Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
From 2005:
I’m left-handed, with an ink-smudging overhand hook so exaggerated that my first-grade teacher, who in 1962 was already a thoroughly cranky old woman, tried briefly and vainly to get me to write with my right hand. I’ve found penmanship awkward ever since, which is why I learned to type as a boy and why I took so readily to e-mail as a grownup….
Read the whole thing here.
“In a sensible language like English important words are connected and related to one another by other little words. The Romans in that stern antiquity considered such a method weak and unworthy. Nothing would satisfy them but that the structure of every word should be reacted on by its neighbours in accordance with elaborate rules to meet the different conditions in which it might be used. There is no doubt that this method both sounds and looks more impressive than our own. The sentence fits together like a piece of polished machinery. Every phrase can be tensely charged with meaning. It must have been very laborious, even if you were brought up to it; but no doubt it gave the Romans, and the Greeks too, a fine and easy way of establishing their posthumous fame. They were the first comers in the fields of thought and literature. When they arrived at fairly obvious reflections upon life and love, upon war, fate or manners, they coined them into the slogans or epigrams for which their language was so well adapted, and thus preserved the patent rights for all time. Hence their reputation. Nobody ever told me this at school. I have thought it all out in later life.”
Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission
Julian Bream and Malcolm Arnold talk about Arnold’s Guitar Concerto, Op. 67, then perform its finale, with Arnold conducting members of the Philharmonia Orchestra. This performance was originally telecast by the BBC on November 19, 1963, as part of the first episode of Gala Performance. The host is Richard Attenborough:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I know that an actor can undermine anything a director tells him to do by making fun of it.”
Rip Torn (quoted by John Heard in Will Harris, “John Heard on The Lizzie Borden Chronicles, The Sopranos, Sharknado, and more” (A.V. Club, April 4, 2015)
In my two drama columns for the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a pair of regional revivals, Walnut Street Theatre’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in Philadelphia and Shakespeare & Company’s God of Carnage in Lenox, Massachusetts. Here are excerpts from both reviews.
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Fifty-five years after it opened on Broadway, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” remains the funniest musical ever written. The Larry Gelbart-Burt Shevelove book about hanky-panky in ancient Rome is so well wrought that it could almost be successfully performed without Stephen Sondheim’s score, though Mr. Sondheim’s elegantly turned songs add immeasurably to the total effect. In addition, “A Funny Thing Happened” is also a time capsule, a vade mecum of baggy-pants vaudeville comedy elevated to the highest possible level of theatricality. It’s possible to put a fresh spin on the show, as Jessica Stone did in her wonderful 2015 all-male Two River Theater revival, but it isn’t necessary, and there’s much to be said for doing it the old-fashioned way, so long as you have a cast and director who speak the all-but-lost language of Catskills-style kill-or-be-killed comedy—which is where Frank Ferrante comes in.
Mr. Ferrante, the director and star of Walnut Street Theatre’s revival of “A Funny Thing Happened,” got his start playing Groucho Marx in a 1986 off-Broadway revue written by Arthur, Groucho’s son. Though he’s only 54, he looks and sounds just like the kind of comedian you might have seen working at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort Hotel three-quarters of a century ago. Every time he opens his mouth and spits out punch lines, you can smell the cigar smoke halfway up the aisle. Mr. Ferrante plays Pseudolus, the scheming Roman slave whose role was created on Broadway by Zero Mostel, and it’s hard to imagine anyone doing a better job.
Not only is Mr. Ferrante a marvelous performer, but he’s also staged “A Funny Thing Happened” with explosive comic punch…
“God of Carnage,” Yasmina Reza’s comedy of bad manners about two New York couples whose children get into a bloody playground fight, has been making the regional rounds ever since the Broadway production closed in 2010. It’s easy to see why: Who wouldn’t want to do a tightly written, ferociously funny hit that calls for only four actors and one simple living-room set? I’d been wondering, though, how well Ms. Reza’s clever variation on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was holding up after seven years of hard use, so when Shakespeare & Company announced that it would be performing “God of Carnage,” I decided to go see for myself. I’m immensely pleased to report that Regge Life’s staging, performed in the company’s 186-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, is terrifically potent, and that the play itself, which skewers with lip-smacking gusto our collective pretensions of middle-class gentility, appears not to have aged a whit….
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To read my review of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, go here.
To read my review of God of Carnage, go here.
Leonard Bernstein leads the London Symphony in a live performance of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, originally telecast by the BBC on November 27, 1966:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence. What are your views? When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head. Greater than Charles [Dickens]; greater than Walter [Scott]—with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”
Rudyard Kipling, letter to C.R.L. Fletcher (April 10, 1915)
In this week’s “Sightings” column, which appeas in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I take a look at Edward Albee’s art collection, which is being auctioned off next week. Here’s an excerpt.
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If art is important to you, then you’ll probably have succumbed at one time or another to the comforting illusion that good taste is a virtue. No such luck. Not only has it been proved that listening to Mozart doesn’t really make you smarter, but the history books are full of bad men to whom the fine arts were vitally important (Adolf Hitler loved the operas of Wagner) and great ones to whom they meant nothing (Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song was “Home on the Range”).
In fact, genuine aesthetic taste isn’t a proxy for anything else, virtue least of all. In part it’s an expression of personality, but not a simple or obvious one, and it has a way of popping up in unexpected places. I recently read an airline-magazine interview with George W. Bush, who became an amateur artist after leaving the White House and who recently published “Portraits of Courage,” a folio of his paintings of U.S. veterans. “Now that you paint—and go to museums—who are you in awe of?” the interviewer asked. He immediately cited four modern artists, Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper, David Hockney and Fairfield Porter. Nobody focus-grouped that reply…
A few days after I read that interview, Sotheby’s announced that it is auctioning off a hundred-odd pieces from the art collection of Edward Albee. Unlike President Bush, the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was well known for his love of modern art, and his success as a playwright allowed him to do something about it. Mr. Albee’s collection, which is currently on view in Manhattan and goes on the block Sept. 26, is expected to bring in between $8 million and $12 million, all of which will benefit the Edward F. Albee Foundation, which funds residencies for artists and writers. That’s a tidy sum for a man who wrote plays in which the American dream is portrayed as a snare and a delusion.
I’m not here, however, to tease Mr. Albee’s ghost (well, maybe just a little). I’m more interested in this question: What, if anything, can we learn about him from the art that he hung on his walls?…
One thing that’s clear is that the collection, like President Bush’s top-four list, reflects its owner’s taste, not that of a high-priced art consultant. Rather than “buying signatures” or hewing to the dictates of fashion, Mr. Albee collected artists who were respected but comparatively little known to the public at large….
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Read the whole thing here.