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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for March 17, 2008

BOOK

March 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

A.J. Liebling, World War II Writings (Library of America, $40). An omnibus collection of wartime dispatches to The New Yorker, plus twenty-eight previously uncollected articles and Normandy Revisited, the uncommonly elegant 1958 memoir in which Liebling wove together present- and past-tense accounts of his wartime and postwar visits to the site of D-Day. The contents may sound miscellaneous, but in fact they’re magnetically readable. Except for Ernie Pyle, no American journalist did a better job of serving as a witness to war in the twentieth century, and these pieces combine lightness of touch with high seriousness to tremendously powerful effect (TT).

TT: Perpetual motion

March 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

peter460.jpgI’m in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it wasn’t easy getting there, either. Last week I saw Caryl Churchill’s Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theater and Mark Morris’ production of Purcell’s King Arthur at New York City Opera. On Saturday morning I took a train to Philadelphia, where I met Ms. Household Opera for lunch, then took her to the Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition closed-circuit live movie-house telecast of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which we viewed in an amusingly pretentious theater. (I’ll be writing about the experience in my next “Sightings” column.)
ENGAGEMENT%20RING.jpgAs soon as the show was over, I headed straight to the Philadelphia airport and flew from there to Boston, then drove to Cambridge, where Mrs. T awaited me. Yesterday afternoon the two of us saw the production of The Tempest that I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, then dined at the home of the jewelry designer who made the one-of-a-kind engagement ring that is now to be found on Mrs. T’s finger. Not only is she a fabulous cook, but she has an excellent boyfriend to boot.
Later today we’ll be heading back to our hideout in Connecticut, where I plan to spend the week sleeping late and working on Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which got short shrift while I was preoccupied with my opera workshop. On Thursday we return to New York, on Friday Our Girl in Chicago pays us a house call, and on Saturday the three of us go to Baltimore to see CenterStage’s production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. Whew!
All this incessant activity is likely to slow my blogging for the coming week, but I’ll do what I can, and CAAF and OGIC will do the rest.
See you in passing.

TT: Almanac

March 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

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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