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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: Once in a while the moon turns blue

October 10, 2012 by Terry Teachout

Satchmo-at-Waldorf-051LO.jpgNo more rehearsals, no more previews: Satchmo at the Waldorf opens tonight at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.
At this point I don’t have much of anything left to say, so instead I’ll post a link to a piece whose third paragraph was surely designed to keep me modest. The author originally spelled my name “Teacher Teachout.” (Yes, it’s been fixed.) I’ve spent my whole life spelling my last name for people who can’t quite bring themselves to believe that it’s spelled the way it sounds, but this was the first time that anybody ever fouled up my first name!
Thanks to everyone out there for your kind words of encouragement. The adventure that is Satchmo at the Waldorf is far from over, but this is still a big night for all of us up in New Haven. Long Wharf is one of America’s top regional theaters, and I never imagined that my play would ever be done there. Now it’s happening.
I’m reminded of the scene from the play in which Louis Armstrong talks about his rise to fame:

And then, this one night we playing in a movie house and they show this Looney Tunes cartoon before the feature, and you know what? I’m in it. Look up at the screen and there’s this trumpet-playing angel…and it’s me. Can’t get no more famous than that.

cen11cp.jpgClean Pastures, the cartoon in question, is no longer shown on TV–Friz Freleng’s well-meaning caricatures of Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Stepin Fetchit, the Mills Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Fats Waller are now understandably regarded as racially insensitive–but in 1937 Armstrong would surely have seen it as proof of his decisive emergence as a full-fledged pop-culture icon.
am-theatre-900.jpgNeedless to say, I’m not famous and never will be. There’s no such thing as a famous playwright anymore, much less a famous critic. Still, I have no doubt that it’s going to feel very special–perhaps even a little bit eerie–for me to sit in the audience tonight and watch my first play being performed on the stage of Long Wharf Theatre.
As W.H. Auden wrote in his libretto for Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan, “Once in a while the odd thing happens,/Once in a while the dream comes true.” So it does. So it has.

TT: Snapshot

October 10, 2012 by Terry Teachout

The Bad Plus performs a jazz version of Igor Stravinsky’s Apollo:

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

TT: Almanac

October 10, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, ‘What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?’
“‘They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,’ Pa said. ‘Go to sleep, now.’
“But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
“She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’
“She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”
Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (courtesy of The Rat)

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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