• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2015 / December / Archives for 9th

Archives for December 9, 2015

One down

December 9, 2015 by Terry Teachout

CVt_ZOSUYAAwbFtThe first rehearsal for the Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf went exhilaratingly well. Barry Shabaka Henley, whom I met for the first time yesterday morning, proved to be both a first-rate actor and an unusually nice man. (He’s the tall guy at left.) Judging by what happened in the Court Theatre’s rehearsal hall on Tuesday, Barry is already well on the way to putting his personal stamp on Satchmo, just as Dennis Neal and John Douglas Thompson did before him. What happens in the rehearsal room stays in the rehearsal room, so I don’t want to be any more specific than that. Suffice it to say that he read the whole show out loud for the production team and a small audience of invited guests, and—as we say in the business—he killed.

CVt-z-0U4AA9CZKI also got a look at the finished model for John Culbert’s set, which is already under construction on the stage of the Court. Of course I’d seen photographs of earlier versions, but standing in front of the model for the first time is always a thrill, and I couldn’t be more pleased.

No guests today. Instead, we roll up our sleeves and get down to business. Charlie Newell, the director, has strongly and excitingly individual ideas about Satchmo, and that, as I told him when we first discussed the production several months ago, is exactly what I have in mind. I don’t want a replica of any of the play’s previous productions, wonderful though they were. I want Charlie to do it his way, and he knows I mean it.

Don’t expect to hear too much more from me for the next few days. We have a lot to do between now and the first preview on January 7. Rehearsing a play is hard work—but it’s also as much fun as anything I know. That’s why they call it a play.

Snapshot: Jerome Robbins’ In G Major

December 9, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAThe Paris Opera Ballet performs Jerome Robbins’ In G Major, a ballet set to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G:

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

Almanac: Vladimir Nabokov on “good” and “bad” writers

December 9, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely.’

“‘A bit severe, isn’t it? And a bit dangerous. Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one-half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”

Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (trans. Michael Scammell “with the collaboration of the author,” 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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

December 2015
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Nov   Jan »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Verbal virtuosity
  • Jump-starting an arts revival
  • Replay: Alfred Hitchcock talks to Dick Cavett
  • Almanac: Tolstoy on happiness
  • Almanac: Ambrose Bierce on the President of the United States

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in