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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 23, 2009

TT: Present at the creation

July 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

I just heard via Facebook from Barbara Brown, my old high-school English and drama teacher. She directed the first play I ever saw, a production of Blithe Spirit that was performed in the gymnasium of the Smalltown Junior High School forty-one years ago. That production caused me to become stage-struck, with consequences of which readers of this blog need not be reminded. A couple of years later I joined the Smalltown High School Drama Club, and Barbara directed me in stagings of Harvey and The Innocents. I never was much of an actor, alas, but I learned things from her that I’ve never forgotten.
d4fa2c5b7163cf19_landing.jpegBarbara left Smalltown around the same time that I did, and I hadn’t heard anything from or about her between then and this morning. As I read her message, I was reminded of the wonderful passage from Act One in which Moss Hart describes the backstage telegrams he received on the opening night of Once in a Lifetime, his first collaboration with George S. Kaufman and the play that made him famous:

Opening-night telegrams may seem a foolish and perfunctory convention, but they are not. Those words are the only ones likely to penetrate the minds and warm the hearts of the people who receive them at this particular moment. Opened backstage in that chill interval of waiting for the house lights to darken and the curtain to rise, they perform the admirable function of saying that hope still runs high. Far-fetched little jokes seem uncommonly humorous in opening-night telegrams, and ten words with an unexpected name signed to them can be strangely touching….
The years leaped out of each envelope with quicksilver flashes of memory, the old jumbled with the new. Time seemed to stop as I looked at each name and the years each name recalled, and something like calm began to settle over me.

Needless to say, Western Union is now a thing of the distant past, but Facebook and Twitter are taking up the slack, and it meant as much to me to hear from Barbara as it did to Moss Hart to hear from all the people in his past who sent telegrams to the Music Box Theatre on that fateful night in 1930. So thank you, dear teacher, for thinking to get in touch with me today. You were the first in a long line of people who made The Letter possible. I never forgot you, and I never will.

TT: Did Maugham know best?

July 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

biography_03.jpgA few days ago I heard Jonathan Richards, a Santa Fe-based actor and writer, give a public reading of “The Letter,” the short story by W. Somerset Maugham that inspired Paul Moravec and me to write The Letter. Our opera is based on Maugham’s own 1927 stage version of “The Letter,” but it was the story that was our starting point–I hadn’t yet read the play when I first got the idea to turn “The Letter” into an opera–and more than two years had gone by since I last looked at it. Hence I found it fascinating to hear Jonathan read “The Letter” out loud, not least because I’d forgotten that it was the source of the original version of one of the best lines in the libretto.

C9F38295-3048-C0CE-556FFC6684A94FB1.jpgIn the second scene of the opera, Howard Joyce, the very proper lawyer who takes on the case of Leslie Crosbie, a woman who shot and killed a neighbor whom she claims tried to rape her, reflects on his client’s plight. “One never knows what respectable women are capable of,” he muses. My libretto contains most of the best-known lines of dialogue from Maugham’s stage version of The Letter, but that particular line isn’t in the play, and when Jim Maddalena, who plays the role of Joyce, told me that it was his favorite line in the opera, I wondered whether I’d actually come up with it myself.

The answer, it turns out, is that I based it on a line from the original short story, one that had slipped my mind until I heard Jonathan read it out loud at Collected Works last week:

“The fact is, I suppose,” he reflected, “that you can never know what hidden possibilities of savagery there are in the most respectable of women.”

somerset.jpgSo far as I can remember, this is the only line from “The Letter” that can be found in the opera but not in the play. Even so, it’s a good example of how I changed virtually all of Maugham’s language in order to make it pithier and more lyrical. Try to imagine Jim singing that handsomely worded but rather complicated sentence and you’ll start to get an idea of the process by which a librettist turns the script of a play into the libretto of an opera.

* * *

Mrs. T and I had a busman’s holiday yesterday: we went to see the Santa Fe Opera‘s production of Don Giovanni. I’ve been so busy with The Letter of late that it’s been more than a year since I saw an opera not written by Paul Moravec and me, and it was a great treat to relax and let Mozart and da Ponte do the heavy lifting.

Tonight it’s back to work. The final dress rehearsal of The Letter starts at nine o’clock. Definitely no tweeting–I expect to be completely preoccupied–but I’ll let you know how it went on Friday.

TT: So you want to see a show?

July 23, 2009 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)

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, closes Aug. 30, 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)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, OREGON:

• The Music Man (musical, G, very child-friendly, closes Nov. 1, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The History Boys (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, too intellectually complex for most adolescents, extended through Sept. 27, reviewed here)

• A Minister’s Wife (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• Pericles and Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in repertory through Sept. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:

• A Minister’s Wife (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• The Norman Conquests (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through Sunday, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

July 23, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.”
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

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, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [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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