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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 22, 2008

TT: It’s official

August 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

My editor at Harcourt just told me that Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be published in the fall of 2009.
Watch this space for further details.
If you feel like celebrating with me, do it by watching this video:

BOOK

August 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

David Thomson, “Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (Knopf, $39.95). A companion volume to The New Biographical Dictionary of Film in which my favorite film critic holds forth on a thousand variously significant movies–some great, some good, some awful–all discussed in quirky single-page essays that are models of pithy, quotable idiosyncrasy. Have You Seen…? will be the book of the season for smart filmgoers who love a good argument (TT).

CD

August 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Louis Armstrong, Rudy Vallee’s Fleischmann’s Yeast Show & Louis’ Home-Recorded Tapes (Jazz Society, two CDs). Don’t be thrown by the elephantine title–this is the most important historical release of the decade. The first CD consists of previously unreleased 1937 airchecks from NBC’s Harlem Radio Review, the first variety series ever to be hosted by a black, in which Louis Armstrong and the Luis Russell band play as though the world were ending. The band never sounded remotely as hot as this on its commercial sides for Decca, and Armstrong is in full-tilt knock-’em-dead mode. The second CD consists of fascinating snippets from Armstrong’s private stash of postwar reel-to-reel after-hours recordings, the same tapes on which I drew in writing Rhythm Man. Absolutely not to be missed under any circumstances whatsoever (TT).

TT: Brave Coward

August 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on some (but not all!) of the shows I saw on my recent travels from hither to yon. This week I review the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Noël Coward in Two Keys, the Peterborough Players’ Our Town, and the Williamstown Theater Festival’s Home. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
TwoKeysBTF08KSPRA_218.sized.jpgNoël Coward wrote a handful of serious plays, but hardly anybody does them anymore, and his reputation now rests exclusively on the divine frivolity of his ever-popular lighter-than-air comedies of bad manners. So naturally I couldn’t resist when the Berkshire Theatre Festival announced that it would be reviving “Noël Coward in Two Keys,” a double bill of one-act plays that includes “A Song of Twilight,” in which The Master (as his friends called him) shook off the caution of a lifetime and wrote with utter sincerity about the still-hot topic of homosexuality, a subject that he had previously handled with the longest of tongs. Coward, of course, was a gay man who grew up at a time when the British authorities threw gay men in jail for pursuing their sexual interests, which suffices to explain his protracted discretion. What is more surprising is that at the very end of his life he summoned up the nerve to write such a play–as well as the artfulness to make it one of his very best….
Thornton Wilder wrote most of “Our Town” at the MacDowell Colony, and it’s widely thought that he was inspired by the New Hampshire village in which America’s oldest artists’ colony is located. The townspeople have no doubt of it: “Welcome to Our Town” is emblazoned on Peterborough’s city-limits signs. As for the Peterborough Players, their relationship with the play goes all the way back to 1940, when Wilder supervised their first staging of “Our Town.” Now the company is celebrating its 75th anniversary by remounting Gus Kaikkonen’s 2000 production of Wilder’s beloved study of small-town life, and has invited James Whitmore back to reprise his performance as the Stage Manager. The Peterborough Players couldn’t have given themselves a better birthday present. This “Our Town” is perfectly, unassumingly right, a model of how to freshen a classic not by adding gimmicky touches of directorial frou-frou but simply by performing it the way it was written, adding only the enlivening force that makes an old chestnut seem brand new….
David Storey made a modest name for himself in this country four decades ago with “Home,” doubtless in large part because John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson came over from London to star in it. Since then, though, only one of Mr. Storey’s other plays has been seen on Broadway, and the Williamstown Theatre Festival’s revival of “Home” suggests the reason why: Mr. Storey is the kind of British playwright whose work doesn’t travel….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

August 22, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“I should have thought that even your cheap magazine mentality would have learnt by now that it is seldom with people’s characters that one falls in love.”
Noël Coward, A Song at Twilight

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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