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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 27, 2014

TT: Down and out

January 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

normal_Monet-Claude-Impression-sunset-Sun.jpgWhenever Mrs. T and I stay on Florida’s Sanibel Island, we make a point of watching the sun go down each evening. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I saw my first sunset, and watching a good one while standing on a patio located a few hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico is at least as pleasing a spectacle as spending a few minutes standing in front of a great painting hanging in a museum.
All things must pass, good and bad alike, and so the two of us sighed deeply as we watched the sun set on Friday, knowing that we’d be leaving Sanibel the following morning, not to return for at least another year. Afterward we drove to Doc Ford’s to eat one last meal of Yucatan shrimp, then returned to our seaside cottage in a frame of mind for which “wistful” isn’t a sufficiently strong word.

We drove the next morning from Sanibel to Winter Park, another of our regular destinations, where I’ll be spending the next three weeks in residence at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute, under whose welcoming auspices, among other things, I wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf and a good-sized portion of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.

1620648_459621167473369_1776782116_n.jpgLike its predecessors, this stay won’t be a holiday: I shared a stage with Morten Lauridsen yesterday afternoon, and on February 4 I’ll be giving a public lecture called “Duke Ellington: The Man Behind the Mask.” I also plan to work on another play while I’m here. In between these events, I’ll be seeing shows elsewhere in Florida, and I’ll also be flying up to New York to pay a couple of visits to Broadway and help out at rehearsals for the off-Broadway transfer of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which starts preview performances on February 15. Hence my calendar will likely be too crowded to see very many sunsets, with or without Mrs. T. We’ll have to settle for our memories of Sanibel, a place so miraculously peaceful that it often pops into our minds throughout the rest of the year.

For New Yorkers, tranquility is always at a premium. On Sanibel, it comes unbidden each evening, just before the sun starts to slide behind the horizon, leaving quiet darkness in its wake. I can never see that happen often enough.

TT: Just because

January 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins dance George Balanchine’s Tzigane in 1977. The score is by Maurice Ravel:

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

TT: Almanac

January 27, 2014 by Terry Teachout

“I once coined a phrase–High Definition Performance–to sum up what I liked most about authentic stars. In a nutshell (and many of the people who have this quality could fairly be described as nutcases), H.D.P. means the ability–shared by great athletes, sportsmen, bullfighters, and conversationalists as well as stage performers–to communicate the essence of one’s talents to an audience with economy, grace, no apparent effort, and absolute, hard-edged clarity of outline.”
Kenneth Tynan, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping (courtesy of Bobby Franklin)

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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