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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 10, 2009

CD

October 10, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve). Nellie McKay, of all people, has recorded an album of pop standards–and it’s a beaut. Her delicate alto-flute voice and tiptoe enunciation turn out to be ideally suited to the repertoire of Doris Day, who was a popular big-band singer before she moved to Hollywood and became a perky icon of Eisenhower-era American innocence. The fare ranges from light-footed swingers like “Dig It” to lyrical cameos like “I Remember You,” and the instrumental arrangements, most of them by McKay herself, are engagingly quirky. Glints of irony twinkle here and there, but there’s nothing sour or backhanded about Normal as Blueberry Pie (TT).

FOLIO

October 10, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Jane Wilson: Horizons (Merrell, $60). The first full-length study of Wilson’s life and work, Horizons contains a penetrating biographical essay by Elizabeth Sussman, a wide-ranging interview by Justin Spring, and handsome reproductions of some ninety-odd paintings and works on paper. In recent years Wilson has specialized in all-but-abstract skyscapes whose canvas-filling bands of color and looming storm clouds are precisely poised between loose representation and abstract expressionism. Horizons puts these later paintings in perspective, illustrating the debt that Wilson owes not only to Mark Rothko but to Fairfield Porter. A long-overdue tribute to a superior artist greatly deserving of wider recognition (TT).

DVD

October 10, 2009 by Terry Teachout

On the Road with Charles Kuralt, Set 1 (three discs, out Oct. 27). Cynics should steer clear of this collection of “On the Road” pieces in which Kuralt, who spent thirteen years driving around America in a motor home, reported for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on whatever caught his eye along the way: a circus bandleader, a cymbal factory, a professional blower of soap bubbles. “I have attempted to keep ‘relevance’ and ‘significance’ entirely out of all the stories I send back,” Kuralt wrote in A Life on the Road, his 1990 autobiography. He succeeded, much to the delight of a generation of TV viewers who loved the uncondescending sweetness with which he portrayed the quiet delights of life off the beaten path. I saw many of these pieces when they first aired in the Seventies, and I find it hard to watch them now without growing misty-eyed (TT).

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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