• 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 / 2016 / April / Archives for 27th

Archives for April 27, 2016

The room where it happened

April 27, 2016 by Terry Teachout

13015579_10154196654822193_3141841479453357640_nI flew down to Florida last Friday morning and started rehearsing my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf that same afternoon. We put in two more full days of work on Saturday and Sunday. On Monday I flew back to New York to see Shuffle Along on Broadway, writing Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal drama column on the plane. I returned to West Palm Beach yesterday morning and resumed work on Satchmo promptly at noon, a bit underslept but not too much the worse for wear.

Much of this is par for the course when you’re putting on a show, but not the part where you have to fly to New York for one night to cover a Broadway opening. The problem, if you want to call it that, is my day job with The Wall Street Journal, which I take with the utmost seriousness. Yes, I’m making my professional debut as a stage director, but this is also the last week of the current Broadway season, which means that opening nights are coming fast and furious. Even if I’d wanted to take a month off to work on Satchmo, I couldn’t possibly have left the Journal in the lurch at this crucial time of year. So I decided to use the same mule to pull both carts—me, with my friend and colleague Ed Rothstein pinch-hitting for two shows that I simply couldn’t make it back to New York to see—and it was every bit as grueling as I’d expected.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m having the time of my life anyway. Here’s how good a time I’m having: if I were thirty years younger, I think I might want to spend the rest of my life directing plays. I feel as though I’ve made a very important discovery about myself, just in the nick of time.

Mike Nichols made the same discovery when, at the age of thirty-one, he directed his first play, Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. “In the first fifteen minutes of the first day’s rehearsal,” he later said, “I understood that this was my job, this was what I had been preparing to do without knowing it….I felt happy and confident and I knew exactly what I wanted to do.”

13087548_10154200689942193_615817222542182387_nNeedless to say, I’m no Mike Nichols, and I’m twice as old as he was when he staged Barefoot in 1963. But I think I have some notion of how he felt that fateful day. No sooner did I walk into Palm Beach Dramaworks’ rehearsal room on Friday morning and say “O.K., let’s get going” than I felt confident of my ability to get Satchmo on its feet and put a personal stamp on the resulting staging, one that extends well beyond the mere fact of my also having written the script. What’s more, my confidence has so far been justified: at the end of two eight-hour rehearsals, the entire show was blocked, a full week ahead of the schedule that I drew up before coming to West Palm Beach.

It goes without saying that I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of my wonderful production team, starting with Jimmy Danford, Satchmo’s virtuoso stage manager, who sits at my right at each rehearsal and makes the impossible easy. On top of that, I have the further advantage of working with a brilliant actor, Barry Shabaka Henley, who just finished doing Satchmo forty times in Chicago and knows it cold. Nevertheless, I’m the one sitting in the driver’s seat, and somehow I seem to have known what I was doing there right from the start. I don’t understand how or why, any more than I understand how I was able to write Satchmo in the first place. Apparently this is how it works with directors: either you can do it or you can’t, and it seems that I can.

I’ve been involved with theater long enough to know that we’re more than likely to hit some fearfully bumpy stretches of road between now and May 13, when Satchmo opens. But I now feel reasonably confident that the show will be ready to go by then, and that I’ll still be having the time of my life. For whatever reason, I’m at home in the director’s chair—and I hope with all my heart that this won’t be the last time that I get to sit there.

Snapshot: Frank Zappa plays music on a pair of bicycles in 1963

April 27, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAFrank Zappa plays music on a pair of bicycles on The Steve Allen Show. This episode was originally telecast on March 4, 1963:

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

Almanac: Dr. Johnson on trust

April 27, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.”

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 79 (December 18, 1750)

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

April 2016
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  
« Mar   May »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Lookback: on joining the National Counncil on the Arts
  • Almanac: Thornton Wilder on hope
  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man
  • Almanac: Gore Vidal on the will to power
  • Verbal virtuosity

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