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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for August 13, 2014

My encounters with Lauren Bacall

August 13, 2014 by Terry Teachout

I’ve never been a celebrity hound, or even much of a celebrity spotter. I actually got through an entire performance by the Paul Taylor Dance Company without realizing that Joel Grey was sitting next to me. But I did see Lauren Bacall twice and spoke to her once, and both of those brief encounters are clearly etched in my memory.

3_633753856491287500629423_29_4mbaryshnikovlbacall_041409The first one took place in January of 1976, when I went with a group of college students from Missouri to see American Ballet Theatre at Broadway’s Uris Theatre (now the Gershwin Theatre). It was my first trip to New York, as well as the first time I’d ever been to any kind of dance performance. Mikhail Baryshnikov, newly defected from Russia, was dancing in Fokine’s Spectre of the Rose, and Bacall was sitting directly in front of me. I blush to admit that I spent more time looking at her than at him. Perhaps not surprisingly, though, I took both of their presences for granted, assuming that everyday life in New York was just like that, an uninterrupted succession of miracles. When, a quarter-century later, I covered the opening of Wicked for The Wall Street Journal, I was quietly amused by the fact that it was being performed in the same theater.

photo_cd_04The second time I saw Bacall was a decade ago. I went to a cabaret performance by Amanda Green, whom I met in the lobby after the show. Bacall had also been in the audience, and Green introduced me to her. I somehow managed to stammer out something marginally appropriate, to which Bacall responded graciously in her famously low and throaty voice, and that was that. I remember thinking, My God, she looks just like herself! And so, of course, she did, very obviously older but still as beautiful and poised as ever.

By then I’d watched Baryshnikov dance countless times and even interviewed him, and I’ve seen him a few more times since then—but whenever I do, I always think of the long-ago night when I saw him step through a window on the stage of the Uris, simultaneously gaping at Lauren Bacall out of the corner of one of my star-struck eyes.

* * *

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Marianna Tcherkassky dance Michel Fokine’s La Spectre de la Rose at Wolf Trap in 1976. The score is Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance. This was Baryshnikov’s American TV debut:

Snapshot: Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet

August 13, 2014 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAFrom Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film version of Hamlet, the “To be or not to be” sequence. The musical score is by William Walton:

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

Almanac: Edward Bond on tragedy (I)

August 13, 2014 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“They used to say tragedy purified, helped you to let go. Now it only embarrasses. They’ve made a law against it.”

Edward Bond, 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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