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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 24, 2006

TT: My world (and welcome to it)

March 24, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I’m back in my Washington hotel room once more, having just wrapped up another excruciatingly long day.


I’ve been too busy to visit the hotel gym, so I decided to work up a sweat by walking to the Old Post Office instead of taking a cab. As I left the hotel at eight-thirty, I noticed two Secret Service snipers lurking on the White House roof–a sight I’d never seen–as well as a hardy little group of picketers marching up and down the sidewalk, chanting “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Wal-Mart’s got to go!” to the accompaniment of a banging drum as a nearby cameraman clicked away.


The National Council on the Arts met from nine to six (we worked straight through lunch, dining on pasta salad at the conference table). Afterward I hopped a cab to the Phillips Collection, my favorite museum, where I saw a lovely show called Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris, 1870-1910, assembled in collaboration with Tate Britain and installed with exceptional elegance and lucidity by the staff of the Phillips. You can read all about it by clicking the link, so I’ll say only that I just saw more paintings by Walter Sickert in a single evening than I’d previously seen in my entire life, in addition to which I also made the acquaintance of some interesting works by several other English artists who are rarely if ever shown in this country. I especially liked a Max Beerbohm-like caricature of Toulouse-Lautrec
by William Rothenstein, Beerbohm’s classmate and close friend.


(Incidentally, I learned at today’s meeting that the Phillips Collection has digitized its entire collection of American paintings, an undertaking for which the NEA helped to pay. Go here and you can browse the museum’s online collection, which is a model of art-related Web-site design.)


I went from the Phillips to Olives, where I had a tasty, unhurried, and solitary dinner (I was supposed to meet a friend, but she had to cancel at the last minute). Now I’m about to curl up in bed with Michael Ruhlman’s Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit, a remarkable book that Our Girl gave me for my fiftieth birthday but which I’ve only just looked into, perhaps because books about heart surgery aren’t the most comforting leisure-time reading for someone who recently survived a bout with congestive heart failure!


On Friday morning the NCA holds a public meeting, after which I’ll take the next train back to New York, rest a bit, then head down to the Zipper Theatre to see a press preview of the new off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. I have yet another show on Saturday afternoon, followed by a full day of writing for The Wall Street Journal.


Sigh.


* * *


I’ll be holed up in one of my secret hideaways all next week, working on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I’ll probably post a daily almanac entry and the usual Thursday and Friday drama-related stuff, but absolutely no more than that (though I’m sure Our Girl will have something to say from time to time).


Later.

TT: The road to nowhere

March 24, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I got out of town for the first half of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, a review of Two River Theater Company’s new production of Waiting for Godot, which I reviewed in tandem with an off-Broadway stage version of The Screwtape Letters:

Samuel Beckett would have turned 100 next month–but so far, next to no attention has been paid to the Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s centennial. Except for an Off-Broadway “Waiting for Godot” that got swallowed up by the transit strike, there have been no Beckett revivals of significance in New York this season (though the Irish Repertory Theatre mounted a very fine “Endgame” last year). According to samuel-beckett.net, the semi-official Beckett Web site, only two full-scale Beckett festivals are being held in the entire U.S., one in Atlanta and the other in Red Bank, a small New Jersey city best known to culture vultures as the home town of Count Basie and Edmund Wilson.


It was news to me that Red Bank is also the home of a theater company, much less that the company in question had the gumption to put on its very own Samuel Beckett Festival. My curiosity having been piqued, I rented a car, drove there last Saturday, and saw a production of “Waiting for Godot” that couldn’t have been better….


Clowning about matters metaphysical is not the exclusive privilege of unbelievers. Fellowship for the Performing Arts, an organization that supports “the integration of faith and the arts,” is currently presenting an Off-Broadway stage version of C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” the wickedly witty epistolary novel in which His Abysmal Sublimity Screwtape, Under Secretary of the Satanic Lowerarchy, instructs his nephew Wormwood, a doltish junior tempter, in the fine art of persuading unwitting humans to part with their souls. It is–if I may say so–one hell of a good show….

No link, naturally, so do the right thing: buy a copy of today’s Journal and read the entire review (which is ever so much longer!). Or, as always, you can go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with on-the-spot access to the full text of my review, along with an abundance of additional art-related coverage.

TT: Gotcha

March 24, 2006 by Terry Teachout

– A reader writes:

Re: strong-voiced opinions and readers who object.


My all-time favorite complaint came from a reader who wrote a letter to the editor near the beginning of my career at the South Bend Tribune. He was objecting to a theater review I had written. The letter began: “Who is this Mark Stryker? He doesn’t seem to have any opinions but his own.”

Ha!


– A friend writes:

“…some of the paintings are very familiar….attracting hordes of noisy visitors….”


From About Last Night, April 1, 2010: “I was happy when they turned the National Gallery into a Duane Reade, and I’ll be even happier later this week when they do the same to the Phillips. These institutions, which have long outlived their day, should be doing something useful, like selling hairspray, cheap soda, and bowel prep kits.”

Double ha!


(P.S. To order a really nice book of postcards from the National Gallery’s C

TT: Almanac

March 24, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“There’s an incredible amount of comedy in this world, and a horrendous amount of tragedy, and you don’t want to let the tragedy define what you do.”


Dr. Frank Moga (quoted in Michael Ruhlman, Walk on Water: Inside an Elite Pediatric Surgical Unit)

TT: Peekaboo

March 24, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Guess who said this?

I seem to be really drawn to minor keys. Some people would say, well, they’re melancholy or they’re dark, but I don’t think so. I think they’re richer and I get a sense when I listen to a minor key that the composer has somehow worked harder at it.

You’ll be surprised.


(Thank you, Alex Ross.)


Incidentally, here’s something relevant that I wrote for Commentary a couple of months ago apropos of Mozart’s minor-key works:

I refer to the comparatively small number of multi-movement works cast in minor keys–two piano sonatas out of 17, two piano concertos out of 27, two symphonies out of 41. For while these and other minor-key works of like scale are not necessarily of higher quality than their major-key counterparts, they do share a special intensity of expression not found in such major-key masterpieces as the C Major Symphony, K. 551, familiarly known as the “Jupiter.”


This intensity manifests itself in many ways, from the turbulence of the first movement of the D Minor Piano Concerto, K. 466, to the crisp austerity of the E Minor Violin Sonata, K. 304. Sometimes, as in the G Minor String Quintet, K. 516, one perceives the minor-key quality as a tint, a single aspect of a carefully balanced, classically poised totality. At other times, as in the unabashedly stern A Minor Piano Sonata, K. 310, it becomes overwhelming, infusing an entire piece with its distinctive coloration. In every case, though, the large-scale minor-key pieces, different as they are from one another, are similar in their power to stir the listener’s emotions, just as one feels, whether rightly or wrongly, that Mozart’s own emotions were more fully engaged in the act of their creation–that he was somehow playing for higher stakes….

I’d say I’m on the same page as our mystery guest!

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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