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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Lincoln Center’s dark legacy

July 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

My essay in the July/August double issue of Commentary is about Lincoln Center. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Lincoln Center, the first major urban performing-arts center in America, was well on its way to completion a half-century ago. The New York City Ballet, the New York City Opera, and the New York Philharmonic had already moved there, and the Metropolitan Opera followed suit in 1966. Theatrical productions began to be mounted in the Vivian Beaumont Theater by the end of 1965, and the Juilliard School and the School of American Ballet relocated to its 16-acre campus a few years later. This unprecedented consolidation remains to this day unrivaled in scope: No other performing-arts center dominates the artistic life of a great American city so totally.

lincoln_center3In recent years, though, Lincoln Center has weathered an equally unprecedented series of crises. The New York City Opera stopped performing there in 2011 and closed its doors two years later. Shortly thereafter, the Metropolitan Opera was forced to contend with a fiscal meltdown that threatens its very survival. Meanwhile, the New York Philharmonic, whose concert hall is closing in 2019 for desperately needed interior renovations, announced that Alan Gilbert, its music director, will be stepping down from that post in 2017 after a tenure widely regarded as lackluster….

Hence it is unusually timely that Reynold Levy, who served as Lincoln Center’s president from 2002 to 2014, has published a memoir noteworthy both for its candor and its smugness. As its title suggests, They Told Me Not to Take That Job: Tumult, Betrayal, Heroics, and the Transformation of Lincoln Center is even more self-serving than most books of its genre. Levy all too clearly sees himself as the heroic figure who single-handedly wrought “transformational change” in the face of “seemingly intractable problems,” and he believes that most of Lincoln Center’s remaining difficulties are the result of certain of its constituents having stubbornly refused to take his advice….

Levy’s indictments are plausible as far as they go. They ignore, however, the fact that Lincoln Center’s original designers made irreversible miscalculations whose long-term consequences are now glaringly apparent and increasingly dire….

In the end, Lincoln Center is best understood as a historical accident, one that has had a distorting and destructive effect on the performing arts elsewhere in America….

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

So you want to see a show?

July 2, 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:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, virtually all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hand to God (black comedy, X, absolutely not for children or prudish adults, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, all 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:
• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, ideal for bright children, remounting of Broadway production, original production reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, closes Aug. 30, reviewed here)

10014602_10153394661070797_5076908638098174684_nIN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 28, reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• On the Twentieth Century (musical, G/PG-13, virtually all performances sold out last week, closes July 19, contains very mild sexual content, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN NEW YORK:
• The Tempest (Shakespeare, G, reviewed here)

Almanac: Somerset Maugham on self-sacrifice

July 2, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘A woman can forgive a man for the harm he does her,’ he said, ‘but she can never forgive him for the sacrifices he makes on her account.’”

Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

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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