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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 2006

TT: In the mood

November 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I set my iBook on shuffle play the other night and sat down at the kitchen table to fill up my seven-day pillbox. (Don’t let anybody tell you that the life of a Manhattan drama critic isn’t exciting!) As Aimee Mann started singing “Deathly,” I glanced at the clock, saw that it was eleven, and suddenly found myself remembering a conversation I had thirty-odd years ago with a long-lost college friend. She was a slightly older married woman who had long, ash-blonde hair, thin legs, and a bone-dry sense of humor, all of which I found irresistibly (and unrequitedly) appealing. Those were the days when I was hosting a late-night jazz show on the campus radio station, and my friend remarked that she liked it when I played “eleven o’clock music.”

“What’s eleven o’clock music?” I asked innocently.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Music to…you know. That’s when my husband and I like to do it.”

This offhand remark promptly triggered a near-incapacitating spasm of jealousy, which doubtless explains why it burned itself into my memory, surfacing without warning half a lifetime later–especially since my friend, as it happens, looked more than a little bit like Aimee Mann, a coincidence that now causes me to smile wryly.

Love-hungry bachelors of the Fifties and early Sixties were notorious for using jazz and romantic ballads to grease the skids. Frank Sinatra, I’m told, was their artist of choice, though I’ve also been assured by a number of senior citizens in a position to know that Getz/Gilberto was similarly effective. Blake Edwards notwithstanding, I’ve never met anyone who did it to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet or Ravel’s Boléro, at least not more than once.

As for me, I’ve never been one to play music in intimate situations. Perhaps because I am, or used to be, a musician, I find it distracting. And I suppose it says something significant about me that while music is one of the most important things in my life–perhaps the most important thing–I don’t find it sexy, and never have.

Musicians, yes, if they’re women: I’ve been attracted to more than a few of them over the years, and the snippet of dialogue from High Fidelity that I posted as an almanac entry a couple of years ago is in my case not without autobiographical overtones:

BARRY: I want to date a musician.

ROB: I want to live with a musician. She could write songs at home, ask me what I thought of them, and maybe even include one of our private jokes in the liner notes.

BARRY: Maybe a little picture of me in the liner notes.

DICK: Just in the background somewhere.

But even though I’ve long been drawn to women who make music, it’s not their music that draws me, at least not directly. I’ve no idea why I make this odd distinction, and I’m not sure what it means, either, since I’ve never been attracted to a woman who made bad music–yet there it is.

For me, music exists in a realm infinitely removed from physical sensuality. It is, as the theologians say, “wholly other,” and it seems to me altogether appropriate that it was in a book about a religious conversion, Karl Stern’s The Pillar of Fire, that I ran across one of the few descriptions of music that seems to me at all valid:

“To talk about music” is a miserable paradox, and contains in four words an admission of incongruity. I remember the embarrassed feeling I had when I read Kierkegaard’s somber theological speculations on Mozart and Don Giovanni. Is Don Giovanni not just a “charming” opera which has a place on the repertoire somewhere with Carmen and The Barber of Seville? Or is it something entirely different, opening up the fathomless abyss of human existence? There is a hierarchy of values, the validity of which cannot be proved by what one calls ordinary means. In this respect, as in others, the Good and the Beautiful are intimately related. To me Mozart’s quartets and Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichord are in essence much more closely akin to Saint Thomas’ Summa than to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, although the latter is music and the Summa is not.

Be that as it may, I have nothing but respect for those fortunate souls who find music sexually arousing. More power to them, I say, though as I say it I can’t help but think of a story that Doug Ramsey likes to tell about his old friend Paul Desmond, the celebrated alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and a man who by all accounts knew his way around a bedroom, though he wasn’t one to kiss and tell:

Once when he and I were dining, a corpulent, polyestered, middle-aged couple planted themselves next to us and announced to Paul that they recognized him from an album cover and just wanted him to know that his music sure was good to make love by. Desmond took a long look at the flabby woman in her beehive hairdo and caked makeup, and the man with his paunch and cigar stub, and said, “Glad to be of help.”

TT: So you want to see a show?

November 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.


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


BROADWAY:
– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
– The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, 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)
– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)


OFF BROADWAY:
– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)
– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)


CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

CLOSING SOON:
– Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

TT: Almanac

November 30, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“If we apply to authors themselves for an account of their state, it will appear very little to deserve envy; for they have in all ages been addicted to complaint.”


Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, March 2, 1754 (courtesy of Pratie Place)

TT: The rule of three (plus one)

November 29, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Robert Altman, Anita O’Day, and Betty Comden: it was a rocky Thanksgiving for lovers of American art.


About Altman’s death I have nothing much to say, for I respected his films far more than I liked them, and only wrote about one of them, Gosford Park. Our Girl (with whom I saw Gosford Park five years ago) thinks otherwise, and I’m hoping she’ll get around to explaining why at some point.


I felt much the same way about O’Day, whose hard-swinging, ever-ingenious jazz singing I admired greatly without ever warming to it. I saw her in person twice, once in her prime and once long afterward, blogging about the second occasion without identifying her:

I recently saw a public performance by a very old artist. No names or details–it wouldn’t serve any purpose–but it was a disastrous, pitiful self-parody of ruined greatness, the kind that leaves a dark and permanent stain of humiliation in the memory. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Yet it did…

I still recall that performance with retrospective horror, and since then have been exceedingly careful about going to see performers whose time has come and gone.


My memories of Betty Comden are sunnier, not only because I was an unabashed fan of her work but also because I was lucky enough to interview Comden and Adolph Green, her late friend and lifelong colleague, for a 1999 New York Times profile:

Sixty-one years after they began working together, it is almost possible to take Ms. Comden and Mr. Green for granted, because they are so much a part of the theatrical air we breathe. Their hit shows, which include ”On the Town,” ”Wonderful Town,” ”Peter Pan,” ”Bells Are Ringing” and ”On the Twentieth Century,” have yielded a bumper crop of standards; whenever you sing ”New York, New York, a helluva town” or ”The party’s over, it’s time to call it a day” in the shower, their words are on your lips. In addition, they wrote the scripts for ”Singin’ in the Rain” and ”The Band Wagon,” by common consent the two finest film musicals to come out of Hollywood since World War II. No less remarkable is the roster of superstars with whom they have worked, including–just for starters–Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Gene Kelly, Mary Martin, Andre Previn, Jerome Robbins and Frank Sinatra….


One unintended consequence of the drying up of musical comedy as a living idiom has been the welcome opportunity to revisit the best shows of the 40’s and 50’s. My guess is that the joint reputation of Betty Comden and Adolph Green has only just begun to benefit from that continuing revaluation. But even if their musicals should fail to survive the test of time, I am certain that the elegantly turned, emotionally true lyrics they wrote for such individual songs as ”Lucky to Be Me,” ”Lonely Town,” ”Just in Time,” ”The Party’s Over” and ”Make Someone Happy” will continue to be sung so long as human beings stubbornly insist on falling in and out of love. To listen as Tony Bennett and Bill Evans turn ”Some Other Time” into a piercingly rueful monologue about missed chances (”This day was just a token/Too many words are still unspoken”) is to realize, once and for all, that the life’s work of the longest-lived writing team in the history of the American theater is far more than just a barrel of laughs.

I made no secret of the fact that I admired Comden and Green without reservation when I visited them at her Upper West Side apartment six years ago, and they in turn made it known to me that they liked what I later wrote about them in the Times. I wouldn’t change a word of it today.


Back then “Some Other Time” was my favorite song, and though in recent years I’ve come to love another song
from On the Town even more, I have no doubt that there can be no more fitting tribute to Betty Comden than to recall the words she and Adolph Green wrote for the most piercingly beautiful of wartime ballads:


Twenty-four hours can go so fast,

You look around, the day has passed.

When you’re in love

Time is precious stuff;

Even a lifetime isn’t enough.


Where has the time all gone to?

Haven’t done half the things we want to.

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.

This day was just a token,

Too many words are still unspoken,

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.


Just when the fun is starting,

Come’s the time for parting,

But let’s be glad for what we’ve had

And what’s to come.

There’s so much more embracing

Still to be done, but time is racing.

Oh, well, we’ll catch up

Some other time.


The world is poorer for her passing.

TT: Mailbox

November 29, 2006 by Terry Teachout

A friend writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting about (among other things) Gone With the Wind:

It’s not my favorite movie either, but I was force-fed it at a very early age because it was one of my mother’s all-time favorites. She first took me to see it on the big screen when I was nine–it was still being shown every now and then in movie houses back then and we went any time it was in town or nearby. Didn’t think much of the movie at the time–the hospital scene was a little much–but it was cool to witness it on the big screen, complete with intermission. Later I read the book, which I preferred, as it was the perfect summer trash read.


