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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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TT: At least a thousand words

February 8, 2013 by Terry Teachout

DUKE%20IN%2055.jpgI’m now assembling and obtaining permission to reprint the photographs that I plan to include in Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington. I recently ran across this “image” (as we say in the publishing business) in the course of my research. Nothing that I could possibly say about it would be as eloquent as the thing itself.
If you want to understand what Ellington’s life as an American artist was like, this explains a good-sized chunk of it.

TT: The takers and the “tooken”

February 8, 2013 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two outstanding Florida productions, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ A Raisin in the Sun and Orlando Shakespeare’s Othello. Here’s an excerpt.
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What makes a play political? Sometimes it’s all in the timing. “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama about a black family that wants to move to a white neighborhood, doubtless came across as strongly political when it first opened on Broadway. How could it have been otherwise? Fifty-four years later, though, “Raisin” seems not so much a here-and-now assault on racism as a history play about black culture in the Eisenhower era, and what hits you hardest is the unflinching truthfulness with which Ms. Hansberry has enacted the hurtful and universal complexities of family life.
sf-palm-beach-dramaworks-raisin-in-the-sun-201-002.jpegThough it’s been nine years since “Raisin” was last seen on Broadway, it was already receiving its fair share of regional productions prior to the 2010 premiere of “Clybourne Park,” in which Bruce Norris imagined what might have happened to the house that the Younger family bought in the early ’50s. The success of Mr. Norris’ toothless little satire, however, has inspired still more companies to revive the original play on which it is based, which is what brought me down to West Palm Beach to see “Raisin.” I already knew that it was effective, but Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production, simply staged by Seret Scott and acted to perfection by a phenomenally well-chosen cast, suggests that it is in fact one of the finest American plays of the 20th century…
Traditional stagings of Shakespeare’s plays are hard to come by these days, and it’s refreshing to be reminded, as Orlando Shakespeare is currently doing in its outstanding version of “Othello,” that the greatest of all English-speaking playwrights can scrape along quite nicely without hip costumes or self-consciously clever directorial touches. Brian Vaughn’s production takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, not Greenwich Village or Nazi Germany, and unfolds on a flexible Elizabethan-style unit set designed by Bert Scott that hurls you from scene to scene with electric swiftness. Nothing is allowed to divert your attention from Shakespeare’s harsh portrayal of jealousy run rampant, and the cast tells the tale briskly and forcefully….
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Read the whole thing here.

TT: Almanac

February 8, 2013 by Terry Teachout

“An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

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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