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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Three channels and plenty on

March 2, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Having grown up in a small Midwestern town in the Sixties, most of my formative cultural experiences came to me via network television. This was one of them:

[Louis] Armstrong’s moral wholeness was caught in the words his mother spoke to him on her deathbed in 1927: ”Son, carry on. You’re a good boy. You treat everybody right, and everybody white and colored loves you. You have a good heart. You can’t miss.” Thirty-seven years later, I saw him for the first time, singing ”Hello, Dolly” on ”The Ed Sullivan Show.” I didn’t know who the old man with the ear-to-ear smile was, but I can remember my mother calling me into the living room and saying: ”This man won’t be around forever. Someday you’ll be glad you saw him.” That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my hometown were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had once been wrought, white people came to love Louis Armstrong–and, just as important, to respect him–not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the self-evident goodness of the man who made it.

Now that ABC, CBS, and NBC have lost their once-central position in American culture, I find myself recalling with intense nostalgia the TV shows that did so much to introduce me to the world beyond the city limits of Smalltown, U.S.A. These are the ones I remember best:


– NBC’s 1960 color telecast of Jerome Robbins’ musical version of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, was shot on videotape and rerun annually for a few seasons thereafter (I probably didn’t get around to seeing it until 1962 or so). It was a rarity that has since become rarer still: a TV version of a Broadway show that reproduced the original production with complete accuracy. Years later Robbins restaged “I’m Flying” for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, and I was astonished by how clearly I remembered the number, in which Martin and the Darling children fly around the stage. Not long after that, the videotape was digitally restored and released, first on videocassette and then on DVD. I can see why it made so powerful an impression on me: it’s one of Robbins’ most perfectly realized pieces of theatrical work.


– I can’t remember when I first started watching Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on CBS, but it must have been some time in the early Sixties. I found them enthralling, and still do. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal when they were first released on home video:

Leonard Bernstein spent an enormous amount of time and energy using TV, the ultimate middlebrow medium, to introduce ordinary Americans to the wonders of classical music. He taught a generation of children, myself among them, to love Bach, Beethoven, Brahms–and Copland.


No small part of his influence derived from the fact that the Young People’s Concerts were broadcast on CBS. Back in 1958, there were only three networks, and the FCC obliged them to devote a certain amount of time to high culture. Yet even without government oversight, I suspect they would have found time for Bernstein, because they were run by men who believed they had an obligation to offer their customers a not-so-occasional taste of something more elevating than “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I doubt that Ed Sullivan cared much for Maria Callas or Edward Villella, but that didn’t stop him from putting them on his show, along with Louis Armstrong and the original cast of “West Side Story.” All was grist for the middlebrow mill.

– My first exposure to great art was in 1964, when NBC broadcast a documentary called The Louvre: A Golden Prison. I don’t remember it clearly–I was only six when The Louvre aired–but the fact that I remember it at all suggests that I must have been paying pretty close attention.


– In 1966, near the end of the long-gone days when the three networks still aired high-culture programs on Sunday afternoons, I saw a telecast of a recital at which David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter played the Brahms D Minor Violin Sonata, Op. 108. (This must have been the show I saw.) It was because of Oistrakh’s playing that I took up the violin. Eight years later, I played the first movement of the D Minor Sonata in a music contest and got a “1” from the judges.


– CBS telecast Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! in 1967. Last summer Holbrook brought the show back to Broadway, and I reviewed it for the Journal:

Though Mr. Holbrook has based his self-directed interepretation on published reports of Clemens’ platform mannerisms–the ice-cream suit, the cigar that wouldn’t stay lit, the deadpan facetiousness and long, long pauses that gave the impression that he was making the whole thing up on the spot–his Mark Twain is no museum piece. Indeed, it scarcely seems like a performance at all. From the moment he steps on stage, you simply take for granted that Twain himself is up there talking to you, cracking sly jokes about the vanity of human wishes and the perpetual follies of “the political acrobats running for office.”


Like most theatergoers of my generation, I first saw “Mark Twain Tonight!” on TV. CBS aired it in prime time in 1967 (the telecast is now available on DVD from Kultur), and my youthful memories of the show remain indelibly vivid, far more so than the only existing film footage of Samuel Clemens, a tantalizingly brief clip shot by Thomas Edison in 1909 and viewable on the Web at www.hannibal.net/twain. No doubt in large part because Mr. Holbrook had to create his own characterization without the aid of film or sound recordings, it has the kind of thickly layered imaginative detail that no mere impersonator could summon up….

Talk about life coming full circle!


– The following year CBS aired a Carnegie Hall recital by Vladimir Horowitz in prime time. I was staggered by it–as well I should have been, since it was the first piano recital I ever saw. So far as I know, this concert has never been released on video (or repeated on TV, for that matter). The soundtrack of the telecast, however, is available on CD, and a quick listen shows that I had pretty damn good taste when I was twelve.


The three networks basically gave up on high culture after the founding in 1967 of PBS (which we didn’t get in Smalltown, U.S.A.). Forty years later, PBS has done the same thing, more or less. You can still find a certain amount of high-culture programming on cable TV, but you have to go looking for it, and it doesn’t have anything like the same impact that Horowitz had when he played Chopin, Scarlatti, Schumann, and Scriabin in prime time–and did so with the imprimatur of CBS, back when that still meant something.


Is life better in today’s radically decentralized world of entertainment-when-you-want-it? Maybe. Probably. But I still miss Peter Pan.

TT: So you want to see a show?

March 2, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.


Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.


BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, extended through July 9)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– The Pajama Game (musical, G, reviewed here, closes June 18)

– Sweeney Todd* (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)


OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)

– I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, strong language, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)


CLOSING SOON:

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)

TT: Almanac

March 2, 2006 by Terry Teachout

He told his life story to Mrs Courtly

Who was a widow. “Let us get married shortly,”

He said. “I am no longer passionate,

But we can have some conversation before it is too late.”


Stevie Smith, “Autumn”

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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