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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 3, 2019

Catching up with myself

January 3, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In addition to my regular drama columns, I published three other pieces in The Wall Street Journal during my recent semi-hiatus from this blog.

The first one, which ran on December 12, was a “Sightings” column about what happens when creative artists of importance draw up lists of works of art that they like:

A film buff recently posted on Twitter the 10 films listed by Whit Stillman, the writer and director of “The Last Days of Disco” and “Love & Friendship,” when he was asked to participate in the 2012 poll in which Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, invited 358 prominent directors to name the 10 greatest movies of all time. Since Mr. Stillman’s mind is as full of surprises as his films, it stands to reason that he should have come up with his fair share of unexpected picks…
 
Ask any artist of stature to draw up a similar list of preferences and you’ll almost certainly learn something just as valuable about him or her. Why? Because the making of lists, in Dr. Johnson’s oft-quoted phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. In 1955, Langston Hughes published a volume called “The First Book of Jazz” in which he included a list called “100 of My Favorite Recordings of Jazz, Blues, Folk Songs, and Jazz-Influenced Performances.” To be sure, it contains a fair number of the records that turn up on most such lists, among them Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” and Coleman Hawkins’ “Body and Soul.” But Hughes, like Mr. Stillman, did his own thinking, and his list also includes politically incorrect picks…

To read the complete piece, go here.

The second one, which ran on December 20, was a “Saturday essay” called “How the Movies Invented Christmas”:

It is a well-attested historical fact that the publication of “A Christmas Carol,” the best-loved book by the best-selling English-language novelist of the 19th century, had the unintended consequence of reintroducing Christmas to countless Britons and Americans who had stopped observing the holiday. And its influence continues to be felt: Dickens’s 1843 novella has been adapted more than three dozen times for film and television since 1901 (Bennett Miller is currently working on a new screen version with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard). Moreover, the vast majority of America’s most popular Christmas films contain plot twists that are derived, at one or more removes, from “A Christmas Carol.”
 
What explains its enduring appeal to filmmakers? It is, first and foremost, a rattling good story. But it is also a secular story, one that offers skeptics a nonreligious route to spiritual renewal….

To read the complete piece, go here.

Finally, I published another “Sightings” column last Thursday, this one about Green Book and the reasons, good and bad, for its mixed critical reception.

It happens that I saw Don Shirley, one of the film’s real-life subjects, play a concert in my once-segregated Missouri home town in 1969, an experience that gave me a special slant on the film:

The sharks of Hollywood are gnawing on “Green Book,” Peter Farrelly’s biopic about Don Shirley, a black pianist who hired Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a white nightclub bouncer, to be his chauffeur-bodyguard on a 1962 tour of the Deep South, through which blacks traveled by car at their own risk. (The title refers to the Negro Motorist Green-Book published between 1936 and 1966 that told black travelers where they could eat and sleep without fear of “embarrassment.”) Once it would have been a cinch at the Oscars, but times have changed, and “Green Book” is instead drawing heavy critical fire. Many contend that its characterizations and storytelling are quaintly sentimental, factually suspect and—worst of all—unenlightened….
 
“Green Book” has been compared to “Driving Miss Daisy,” but it’s really “In the Heat of the Night” played for laughs. Norman Jewison’s 1967 film, in which a black detective from Philadelphia (famously played by Sidney Poitier) gets caught up in a Mississippi murder case and befriends the racist local police chief, was once thought daring, but now it feels dated. “Green Book” has a similarly old-fashioned air that will strike many millennials as alien, though it will more likely fill you with nostalgia for the way movies used to be if you’re 50 or older. Either way, it’s a solidly traditional piece of storytelling, and Mr. Farrelly’s portrait of the ugly realities of segregation will surely seem believable—as well it should—to viewers of all ages.
 
The catch is that Hollywood’s time-honored by-the-book formulas don’t mesh well with today’s heightened racial sensitivities….

To read the complete piece, go here.

Almanac: William Goldman on clichés and art

January 3, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Examine any work of art down to its bone and you find cliché.”

William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (courtesy of Jason Zinoman)

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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