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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 2019

Almanac: Laurence Olivier on the actor’s temperament

January 31, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“If I wasn’t an actor, I think I’d have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life—it’s an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.”

Laurence Olivier (quoted in Foster Hirsch, Laurence Olivier)

Snapshot: Frank Sinatra sings “Send in the Clowns”

January 30, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Frank Sinatra sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” (from A Little Night Music).This performance, taped in front of a live audience, was originally telecast by NBC on November 18, 1973, as part of Magnavox Presents Frank Sinatra. The arrangement is by Gordon Jenkins:

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

Almanac: Somerset Maugham on the actor in old age

January 30, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Lookback: on “definitive” biographies

January 29, 2019 by Terry Teachout

From 2009:

A great man (or woman) is too big to cram into a book-sized box. The best that you can do is offer a summary of the current state of knowledge about him, written from your own point of view–but you can never know everything there is to know. The day after your book is published, somebody may dig up an immensely important fact that you missed, or interpret the facts that you dug up in a way that makes more sense than your version. Biographical understanding is a journey without a destination, only stops along the way….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Jean Kerr on movie stars

January 29, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.”

Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary

Just because: George Raft and Carole Lombard dance a duet

January 28, 2019 by Terry Teachout

George Raft and Carole Lombard dance a duet in Rumba, a 1935 film directed by Marion Gering. The song to which they are dancing is Ralph Rainger’s “The Magic of You”:

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

Almanac: Martha Graham on the purpose of dance

January 28, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and the wonder of life. This is the function of the American dance.”

Martha Graham, “The American Dance”

The case for Chopin

January 25, 2019 by Terry Teachout

My latest monthly essay for Commentary, occasioned by Alan Walker’s important new primary-source biography of Fryderyk Chopin, is now on line:

Chopin…was a publicity-shunning introvert who played only his own music and performed mainly in the salons of Paris and England on increasingly rare occasions. He made his living teaching piano to well-heeled students of indifferent ability. He wrote no autobiography, died too soon to make records, and left behind no symphonies, string quartets, operas, or ballets for a later generation of writers to parse at leisure and at length. By all rights, then, Chopin should have gone the way of the many other 19th-century pianist-composers whose renown did not outlive them. Instead, his music is as familiar today as it was at the time of his death in 1849. It is ubiquitous—but is it truly great?

Read the whole thing here.

*  *  *

Vladimir Horowitz plays Chopin’s G Minor Ballade at Carnegie Hall in 1968. This performance is part of a solo recital by Horowitz that was originally telecast in prime time on CBS:


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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...]

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