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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 18, 2009

TT: Tinkering with beauty

April 18, 2009 by Terry Teachout

The extensive changes that Arthur Laurents made in the new Broadway revival of West Side Story (about which I wrote here) have inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal about creative artists who decide to tinker with their early works. Why not leave well enough alone? Was it mere retrospective perfectionism that led Igor Stravinsky to reorchestrate The Firebird and Petrushka–or did he have baser motives? And did Henry James really improve his novels when he revised them for the New York Edition of his collected works? I speculate about all these examples and a few more to boot in today’s Journal. Pick up a paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.
* * *
The prologue from the 1961 film version of West Side Story, choreographed by Jerome Robbins and directed by Robbins and Robert Wise:

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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