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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 16, 2014

In Gouldland

July 16, 2014 by Terry Teachout

220px-Niagara_On_The_Lake_cenotaphMrs. T and I drove up to Ontario yesterday to see four plays at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, one of the prettiest and most pleasant places I know, a preternaturally neat town where the lawns look as though they were trimmed three times a day and you can’t get a bad meal unless you go out of your way to find it.

I paid my first professional visit to Canada in 2009. Since then I’ve returned to see shows every summer, both because Canadian theater is excellent and because I find the country itself to be so agreeable—and interesting. My interest, which has ripened into outright fascination, dates from my reading of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada: An American’s Notes on Canadian Culture. Part of what fascinates me is that Canada looks and sounds deceptively like its southern neighbor, but is nonetheless, as I first learned from Wilson, a very different place with a strongly distinctive and self-conscious identity of its own.

To read an article like this is to be made acutely aware of the extent to which some Canadians define that identity in terms of not being American. As Mike Myers famously said, “Canada is the essence of not being. Not English, not American, it is the mathematic of not being. And a subtle flavor—we’re more like celery as a flavor.”

10350407_10152617813292193_5057628007536790963_nAs I wrote during my first visit to Canada:

I’ve been walking around town each afternoon in search of impressions. Mostly I’m struck by how similar Canada is to America—and how intensely aware it is of its neighbor to the south. While I have no doubt that surface appearances are deceiving, it’s also true that every other story I read in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, is either about the United States or makes prominent reference to it….

The main thing I’ve noticed since arriving on Sunday is that everyone here seems to be nice. Granted, I’ve yet to meet a Canadian I didn’t like, but the unfailing agreeability of the people whom I’ve encountered in Stratford suggests that niceness might well be a component of the Canadian national character.

To be sure, I would never dream of generalizing with any authority about Canada based on a handful of visits. On the other hand, I have a fair number of close friends who come from there, and they all have two things in common: they are nice without exception and conspicuously ill at ease about tooting their own horns. Anyone who decides to live and work in this country is by definition self-selected for ambition, yet just about every Canadian expatriate I know is diffident to the point of shyness when it comes to acting decisively on that ambition.

Hugh MacLennan, C.C., 1984I discovered Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night, my favorite Canadian novel, in 2008, and found it unusually revealing on this score. In it MacLennan refers to Canada as a “cautious country which had always done more than she had promised, had always endured in silence while others reaped the glory.” That sentence describes most of my Canadian friends to the letter.

As far as the deceptive similarities go, they’re sometimes so conspicuous as to be downright amusing. At breakfast this morning I heard two young women conversing merrily in the nasal yap-speak that is characteristic of American women of their age: “Yah. Yah. That’s AHH-some. Yah.” Were it not for their unmistakable Canadian accents, I would have taken them to be from Los Angeles.

But Niagara-on-the-Lake is not—to put it mildly—Los Angeles, and though the Shaw Festival is one of the finest theatrical enterprises of its kind in North America, it’s not nearly so well known in the United States as it ought to be, perhaps because it’s…well, Canadian. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy coming here so much, just as I love my Canadian friends in part because they are so very Canadian, and so very unlike me.

* * *

UPDATE: To read Mordecai Richler’s 1965 review of Edmund Wilson’s O Canada, go here.

Glenn Gould’s Toronto, originally telecast by the CBC in 1979:

Snapshot: Julius Katchen plays Brahms

July 16, 2014 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERA
Julius Katchen plays two of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances on French TV. Katchen, a renowned specialist in the music of Brahms, died of cancer in 1969 at the age of 42:

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

Almanac: A.J. Liebling’s credo

July 16, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“The way to write is well, and how is your own business. Nothing else on the subject makes sense.”

A.J. Liebling, The Honest Rainmaker (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

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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