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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 2019

Look alive

April 30, 2019 by Terry Teachout

As I grow older, I find that my personal definition of what it means to be beautiful is becoming far more encompassing. To be sure, I can’t remember ever having had a perfectly clear-cut “type,” though I’ve always had something of a weakness for cat-like faces. My past girlfriends look nothing like one another. Nevertheless, I’m impressed by the range of women who strike me these days as attractive (I’m almost entirely blind to male beauty, in much the same way that Mister Rogers couldn’t tell the difference between red and green). Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio, who is notorious for his insistence on dating only women of a very certain age, I find beauty in places where once I would never have thought to look. All ages, all facial types, all shapes and sizes: the possibility of being beauteous, as Rimbaud called it, now seems to me very nearly without limit. Indeed, I seem to be approaching the state of mind described by a character in Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, albeit for a reason utterly and fortunately different from that of the unhappy fellow who speaks the line: “Since my marriage I have found all women beautiful.”

What no longer catches my eye, however, is youthful prettiness, the unlined state of unearned grace whose external appearance medical science has at long last found a way to simulate and which DiCaprio is by no means the only movie star to require of his consorts. It is wasted on me, whether in its natural form or in the chemically assisted simulacra that are easy enough to spot, especially on the already-known faces of celebrities unwise enough to resort to such assistance.

On the contrary, it is the distress marks of experience that speak most powerfully and eloquently to me in my late middle age. I think this is because I favor the company of people whose lives have taught them something of how the world works, and who have profited from what they’ve learned. It isn’t hard to detect the presence of such knowledge in those who have it, any more than it is to be able to tell whether people are bright before they utter a single word. All you have to do is look—and to understand what you’re seeing.

Experience, like intelligence, reveals itself best through a person’s face, and above all through the eyes. No amount of Botox, however cunningly administered, can offset the lack of a comprehending gaze. Conversely, it is the eyes that reveal no less immediately the cruelty and inward disorder of a person who is full of rage and capable of great evil.

The frontispiece of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood consists of tightly cropped photographs of the eyes of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, an image that was surely inspired by this passage from the book:

Marie examined the front-view and profile photographs of Smith: an arrogant face, tough, yet not entirely, for there was about it a peculiar refinement; the lips and nose seemed nicely made, and she thought the eyes, with their moist, dreamy expression, rather pretty—rather, in an actorish way, sensitive. Sensitive, and something more: “mean.” Though not as mean, as forbiddingly “criminal,” as the eyes of Hickock….

Marie, transfixed by Hickock’s eyes, was reminded of a childhood incident—of a bobcat she’d once seen caught in a trap, and of how, though she’d wanted to release it, the cat’s eyes, radiant with pain and hatred, had drained her of pity and filled her with terror.

Vultus est index animi, said the Romans: the face is the index of the mind. I recalled that dusty tag as I sat in a hot tub last week and caught sight of a woman who looked from a distance to be in her late forties or early fifties. Time was when I wouldn’t have thought twice about her, but I know better now, and I said to myself, You know, she’s really quite attractive. But then I saw the slack, dull expression on her face, and that was that.

Not so Mrs. T, with whom I fell in love at first sight (really and truly!) fourteen years ago, at which time we were both a couple of months shy of our fiftieth birthdays. What I saw in her that fateful, blessed night was a face full of energy and determination, anchored by a lively pair of eyes into which I knew at once that I longed to gaze every day for the rest of my life.

I soon found out that Mrs. T didn’t like the way she looked, something that she has in common with every other attractive woman I’ve known. As Stephen Maturin says to Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander, “I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep.” So be it: all I can tell you is that she looks to me like a woman who has lived a full life, and who paid attention while she was living it. I would rather look at her than anyone else in the world.

Our Girl in Chicago, my best friend, is another person whose eyes tell you what she is, smart and funny and almost painfully sensitive. She, too, is a beauty who is unaware of it, the only good thing about which is that it makes it possible for me to tell her as often as I please that she is beautiful. That beauty was as yet unformed when we first met, not long after she graduated from college and came to work for my then-publisher, but she’s since had time to grow into it, and today she has the knowing eyes of a mature woman who, like Mrs. T, has learned the hard lessons of experience without being hardened by them.

The biggest thing that Our Girl and Mrs. T have in common, though, is that they both look alive. I’ve previously had occasion to quote in this space the terrible words of Samuel Beckett: “At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” To me, nothing is more beautiful than a face which shows that its owner is fully awake, fully aware of the common dilemma, fully conscious that we must seize each day or lose it. Next to such hard-earned beauty, mere prettiness is as forgettable as a greeting-card verse.

For my part, I prefer the real right thing, about which one might well say what E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier said about goodness in their libretto for Benjamin Britten’s operatic version of Billy Budd: “There is always some flaw in it, some defect, some imperfection in the divine image, some fault in the angelic song, some stammer in the divine speech.” Such, too, is the nature of true beauty: there is always some flaw in it. That is what makes it human—and lovable.

