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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Your daily dose of schadenfreude

June 29, 2005 by Terry Teachout

For those of you who loathe New York City and everything in it, please know that my adopted home town is obscenely hot and humid today. I just returned from a visit to the National Academy Museum and am too limp to blog about it. I’m supposed to go hear an outdoor concert in Central Park tonight and am praying for a timely thunderstorm.


Gloat while you can. Your time will come.


UPDATE: Sure enough, the sky fell, but I went to the concert anyway, got soaked to the skin, and had a wonderful time. The breeze blew the humidity away and the rain drove the malcontents away, meaning that everybody who toughed it out was in a mood to be pleased when the music started. Pink Martini, whom I adore (I have such a crush on China Forbes),
opened the proceedings with a wonderfully polished set, while David Byrne, who is touring with a six-piece string section, filled all the aging scenesters in the crowd with delight. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard several thousand happy concertgoers howling Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? at the top of their lungs.


No sooner did Byrne hit the stage than fancy footwork broke out in our quadrant of the park–I was especially charmed by two somewhat youngish ladies who spent the entire evening performing what can only be called an interpretative dance–and by the time his set was over, the sun had finally set and the lights of Manhattan were bouncing off the low-lying thunderheads, tinting them a dark reddish-orange.


As I walked home, I asked myself if there were any other place in the world where I might possibly care to live. Answer came there none….

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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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