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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 10, 2016

Putting on the frosting

May 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

13124452_10154226593557193_5237866013866554097_nOver the weekend I spent two consecutive twelve-hour working days in technical rehearsals for my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf. I say “my” because I wrote the play and am directing it, but nothing drives home the collaborative nature of theater quite like tech, in which the director, design team, and stage crew of a show work hand in hand to build, polish, and rehearse the lighting and sound cues that transform what happened in the rehearsal hall to what will happen in front of an audience.

Tech is a grueling, painstaking, time-consuming process that requires infinite patience. If you’re a naturally impatient person—as I am, I regret to say—it can be tedious in the extreme. But if—as I also am—you’re the kind of person who has a taste for taking infinite pains, then it can be one of the most engrossing and pleasurable experiences that theater has to offer. It’s the Orson Welles part of stage directing: you get to pull out the toy box and spend hours and hours playing with it. You fuss endlessly and productively over every single lighting cue, making one part of the stage dark and another bright, with the lighting designer saying “Do you like it better this way, or this way?” over and over again like a demented ophthalmologist.

Ch-sZPbU4AAfmbWI tweeted about our tech rehearsals as they were in progress, and a jazz-singing friend of mine who has also worked in theater responded as follows:

Tech has always been my favorite part of the rehearsal process. Such a joy and relief to incorporate lights, sound, and costumes after you’ve been stuck in a rehearsal room pretending they’re there. It’s when the production becomes real, and you get to work through all the magical technical moments.

My—our—production of Satchmo is full of such moments, a few of which are sufficiently surprising that I don’t want to give them away. Most, though, are intended to be so subtle as to escape the conscious notice of the audience. Their purpose is to heighten the atmosphere of the show without drawing attention to themselves, and to make you concentrate all the more closely on the action and actors.

In the case of Satchmo, we have only one actor, Barry Shabaka Henley, who did the show earlier this year in Chicago in a completely different-looking production. I’ve found it inspiring to watch Shabaka adjust with seeming effortlessness to this new setting, and to see his interpretation of the triple role of Louis Armstrong, Joe Glaser, and Miles Davis grow richer and more complex with each passing day. Like John Douglas Thompson and Dennis Neal before him, he is a true artist, and I am lucky beyond words to have him doing the show.

13173625_10154219783907193_2005067985405356684_nThat said, tech is less about the actor than about the people you don’t see on stage, and I couldn’t begin to say enough about them. Mike Amico, his wife Erin, Kirk Bookman, and Matt Corey, designed the set, costumes, lighting, and sound for Satchmo, and they are, each and every one, masters of their crafts. So are James Danford and Ashley Horowitz, the stage manager and assistant manager, who (if I may mix my metaphors) keep the balls in the air and make the trains run on time. Between them, they’ve all helped to turn the production in my head into a living, breathing thing, and it is no false modesty but the simple truth when I say that I couldn’t have even begun to do it without them.

All of which brings us to the eve of the moment of truth. Tonight is the final dress rehearsal. The first public preview of Satchmo at the Waldorf is Wednesday, with a second preview the next day. We—we—open on Friday. So far, so good. As of this morning, those are the eight happiest words I know.

Lookback: on getting a clean bill of health after a near-fatal illness

May 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

LOOKBACKFrom 2006:

On Monday morning I pulled on my sweats, hailed a cab, and made my way across town to the office of my cardiologist, unfed and insufficiently slept but on the whole optimistic. A few minutes after arriving I was whisked into an examination room, where a technician threaded an intravenous needle into my right arm and pumped me full of thallium. “You’re going to be radioactive for the next couple of days,” she told me matter-of-factly. “Let us know if you’re going to be traveling by air or if you have to enter a federal building–any place with metal detectors–and we’ll give you a card so that they’ll know why you’re setting off the machine.” Then she escorted me to another room containing a large, ominous-looking machine upon which I reclined motionless while a second technician took pictures of my heart….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Tom Stoppard on knowledge and the meaning of life

May 10, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

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, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [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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