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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 23, 2012

TT: Two on the road

January 23, 2012 by Terry Teachout

ph1.jpgMrs. T and I departed Florida’s Sanibel Island with the utmost reluctance on Saturday morning. We then drove across the peninsula to Miami Beach, had lunch at Joe’s Stone Crab, made our way to Coral Gables, and checked into the Biltmore Hotel. In short, we reversed the first half of our itinerary of three years ago, leaving out the part where I then went from Miami to New York to San Francisco to San Diego to Kansas City to Chicago to New York to Connecticut to Lenox, Massachusetts. I’d forgotten how much travel I packed into that marathon. The thought of it makes me shudder now, even though it was fun–mostly–while it was happening.
Things are different this time around. On Tuesday we’re driving up to Winter Park, and I’ll be flying back to New York on Wednesday to see Wit, Look Back in Anger, and the DiCapo Opera Theatre’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, after which I return to Winter Park and stay put, more or less, until the end of February. That’s kid stuff!
GableStage-posted-small_2.jpgFrom the (admittedly narrow) point of view of a drama critic, one of the most convenient things about the Biltmore is that GableStage, the company that I came to Coral Gables to see, is in the same building as the hotel, meaning that it’s a five-minute stroll from our hotel room to the lobby of the theater. I can think of a number of other hotels that are unusually close to a major regional theater, among them San Francisco’s Hotel Diva, but the only other company in America, so far as I know, that shares a roof with a first-class hotel is the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, where Mrs. T and I saw The Norman Conquests six years ago in the middle of an eyelash-freezing cold spell. It was nice enough not to have to go outside to get to the theater, but this is even nicer.
While we’re always glad to be at the Biltmore, we already miss Sanibel and can’t wait to arrive in Winter Park, where I plan, among other interesting things, to conduct a public conversation with Pat Metheny and roll up my sleeves and write three chapters of Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. Time and inspiration permitting, I’ll also try to get started on the first draft of my next opera libretto. Today, though, I’ll settle for writing the second half of Friday’s Wall Street Journal column, a review of the show that Mrs. T and I saw last night at the Biltmore, after which we’ll have breakfast and pay a visit to the pool.
See you around, somewhere or other.

TT: Found object

January 23, 2012 by Terry Teachout

I’m always intrigued by the ill-sorted books that lurk randomly on the shelves of hotels and inns. Our room in the Biltmore Hotel, for instance, contains a bookshelf on which can be found the following volumes:
• A Trial by Jury, D. Graham Burnett’s account of the experience of serving on the jury for a murder trial
390371-L.jpg• Viana La Place’s La Bella Cucina: How to Cook, Eat, and Live Like an Italian
• Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround, by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
• A Reader’s Digest Select Editions volume from 2000 containing condensed versions of novels by Nelson DeMille, Linda Nichols, Michael Palmer, and Jennifer Chiaverini
• Pandora’s Daughter, a novel by Iris Johansen
21-stormy-petrel.jpg• Stormy Petrel, a novel (I think) by Mary Stewart
• The Runway of Life, a self-published book by Peter Legge whose genre was not apparent to me in the modest amount of time I was prepared to spend flipping through it
• Little Women
• Webster’s New Century Dictionary
No doubt a more imaginative person than I could write a witty poem or a wistful short story about these nine books, just as Mrs. T is capable of whipping up an edible meal out of whatever happens to be in our refrigerator at any given moment. Alas, all I can do is post their titles and wonder: did any of their authors ever imagine that the books over which they once slaved so hopefully would end up gathering dust in a resort hotel in Florida?
While we’re on the subject, here’s another question: will the day ever come when I stumble across a book of mine in a similar setting? And if I do, will I have the grace to smile wryly and reflect on the vanity of human wishes?

TT: Just because

January 23, 2012 by Terry Teachout

An excerpt from Sinatra: An American Original, originally telecast on CBS in 1965, in which Frank Sinatra is seen recording “It Was a Very Good Year.” The conductor is Gordon Jenkins and the narrator is Walter Cronkite:

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

TT: Almanac

January 23, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“Where ambition can be so happy as to cover its enterprizes, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of all human passions.”
David Hume, The History of England

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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