• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2011 / September / Archives for 12th

Archives for September 12, 2011

TT: Countdown

September 12, 2011 by Terry Teachout

I’m spending the week in Orlando, Florida, having flown down from New York last Saturday to attend the final rehearsals of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which opens on Thursday. I’ve spent fourteen of the past forty-eight hours sitting in a rehearsal room, watching Dennis Neal and Rus Blackwell, the star and director, pull the script off the page and put it on the stage.
SATCHMO%20POSTER%20%28TEXT%29.jpgI’m staying in the same Rollins College-owned condo where I wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf a year and a half ago during my first stint as a scholar-in-residence at the Winter Park Institute. Except for the (temporary) absence of Mrs. T, it felt like home as soon as I unlocked the front door. Indeed, I know my way around Winter Park so well that I drove to the grocery store two nights ago without benefit of GPS. No sooner did I roll my shopping cart into the store than I heard somebody calling out to me. “Hey, you’re Terry Teachout!” he said. “How’s the play going? I’ll be there on opening night!” That felt good.
Rehearsing a play is a fascinating process, at once grueling and exhilarating—and, in my case, instructive. I already knew how good Dennis was, but Rus’ directorial gifts have proved to be illuminating. He has an uncanny sense of the show’s visual line, and I’m learning something new each time he tinkers with the blocking or gives Dennis a note about his performance.
Tomorrow we load the show into the theater and hang the set. I have to spend the whole morning writing Friday’s Wall Street Journal column, but I’m going to head over and join the crew as soon as the column is filed. I don’t want to miss any of the fun. Needless to say, it’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll do my best to blog between now and then about the process of putting the show on stage. (I’ll also be be tweeting about the rehearsals at @terryteachout and in the “Terry’s Twitters” module of the right-hand column.)
In the meantime, here’s the author’s note that will appear in the printed program:

Louis Armstrong, the greatest jazz musician of the twentieth century, was a deeply happy, fundamentally optimistic man who was rarely seen without a smile—in public. But there was more to him than met the eye. Between 1947 and his death in 1971, Armstrong taped hundreds of after-hours conversations with his wife, friends, and colleagues in which he revealed a very different side of his personality. Some of these tapes are startlingly intimate, and many of them contain language that Armstrong never used on stage. I made use of the tapes in writing Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, my 2009 biography, and they later inspired me to write this play, in which Dennis Neal portrays both Armstrong and Joe Glaser, the trumpeter’s longtime manager, who was as complex a character as Armstrong himself.
Satchmo at the Waldorf is a work of fiction, but it is based on and informed by the facts of both men’s lives, and though I made up most of the dialogue, it closely resembles the way that Armstrong and Glaser talked in private.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do….
* * *
To hear a radio interview in which Dennis Neal and Rus Blackwell talk about Satchmo at the Waldorf, go here.

TT: A week with Satchmo (I)

September 12, 2011 by Terry Teachout

Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform “What a Wonderful World”:

TT: Almanac

September 12, 2011 by Terry Teachout

“CRITIC, n. A person who boasts himself hard to please because nobody tries to please him.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

September 2011
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« Aug   Oct »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Just because: Victor Borge’s “phonetic punctuation” routine
  • Almanac: Philip Roth on the mental confusion of man
  • Choking on chaos
  • Replay: Edward R. Murrow interviews Tyrone Power in 1957
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on agnosticism

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in