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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 1, 2015

Whatever happened to Archie Bunker?

January 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

I wrote about Norman Lear’s recently published autobiography for the January issue of Commentary:

Throughout much of the 1970s, Norman Lear was the most powerful TV producer in Hollywood. He created a string of situation comedies so successful that five of them, All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Maude, and Sanford and Son, were in the top 10 in the final week of the 1974–75 season. In 1983, he was one of the first seven people to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, together with Lucille Ball, Paddy Chayefsky, Milton Berle, Edward R. Murrow, William S. Paley, and David Sarnoff—a sign of how seriously he had come to be taken.

archieBy 1985, though, all of Lear’s series had been canceled, and none of them is shown widely in syndication today. Even Archie Bunker, the working-class anti-hero of All in the Family, whose name was for years synonymous with the blue-collar prejudices that the show was created to satirize, has long since faded from the common stock of American cultural reference.

No species of fame is as fleeting as the sort bestowed by network TV. But Lear fell further, faster, and more fully than most, and it is noteworthy that he has nothing to say about this descent in his newly published autobiography, Even This I Get to Experience, in which he is fairly forthcoming about most other aspects of his long and eventful life (he is 92 years old). One might well come away with the impression that he simply lost interest in television and decided to pursue other interests were it not for the fact that between 1991 and 1994, he created and produced two more sitcoms, both of them flops that were canceled after a half-dozen episodes each.

Such, of course, is the final fate of all TV producers, no matter how successful their series may be. Sooner or later—usually sooner—they lose touch with popular taste. But Lear’s brief period of domination over the airwaves was so complete that it is worth considering why it ended when it did. Did he simply run out of creative steam? Or was American culture changing in ways that he no longer understood?…

Read the whole thing here.

The DVDs I brought to Florida

January 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Not having advanced technologically to the point of being able to suck movies from the Web, Mrs. T and I usually bring a varied assortment of DVDs with us whenever we’re going anywhere for a long stay. We’re going to be in Florida for two months, so we decided that it might be wise to pack a larger-than-usual selection this year. Here’s what I stowed in the suitcase. As was the case with the books I brought on our trip, some of these films are new to me and some not:

Baby, the Rain Must Fall (since Horton Foote has been on my mind of late)

Children of Paradise

Frances Ha

Ghost-World-indie-films-1947556-500-281Ghost World

The Grand Budapest Hotel and Letter from an Unknown Woman (to suit my Stefan Zweig mood)

Honeymoon in Vegas (for homework—I’ve never seen the film and I’m prepping to review the Broadway stage version)

Junebug

Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming

The Last Picture Show

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (David Mamet’s favorite movie, which we watched with undiminished pleasure on New Year’s Eve)

Local Hero

Margaret (in honor of the Broadway run of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth)

meandorsonwelles-zoeMe and Orson Welles (a continuation of our Zoe Kazan film festival)

Moonrise Kingdom

Henry Bromell’s Panic (one of the most underrated films of the past quarter-century)

Passion Fish

Silver Linings Playbook

Sunshine State (we’re in Florida, right?)

There Will Be Blood

Between that stash (which I’ll replenish as needed when I fly up to New York later this month) and TCM, I’d say we’re good for at least a month.

So you want to see a show?

January 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, all performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• The Elephant Man (drama, PG-13, contains partial nudity, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes Feb. 22, reviewed here)
jefferson-mays-450• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:
• My Old Lady (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 11, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:
• Once (musical, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• This Is Our Youth (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)

Almanac: Peter Drucker on success

January 1, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.”

Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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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