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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Hither, yon, etc.

May 10, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Mrs. T and I met on Friday at O’Hare International Airport, made our way to a downtown hotel, met Our Girl shortly thereafter, and proceeded to the first of the five shows that we’ll be seeing in Chicagoland this week. The list includes Strawdog Theatre’s Good Soul of Szechuan, TimeLine Theater’s The Farnsworth Invention, Chicago Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, Profiles Theatre’s Killer Joe, and Writers’ Theatre’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the last of which is directed by David Cromer, about whose gifts longtime readers of this blog will need no reminding. That strikes me as an appropriately wide-ranging list, and I have no doubt that it will keep the three of us hopping between now and week’s end, when Mrs. T and I fly back to New York.
This is my first full-scale theater-related road trip since February, and I’m glad to be on the move again after being stuck in New York for two near-solid months. I was no less pleased to be able to spend three days at home with my family, though I broke my glasses and watchband during my visit, subsequently discovering that neither object could be repaired or replaced in Smalltown, U.S.A. My brother, who is handy like Mozart was musical, did his best to glue my glasses back together but finally gave it up as a bad job, so I drove from Smalltown to Kansas City on Thursday without benefit of eyeware. I got there in one piece, didn’t kill or maim anyone along the way, and managed to read a lecture about Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong out loud to a full and enthusiastic house at the Kansas City Public Library, thereby demonstrating the wisdom of my longstanding precautionary practice of printing out my speech texts in twenty-two-point Comic Sans MS Bold type, which may be totally unhip but is big and clear enough for me to read without glasses.
I have to write two columns for The Wall Street Journal during our stay in Chicago, so I won’t be blogging much while we’re here. I’ll be back at the old stand next Monday. In the meantime, make the most of the usual daily offerings, which will, as always, appear like clockwork.

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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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