Archives for October 2012

No 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.

Clean 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.
Needless 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.

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.)

“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)

I’ve finally updated the Top Five and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column with a septet of fresh picks. Forgive my delinquency–and please take a look.

From 2006:

I’m not inclined to be forgiving of anyone who plays pattycake with totalitarianism, but if there’s been a truly great creative artist whose sins against humanity amounted to much more than first-degree talk, I’m unaware of it.
Mind you, I have no illusions about the ennobling power of art. I’ve spent too much time around artists not to know better than that. Daily megadoses of beauty won’t make you a better person unless you were a good person to begin with. What keeps great artists out of trouble is that they’re too busy making art to do much of anything but talk. It’s the second- and third-raters who end up working for the Ministry of Truth, where they burn off their frustrations by rejecting the grant applications of their betters (or sending them to concentration camps)….

Read the whole thing here.

“The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different.”
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Mrs. T and I got married five years ago last night. The exigencies of getting Satchmo at the Waldorf open in New Haven have prevented us from celebrating the great day in an appropriate manner, but we’ll catch up next week.
Be it this week or next, I’ve never been happier. These have been the best five years of my life, and the next five will be even better. I’m a very lucky guy–as lucky as it gets.

I spotted this sentence in a recent item about Satchmo at the Waldorf:

Terry Teachout, the playwright, is out to prove that critics–he’s the theater reviewer for The Wall Street Journal–can walk the walk, too.

Well, no, I’m not. I definitely didn’t write Satchmo at the Waldorf to prove that critics are capable of writing plays. (George Bernard Shaw settled that one a long time ago.) Nor did I write it to prove that Louis Armstrong was a great artist, or that Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were wrong to call him an Uncle Tom.

In fact, I didn’t write it to “prove” anything at all.

Here’s why I wrote Satchmo: (1) I thought it would be fun. (2) I also thought that trying to write a play would be an interesting and exciting challenge. And that’s about the size of it.

I’m not saying that Satchmo at the Waldorf is devoid of wider implications. Far from it. You can’t write a play about the life of a black jazz musician, least of all one as historically significant as Armstrong, without touching on the subject of race relations in America. What’s more, I upped the ante considerably when I decided that the same actor would play Armstrong and Joe Glaser, his Jewish manager. But I didn’t do so to make a non-theatrical point–I did it for dramatic effect. You can’t have a play without conflict, and the trick to making a one-man play dramatic is finding a way to make that conflict palpable, even visible. By making Glaser an onstage character in the play, I embodied the emotional conflict that lies at the heart of Satchmo.

Does my decision to have a black actor play a white man have political overtones? That’s for you to decide. But if you read me at all regularly, you know that I’m a skeptic when it comes to political art, most of which inclines to propagandizing at the expense of artfulness. A boring work of art can’t persuade anyone of anything, not even that we should believe what it tells us about the world. And nothing is more boring–or less believable–than a story with only one side.

It stands to reason that I wouldn’t want to create that kind of art. My interests lie elsewhere. Maurice Ravel affixed to his Valses nobles et sentimentales this epigraph by the French poet Henri de Régnier: The delicious and always new pleasure of a useless occupation. I love that phrase, and up to a point (though not beyond) it explains why I wrote Satchmo at the Waldorf. Fairfield Porter came even closer, though, when he wrote that his goal as a painter was “to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” At bottom, that’s what I’ve tried to do with my first play. I’ve taken some of the known facts of Louis Armstrong’s life and some of what Armstrong himself said and wrote about his life and work, and shaped it into a work of art that happens to be about two real-life historical figures.

W.H. Auden claimed in his poem In Memory of W.B. Yeats that “poetry makes nothing happen.” He was, of course, speaking as a poet, and so, in my far more modest way, am I. I know perfectly well that if you should go to see Satchmo at the Waldorf, you’ll come away knowing more about Louis Armstrong at evening’s end than you did when the curtain went up. But I didn’t write the play to teach you anything, much less to prove anything. I wrote it to give myself pleasure and–if possible–to make the world a little bit more beautiful.

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Charles Munch leads the Boston Symphony in a 1963 performance of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales: