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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 18, 2011

TT: Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?

April 18, 2011 by ldemanski

Time was when I prided myself on ignoring the weather. Rain or shine, cold or hot, I rose above it, paying no psychic attention to the outside world. Or at least I pretended to pay no attention–and very often I even fooled myself.
0414111223.jpgIn recent years, however, I’ve discovered, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the weather matters to me, and having spent good-sized chunks of the past two winters in Florida, I now find that it matters a lot. Fall remains my favorite season, but I like sunshine, and when I returned to New York from Winter Park last month, the near-complete absence of it sent my general frame of mind into a low-grade tailspin. So when the sun came briefly out last week and spring declared itself to be here de facto, I rejoiced.
Given the fact that I’ve just finished writing a libretto for an opera about the making of The Rite of Spring, this would seem to be a perfectly logical thing to have done. But for the moment, Danse Russe is going on without me. Yes, it’s being rehearsed in Philadelphia, but I’m completely tied up with Broadway press previews, and it won’t be until next Monday’s piano dress rehearsal that I’ll finally be able to get out of town and see what Andrew Kurtz and Center City Opera Theater have wrought.
Don’t take this as indifference. I’m enormously eager to see what Danse Russe looks like on stage–but for the moment there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can’t get out of New York for anything short of a life-or-death crisis, and the opening of my second opera, sad (or not) to say, doesn’t qualify. So far as I know, everything is going just fine down in Philadelphia, and my presence isn’t required. Paul Moravec and I put the opera through an elaborate workshop process, and we hope we fumigated it enough to kill all the bugs. No doubt we’ll need to make some last-minute fixes, just as we did for the premiere of The Letter in 2009, but my guess is that if we do, they’ll be small.
So here I sit, thankful that spring has made its belated appearance and wishing that I were at today’s rehearsal. Instead I’m writing about a Broadway show that I didn’t much like and keeping one eye on the clock, since I have to go down to Paul’s Upper West Side Apartment and tape a radio interview about Danse Russe later today. Life is what it is, and it rarely works out precisely as we’d like–which is no reason not to be basically happy with most of it, and wildly happy with some of it. Just because I wish I were somewhere else doesn’t mean I’m not glad to be here.
* * *
Tom Lehrer sings about the coming of spring:

TT: The sound of spring

April 18, 2011 by ldemanski

The Bill Evans Trio plays “Spring Is Here”:

TT: Almanac

April 18, 2011 by ldemanski

“You’re only as good as your last compliment.”
Chelsea G. Summers (posted on Twitter, Apr. 4, 2011)

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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