequently to Washington, D.C., and occasionally to other places as well. Earlier this year, for instance, I went to Washington specifically to see the Phillips Collection‘s Milton Avery retrospective, an important show that never left home. The Phillips was the first museum to acquire Avery’s paintings, and by the time of Duncan Phillips’ death it owned a dozen-odd oils and works on paper, to my knowledge the largest single cache of Averys in any museum in the world. It showed them all in “Discovering Milton Avery,” together with works owned by the violinist Louis Kaufman, the very first person ever to buy an Avery painting, plus a sprinkling of pieces from other institutions. “Discovering Milton Avery” didn’t quite add up to a full-scale blockbuster retrospective, but in a way it was even better–more concentrated and personal–and speaking as the happy owner of an Avery drypoint, I can assure you that I found it as exciting as any museum show I’ve seen in ages.

Not long before my visit to the Phillips, I contrived to fly down to Raleigh, N.C., again for a specific purpose: I wanted to watch Carolina Ballet dance Robert Weiss’s staged version of Handel’s Messiah, a ballet about which I’d been hearing good things for the past couple of years but had never previously been able to see. I departed for Raleigh two days after turning in the manuscript of my George Balanchine biography–a nice coincidence, since Weiss danced for Balanchine at New York City Ballet–and even though I was desperately busy, I was able to stay in town long enough to see two complete performances of Messiah in a single day. I’m glad I did. I’ve been writing enthusiastically about Weiss’ dances ever since he founded Carolina Ballet in 1997, but I think it’s possible that his Messiah is the best thing he’s done to date, which is saying something. It’s a masterly fusion of storytelling and abstraction (the first part is set in a London cathedral, while the last section is a plotless “white ballet”