• 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 / 2017 / August / Archives for 15th

Archives for August 15, 2017

Lookback: how to turn a play into an opera libretto

August 15, 2017 by Terry Teachout

From 2007:

An opera libretto resembles a play at first glance, but the differences are bigger than you might realize. To begin with, a libretto is shorter than a play, since it takes longer to sing words than to speak them. For the record, the first draft of The Letter is 8,700 words long, roughly half the length of the play on which it’s based. (By way of comparison, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, is 18,301 words long.) I expect it will shrink still further before it reaches its final form. Yet our version of The Letter tracks the action of Maugham’s original play fairly closely.

So what happened to the rest of the play? Some was cut outright—I started by eliminating two of Maugham’s characters—and the remainder was trimmed ruthlessly….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Arthur C. Clarke on religious faith and science

August 15, 2017 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Others, one suspects, are afraid that the crossing of space, and above all contact with intelligent but nonhuman races, may destroy the foundations of their religious faith. They may be right, but in any event their attitude is one which does not bear logical examination—for a faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”

Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space

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

August 2017
M T W T F S S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  
« Jul   Sep »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Snapshot: Vladimir Horowitz plays Schubert
  • Almanac: Jacques Barzun on the piano
  • Lookback: on joining the National Council on the Arts
  • Almanac: Thornton Wilder on hope
  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man

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