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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 16, 2012

TT: More reviews of Satchmo at the Waldorf

October 16, 2012 by Terry Teachout

• In TheaterMania: Satchmo at the Waldorf
• In Broadway World: Satchmo at the Waldorf Jazzes at The Long Wharf

TT: When docudramas were true

October 16, 2012 by Terry Teachout

My Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which normally runs every other Friday, is being published in today’s paper to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. In it I write about The Missiles of October, the 1974 TV docudrama about the crisis. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
6a01156f1b6b31970c0120a77c93db970b-320wi.jpgMost historians regard docudramas with extreme suspicion–as well they should. From “Inherit the Wind” to Oliver Stone’s “JFK” to “Stuff Happens,” David Hare’s 2004 play about Gulf War II, most of the best-known examples of the genre, in which a screenwriter or playwright takes a well-documented historical event and fictionalizes it, are tendentious to the point of outright falsity. But the rotten barrel of docudrama also contains a few good apples, and one of them, “The Missiles of October,” deserves to be celebrated this week, a half-century after the Cuban Missile Crisis was set in motion by the Pentagon’s discovery that the Soviet Union was moving nuclear missiles into Cuba.
Written by Stanley R. Greenberg and telecast on ABC in 1974, “The Missiles of October,” which is now available on DVD and on YouTube, was a new type of full-length prime-time TV docudrama. Prior to that time, network TV had dabbled with some frequency in the fictionalization of history, most notably with Abby Mann’s “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which was originally written in 1959 for “Playhouse 90.” But Mr. Greenberg, unlike Mr. Mann and the vast majority of his predecessors, tried to stick as closely as possible to the facts as they were known at the time. Not only did he base his script on “Thirteen Days,” Bobby Kennedy’s posthumously published memoir of the crisis, but “The Missiles of October” opens with an announcement that leaves the viewer in no doubt of his intention to play it straight: “The names we use are real. The action is based upon the historical record as drawn from reportage, academic studies, eyewitness accounts, and official documents.”
Mr. Greenberg’s determination to hew as closely as possible to the record explains in large part why “The Missiles of October” is so much more believable than the Kevin Costner vehicle “Thirteen Days,” the 2000 film version of the same story. Scarcely less central to its impact, though, is the bare-bones way in which it was produced. Anthony Page, the director, shot “The Missiles of October” not on film but videotape, thus giving it a you-are-there crispness, and used dirt-plain interior sets reminiscent of what you might have expected to see in a medium-to-low-budget stage play–or a classic ’50s live-TV drama…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
Watch The Missiles of October:

President Kennedy’s actual 1962 Oval Office speech, in which he told viewers that the Soviet Union was moving nuclear weapons into Cuba:

TT: Lookback

October 16, 2012 by Terry Teachout

Past-Present-Future.jpgFrom 2005:

Was it a great performance, or merely a great occasion? Falstaff, after all, is no knockabout farce but one of Western art’s most searching commentaries on the vanity of human wishes, no less so because it says what it has to say with a smile. What makes Verdi’s Falstaff immortal is the comic finality with which his remaining delusions of potency are dispelled–and the nobleman’s grace with which he accepts his reversal of fortune. Verdi, who was seventy-nine years old when he completed Falstaff, understood such matters in his bones, which is why Falstaff is the most Shakespearean of all operas. Sir John may be a fool to chase after Alice and Meg, but if he is, so are we all…

Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

October 16, 2012 by Terry Teachout

“I suppose there is no word quite as evocative in the English language as ‘home,’ especially if you don’t have one.”
Richard Burton, diary entry, Aug. 22, 1969

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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