My mom lived in the movie houses when she was a teenager, watched old movies on television whenever she could and would wax rhapsodic about her favorites. She saw Vivien Leigh in person once, when she was married to Laurence Olivier, and said she looked exactly like Snow White. I became more of a Clark Gable fan myself and always enjoy watching his Rhett. Think I saw it last summer when it was on television and I was on painkillers from surgery. It’s still hard to sit through, even under sedation.

Or when seated on a rowing machine.

TT: Almanac

November 29, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“All of life is a choice of genre.”


Eve Tushnet, EveTushnet.com

TT: Misery is…

November 28, 2006 by Terry Teachout

…having the new Richard Stark novel on your nightstand and being too busy to start reading it.

TT: Multimedia extravaganza

November 28, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I may be busy, but that hasn’t stopped me from going to the gym every day I’m in town. With the first anniversary of my near-death experience just around the bend, I’m disinclined to get lazy, so even on mornings when I’d rather curl up on the couch and look at the Teachout Museum, I pull on my sweats, plug in my iPod, and hit the road.

Sunday morning was especially difficult–I’d seen a show the night before and had two more coming up later that day–but I bit the bullet anyway, in part because I was actively looking forward to spending an hour with the latest version of the Terry Teachout Workout Tape:

Bill Monroe, “New Muleskinner Blues”

Donald Fagen, “Security Joan”

Horace Silver, “Opus de Funk”

Duke Ellington, “Never No Lament”

Abba, “S.O.S.” (a guilty pleasure, I suppose, but it’s still one of the best-made pop singles of the Seventies)

Gene Krupa, “Leave Us Leap” (composed by Eddie Finckel, whose son David is the cellist of the Emerson String Quartet)

Lionel Hampton, “Haven’t Named It Yet” (on which Big Sid Catlett’s drumming can be heard with exceptional clarity)

Pentangle, “Sally Go Round the Roses”

Benny Goodman, “Ridin’ High” (the thrilling live version recorded off the air in 1937)

Johnny Winter And, “Rock ‘n Roll, Hoochie Koo” (an old high-school favorite, recently downloaded from iTunes)

Dave’s True Story, “Sequined Mermaid Dress” (the song that first turned me on to DTS)

Flatt & Scruggs, “Six White Horses”

Miles Davis, “Seven Steps to Heaven”

Not only did all these songs give me great pleasure, but for once there was something on the TV monitors at the gym that I didn’t mind seeing: the burning-of-Atlanta sequence from Gone With the Wind. I last saw that grossly overrated movie in 2004, and once again found it wanting:

The only other costume piece I can think of that uses Technicolor as vividly is John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel are excellent, Max Steiner’s score is wonderful in its old-fashioned way, and the siege and burning of Atlanta are fully as effective–and unexpectedly unsentimental–as I remember them. But Vivien Leigh’s two-keyed performance as Scarlett is wearying, while the script scissors out most of the novel’s ambiguities, such as they are….

I haven’t changed my mind, but I can report that Gone With the Wind is a good deal more tolerable with the sound off. I especially appreciated the irony of seeing Rhett and Scarlett galloping toward Tara to the accompaniment of Miles Davis, whose opinion of Gone With the Wind is unrecorded but must surely have been unprintable in the extreme. To be sure, I didn’t get to hear Clark Gable’s deliciously growly voice or Max Steiner’s lush score, but I was also spared Vivien Leigh’s flibbertigibbet accent (they really should have dubbed her) and the pitiful minstrel-show antics of Butterfly “I Don’t Know Nuthin’ ‘Bout Birthin’ Babies!” McQueen.

I looked up McQueen’s Wikipedia entry after coming home from the gym, and found it edifying:

By 1947 she had grown tired of the ethnic stereotypes she was required to play and ended her film career.

By 1950 she had played another racially-stereotyped role for two years on the television series Beulah, which reunited her with her Gone with the Wind co-star Hattie McDaniel.

Her acting roles after this were very few, and she devoted herself to other pursuits including study, and received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1975. She had one more role of some substance in the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast.

McQueen lived in Aiken, South Carolina, and died in Augusta, Georgia, as a result of burns received when a kerosene heater she was attempting to light exploded and burst into flames. A lifelong atheist, she donated her body to medical science and remembered the Freedom From Religion Foundation in her will.

I like that last detail.

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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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