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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 2008

CAAF: John Keats, John Keats, John, please put your scarf on

July 15, 2008 by cfrye

Is it just me, or is John Keats everywhere right now? In her excellent Believer essay on novel-writing, Zadie Smith talks about her early identification with the poet and the influence of his example:

I was about fourteen when I heard John Keats in there, and in my mind I formed a bond with him, a bond based on class–though how archaic that must sound, here in America. I knew he wasn’t working-class, exactly, and of course he wasn’t black–but in rough outline his situation felt closer to mine than the other writers I’d come across. He felt none of the entitlement of, say, Virginia Woolf, or Byron, or Pope, or Evelyn Waugh. That was very important to me–I think you may have to be English to understand how important. To me, Keats offered the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked Apprentices Welcome Here. Keats went abut his work just like an apprentice: he took a kind of M.F.A. of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower-middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence–he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic from, in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it’s there, famously, in his reading of Chapman’s Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. When I’m writing, especially during those horrible first hundred pages, I often think of Keats. The term “role model” is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a mode kept somewhere in mind. So I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling growing, writing many poems that made him blush, and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

Also stoking the current Keats-biquity is the publication of Posthumous Keats, which Adam Kirsch reviewed in the New Yorker and which I’m reading right now and adore (so I’m not so much being shadowed by the poet as carrying him around in my purse).

TT: Almanac

July 15, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“There is an enthusiastic reflection that is of the greatest value if one does not allow oneself to be carried away by it.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

TT: Here and there

July 14, 2008 by Terry Teachout

I just got back to Connecticut from a hectic two-state reviewing trip and am returning to New York on Tuesday for a few frenzied days of work. I haven’t had time to blog, but I’ll try to post an update on my recent activities tomorrow, or maybe Wednesday.
Till then.

TT: Almanac

July 14, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Well, you could be serious and still have fun. In fact, he believed it was the secret of a happy life, if anybody wanted to know a secret.”
Elmore Leonard, LaBrava

TT: Happiness on the Hudson

July 11, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Most of today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to a report on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival‘s productions of Cymbeline and Twelfth Night, followed by a few testy remarks about Lincoln Center Festival’s presentation of The Bacchae. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
What makes a festival festive? To answer this question, hop in your car and head for Garrison, the small town across the Hudson River from West Point that is home to my favorite outdoor summer Shakespeare festival. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, founded in 1987, is that rarity of rarities, an artistic enterprise that gets everything right. Impressive as its productions are, the real secret of the festival’s success is that it offers its patrons a total experience that adds up to more than the sum of its admirable parts. The shows are bright and lively, the performers engaging, the setting gorgeous, the atmosphere joyous. I won’t say that it’s impossible to have a bad time at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival–some people are inexplicably resistant to pleasure–but I’ve been going to Garrison for four summers now, and my annual visit has become one of the most eagerly awaited dates on my theatrical calendar.
2595299140_00537a892d.jpgIt’s impossible to talk about the festival without first mentioning the site. The company performs in a huge tent pitched on the lawn of the Boscobel House, a lovingly restored Federal-style 1808 mansion located on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River. The performances get underway just as the evening sun slips behind the mountains of the Hudson Highlands. Wise playgoers dine on the lawn an hour or so before curtain time–tasty catered picnic baskets can be ordered in advance–and enjoy a spectacle that has been capturing the imagination of American landscape painters for the better part of two centuries.
Sunset on the Hudson can be a hard act to follow, but Hudson Valley pulls it off. The company’s productions are models of uncondescending theatrical populism, reaching out to contemporary audiences without watering down Shakespeare beyond recognition….
btbaccae113.jpgI’ve never found Lincoln Center Festival to be especially festive, though it often presents memorable performances. Part of the problem–maybe most of it–is that the festival takes place in the middle of a bustling, art-crammed city, thus making it difficult to turn off the hum and buzz of urban life and immerse yourself in its wide-ranging fare. Sometimes, though, the fare itself is the problem. This year’s festival, for instance, opened with the National Theatre of Scotland’s tiresomely transgressive production of “The Bacchae,” which struck me as a good working definition of Eurotrash at its trashiest. Picture Alan Cumming in a kilt, being lowered to the stage by his ankles and flashing his buttocks all the way down. Then imagine him as an ultra-campy Dionysus in drag who sashays through a wink-wink-nudge-nudge rewrite of Euripides’ classic Greek tragedy (“Don’t be so coy, big boy”) in which the chorus consists of nine school-of-Motown backup singers decked out in fire-engine red. Get the idea? I did–it took me about 30 seconds–and spent the rest of the night looking at my watch….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

July 11, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“Critics are reprimanded when they get sarcastic. How absurd! Is the torch of criticism supposed to shine without burning?”
Franz Grillparzer, Notebooks and Diaries

TT: So you want to see a show?

July 10, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County * (drama, 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)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes July 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

July 10, 2008 by Terry Teachout

The critic leaves at curtain fall

To find, in starting to review it,

He scarcely saw the play at all

For starting to review it.


E.B. White, “Definitions”

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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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