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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 13, 2009

TT: Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am

April 13, 2009 by Terry Teachout

I just read about a Twitter-based contest in which opera geeks are invited to “tweet” a synopsis of an opera in one hundred and forty characters or less. How could I resist? Here’s The Letter in a nutshell:

Adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, confession, trial, hallucination, acquittal, confrontation, disaster, blood, blackout.

Who could ask for anything more?

TT: Across the water

April 13, 2009 by Terry Teachout

POPS%20BRITISH%20COVER.jpgPops: A Life of Louis Armstrong will be the first of my books to be published in England. JR Books, a new publisher specializing in “the arts, history, biography, humour, lifestyle and sport,” will be bringing out Pops at the end of November, simultaneous with its publication in this country by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The title over there will be Pops: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong. Jeremy Robson, my British publisher, has just e-mailed me the design for the front cover, which is very different from the American dust jacket but strikes me as wonderfully clean and elegant in its own way.
It’s fitting that Pops will be published in England, since the seventh chapter of the book tells the story of Armstrong’s 1932 European debut at the Palladium in London:
whatare-1.jpg

It is hard to imagine Louis Armstrong sharing a bill with such quintessentially English vaudevillians as Max Miller, the “cheeky chappie” whose loud suits and blue humor were as familiar to his audiences as Armstrong’s handkerchiefs and high Cs were to his–but, then, it is as hard for most of us to imagine what the London Palladium was like in 1932, three quarters of a century before it passed into the hands of Andrew Lloyd Webber and became the home of high-tech musical-comedy extravaganzas. Nowadays the Edwardian music hall, with its galloping comic songs, sentimental ballads, and flamboyantly costumed clowns, is known only to viewers of such films as The 39 Steps and The Entertainer. In the Thirties, though, it was still an immensely popular and vital institution, much more so than America’s fast-fading vaudeville circuit, and the 2,300-seat Palladium (on whose stage the hapless Mr. Memory is shot dead in the last scene of The 39 Steps) was the city’s most celebrated “variety house.” In any case Armstrong had nowhere else to go. The British musicians’ union was adamantly opposed to letting foreign musicians work in England, and the Ministry of Labour accordingly refused to grant permits allowing the members of American bands to perform in hotels, restaurants, or nightclubs. Alien though its culture was to a black jazzman from New Orleans, the music-hall circuit was the only place where Armstrong could introduce himself to the British public….

The story of Armstrong’s first European performances is a fascinating tale that I tell in detail in Pops. Part of what makes it so interesting is that he had never before been written about so extensively in the mainstream press. In America circa 1932 Armstrong was “a second-tier celebrity, worthy of a half-page in Time on a slow news week but not nearly so famous as Bing Crosby, or even Rudy Vallée. His name did not appear in the news columns of the New York Times until 1935, or in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature until 1944.” In England, by contrast, he was a big story–and a controversial one.
Why? Read all about it in December!
* * *
Laurence Olivier plays a music-hall comedian in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, filmed by Tony Richardson in 1960:

TT: Almanac

April 13, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“The British public has always had an unerring taste for ungifted amateurs.”
John Osborne, BBC-TV, Feb. 18, 1958

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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