Archives for 2018

In case you hadn’t noticed, @terryteachout, my Twitter account, was hacked on Sunday morning as part of a cross-platform attack on my social-media presence. The objective, it seems, was ransom: I actually received a series of telephone calls from the culprits, who appear to reside in England. Needless to say, I hung up and immediately started changing passwords and building a higher security wall.

After careful consideration, I also asked Twitter to deactivate @terryteachout and started a brand-new Twitter account, @TerryTeachout1. This meant, of course, that all of my old Tweets vanished into the memory hole and that I lost my 15,000 followers. Be that as it may, I felt more comfortable with this drastic solution: I simply didn’t want to be associated with the old account any more. It felt dirty, if you know what I mean, in the same way that a house that has been burglarized feels dirty. All things considered, I thought it best to start from scratch.

Alas, several hours went by before the powers-that-be at Twitter took notice of my plight, and numerous obscene postings were still visible on my old Twitter page, as well as on the Twitter module in the right-hand column of this blog, well into Monday. I did, however, receive this message from Twitter Support late Sunday night:

We’ve investigated the reported account and have determined that it is not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy. In order for an account to be in violation…it must portray another person…in a misleading or deceptive manner.

That was how Twitter Support responded when my verified account was hacked, obscene and racist messages were posted on it, and a ransom request was made to me by telephone. Is it any wonder that more and more people are getting fed up with Twitter?

The good news is that an earlier version of this posting went viral last night. No doubt as a result of the overwhelming public response to my complaints, Twitter Support finally deleted my hacked account and verified @TerryTeachout1 as of six p.m. tonight. I should add that once I managed to engage with an actual human being at Twitter, my problems were solved within a couple of hours. I only wish it hadn’t been so hard for me to get past the bots—but I’m still grateful.

If you followed me at @terryteachout, I hope that you’ll move over to @TerryTeachout1 and share my new handle with your friends. I put a lot of energy into Twitter—I get great pleasure out of it—and I expect to continue to do so. Thanks for your support—and please keep spreading the word about my new Twitter home!

UPDATE: It turns out that my attackers planted a trojan-horse virus in my laptop that locked me out of Twitter and my e-mail account again this morning. Fortunately, I’d already taken precautions that prevented them from vandalizing my new Twitter feed, but the virus appears to have contained a time bomb that has now erased my e-mailbox and address book. If you are a personal friend who has my e-mail address, do please drop me a line as soon as possible so that we can re-establish contact.

The twenty-third episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

This episode, the critics sit down for an interview with Time Out New York and 4Columns contributor and critic Helen Shaw (she also writes for American Theatre on happy occasion). They discuss Shaw’s experience covering the Off-Off-Broadway scene and its inherent challenges, as well as her beginnings in criticism. Then all the critics try to finally figure out what exactly a dramaturg does. Teach Al Pacino yoga, for one—at least that’s what she did in her second day as a dramaturg on a production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui….

To listen, download the latest episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Peggy Lee and George Shearing perform Shearing’s “Lullaby of Birdland” on The Bing Crosby Oldsmobile Show, originally telecast by CBS on September 29, 1959:

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

“By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.”

Joseph Brodsky, opening remarks as U.S. Poet Laureate (1991)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Classic Stage Company’s off-Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Here’s an excerpt.

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You needn’t believe in historical inevitability to have predicted that the election of Donald Trump would lead in short order to a New York revival of “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.” Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, in which Adolf Hitler becomes a Depression-era Chicago gangster who is out to corner the local cauliflower trade by hook, crook or tommy gun, has a way of getting produced whenever the White House happens to be occupied by a president who rings the gong of backstage outrage. “If we’re not screaming and shouting now, when are we ever going to do it?” asks John Doyle, the director of Classic Stage Company’s new production….

As fine an artist as Mr. Doyle is, and as excited as I was by the prospect of seeing Raúl Esparza in the title role, I was more than a little bit apprehensive about this production going in. “Arturo Ui,” after all, isn’t one of Brecht’s masterpieces—its satire is too cartoonish—and I’ve seen a fair number of shows in recent months whose claims to artistic seriousness were undercut by the willingness of their makers to stoop to over-obvious anti-Trump pandering. But Mr. Doyle mostly avoids blatant point-making, instead giving us an electrifyingly coarse and colloquial show into which Mr. Esparza’s complex performance fits with surprising neatness….

Not only is the action of the play, which unfolds in a fluorescent-lit warehouse, grotesquely comic in tone, but Mr. Esparza turns Ui-Hitler into a figure of fun (his whiny, nasal voice reminded me of Jerry Lewis). At the same time, though, he also plays the dictator as a man given to startling outbursts of self-pity and doubt, a quality remarked on by many people who knew Hitler personally…

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Read the whole thing here.

Listen to a commercial recording of Aimee Semple McPherson, the Los Angeles-based evangelist, singing “I Ain’t-a Gonna Grieve (A Negro Spiritual)” in 1926:

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

“With each new trauma, ideology replaces emotion a little more.”

Christopher Shinn, Twitter (Oct. 28, 2018)

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write in praise of Sondheim Sublime, a new album by Melissa Errico. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stephen Sondheim is America’s greatest living theatrical songwriter—but he’s not popular, and never has been. Part of the problem is that his songs are too lyrically and harmonically complex to suit the tastes of the average listener, in addition to which they tend to lack a clear-cut emotional profile. The look-both-ways-before-crossing ambivalence of a lyric like “Sorry/Grateful” (“You’re always wondering what might have been/Then she walks in”) is worlds away from the whole-hearted view of romantic love that has traditionally been the stuff of pop-music success.

Just as important, though, is the fact that Mr. Sondheim is and has always been a theatrical composer, not a creator of free-standing songs. His own songs exist to drive the plots and deepen the characterizations of the shows for which they are written, so much so that their meanings are often not fully clear when they’re performed outside the dramatic contexts of those shows….

Taken together, these aspects of Mr. Sondheim’s work go a long way toward explaining why so few recitals of his songs have been recorded by top-tier pop and jazz performers. Judy Collins’ “A Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim,” Jackie & Roy’s “A Stephen Sondheim Collection,” Cleo Laine’s “Cleo Sings Sondheim” and “Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim” come to mind, but after that, the choices grow thin on the ground. That’s why the release this month of Melissa Errico’s “Sondheim Sublime” (Ghostlight) is big news to those, myself among them, for whom his work has long spoken with the force of revelation. Not to put too fine a point on it, “Sondheim Sublime” is the best all-Sondheim album ever recorded, a program of 15 songs in which radiantly warm singing and sensitive, intelligent interpretation are tightly and inseparably entwined. Even if you’ve never felt at ease with Mr. Sondheim’s cool embrace of ambivalence, this CD, accompanied with like sensitivity by Tedd Firth, will show you what you’ve been missing….

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Read the whole thing here.

Melissa Errico sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Children and Art” (from Sunday in the Park with George at Feinstein’s/54 Below: