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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for November 25, 2009

TT: Snapshot

November 25, 2009 by Terry Teachout

Paul Hindemith conducts the Chicago Symphony in the first movement of his Concert Music for Strings and Brass, Op. 50:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Edward Woodward, R.I.P.

November 25, 2009 by Terry Teachout

When I read the obituaries for Edward Woodward last week, my mind went back to an essay I wrote in 1986 about The Equalizer, the stylish TV series in which he starred a quarter-century ago. This piece, which appeared in National Review, was one of the first things I wrote for a magazine that I really liked, and I’ve no idea why I didn’t include it in the Teachout Reader.

I especially like this part:

Over a churning electronic soundtrack, we see a jerkily edited sequence of New York nightmares. A young woman unsuccessfully attempts to board a subway car at Columbus Circle and a punk slithers out from behind a column as the train pulls away. A man pounds frantically on the door of a telephone booth as a big black car screeches toward him. One stark image bears down savagely upon the next. All at once the soothing image of a man in deep shadow fills the screen. He is The Equalizer, the Nietzschean superman come to make safe the mean streets of the Big Apple….

The dream of the Übermensch as urban savior has always gone over big in America. Superman fantasies can be easily found in the hard-boiled detective novel, many of our movies, and most of our comic books. But television, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues, has generally preferred to let duly appointed authorities clean up the streets. It’s all right to be a maverick, a cop with an independent streak, but a current institutional affiliation in reasonably good standing is almost always a must. Shows that posit the helplessness of the police in the face of urban crime have never been popular on American television, which prefers to reassure rather than frighten. So it is intriguing that each episode of The Equalizer should enact the desperate notion that the center cannot hold without the occasional benign intervention of a fearless vigilante….

The show is clearly aimed at a sophisticated audience of baby-boomers, and the assumption that this audience would appreciate so straight-forwardly moralistic a denouement is a telling one. The baby-boomers, despite their notoriously touchy consciences, are still looking for simple answers to complex questions, and commercial television has long been in the business of supplying them. The Equalizer caters gracefully to subway-riding boomers who wonder nervously when their turn to be mugged will come up. Nothing stimulates the desire for order quite like advancing age.

* * *

The opening title sequence to The Equalizer. The music is by Stewart Copeland:

TT: Almanac

November 25, 2009 by Terry Teachout

“Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.”
Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

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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