*  *  *

“No Matter What Shape Your Stomach’s In,” an Alka-Seltzer commercial created by Mary Wells Lawrence in 1965 for Jack Tinkers & Partners:

A scene from The Truth About Cats & Dogs, written by Audrey Wells, directed by Michael Lehmann, and starring Janeane Garofalo and Ben Chaplin:

Lookback: on simultaneously finishing a book and an opera

April 30, 2019 by Terry Teachout

From 2009:

When I told Paul Moravec three years ago that I’d love to collaborate with him on an opera, it didn’t occur to me that The Letter would open in the same year that Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong would be published. I’m sure I would have said yes anyway–it was an offer I couldn’t refuse–but I might have thought twice, and maybe even thrice, if I’d known exactly what I was getting into….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Joseph Conrad on determination

April 30, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through.”

Joseph Conrad, Typhoon

Just because: Peter Pears sings “O Waly, Waly”

April 29, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten perform Britten’s arrangement of the English folk song “O Waly, Waly” (The water is wide) on the BBC in 1964:

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

Almanac: George Santayana on the utility of music

April 29, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“That a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a fact calculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explain consciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moral processes march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds run together should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as the spirit’s concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate its life.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

A touch of class

April 26, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway transfer of Ink. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The newspaper movie used to be an established genre in Hollywood, and a consistently popular one. No more: Even as newspapers themselves struggle to survive in the 21st century, such classic films of the past as “The Front Page,” “Call Northside 777” and “Deadline USA” are gradually growing less comprehensible to younger viewers. For this reason alone, anyone who knows anything about the raffish history of print journalism will delight in James Graham’s “Ink,” which has transferred to Broadway after a highly successful London run. It’s a big, loud, aggressively funny play that turns the newsroom clock back to 1969 to tell a fictionalized version of the improbable but true story of how Rupert Murdoch (played by Bertie Carvel) came to England from Australia, bought The Sun and turned it into the hottest tabloid in town, in the process eating the lunch of the Daily Mirror, then London’s “respectable” working-class paper. Staged at a headlong hurtle by Rupert Goold and featuring excitingly raucous performances by Mr. Carvel and Jonny Lee Miller, who plays Larry Lamb, the incoming editor of The Sun, “Ink” moves at so brisk a gallop that the intermission break will catch you off guard.

The Sun is, among other things, the paper that became notorious for boosting its circulation by breaking England’s unofficial ban on printing photos of bare-chested women in newspapers (they ran on the third page of The Sun from 1970 to 2015, and the models who posed for them came to be known as “Page 3 girls”). In “Ink,” the introduction of the first Page 3 girl (played by Rana Roy) becomes the final step in the process by which Messrs. Murdoch and Lamb turn a once-staid paper into a hard-charging tabloid that gives the people plenty of what they want: sex, crime, sports, gossip, “free stuff” and cultural coverage that emphasizes movies, TV and—yes—rock and roll. What’s more, this transformation is for the most part presented non-judgmentally, as a success story rather than a melancholy fable of journalistic virtue besmirched….

 It’s no secret that the real Mr. Murdoch (who is the executive chairman of News Corp, which owns both The Sun and this paper) is widely regarded by Britain’s chattering classes as the devil incarnate. This makes it downright flabbergasting that Mr. Graham has portrayed him with seemingly genuine sympathy in “Ink.” How is such a thing possible, especially given the fact that the British stage, like the American stage, is a monoculture in which pretty much everyone lists to the left?

The answer is that “Ink” is not so much about politics, or even journalism, as it is about the British class system, and specifically about the proclivity of bowler-hatted toffs in old-school ties to sneer at the lesser breeds who read, write, edit and (ahem) publish tabloids. Mr. Graham knows that you needn’t be on the right to bristle at such snobbery…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from Ink:

A 1969 TV story about Rupert Murdoch’s entry into the English media market:

Overwhelming

April 26, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” is back on Broadway, this time in a straightforward, sober-sided Roundabout Theatre Company production directed by Jack O’Brien, performed on an ultra-realistic set and starring Tracy Letts and Annette Bening. It’s one of the best Miller revivals I’ve ever seen, a staging so magnetic that it overwhelmed my lingering doubts about a play that can feel preachy when it isn’t done as well as this….

While it’s no masterpiece, “All My Sons” is soundly built—the plot twists are managed with curve-hugging skill—and wholly stageworthy. Ms. Bening, who hasn’t been seen on Broadway in 31 years, gives a performance of plain-spoken force that makes you long for her to take up residence there permanently. As for Mr. Letts, the author of “August: Osage County” and the foremost character actor on the American stage today, he’s breathtaking as Joe, whom he plays not as a monster of bourgeois greed but as a regular guy of the utmost ordinariness who merely did what he thought he had to do. How can he possibly act as well as he writes? If you think life is fair, don’t see this show….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A trailer for the Broadway revival of All My Sons:

Did you see the same show I did?

April 26, 2019 by Terry Teachout

The thirtieth 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.

The inspiration for this episode was our discovery that the three of us were sharply at variance on the merits of two recently opened Broadway musicals. Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

What is it like when you go against the critical consensus? Peter, Elisabeth, and Terry discuss this through the lens of Oklahoma! and Hadestown, both of which strongly divide our critics’ opinions. Then they discuss the most perfect casting they’ve seen, and ponder the difference between a bad actor and a miscast actor.

Finally, they go around the table to talk about Classic Stage Company’s revival of The Cradle Will Rock, Junk by Ayad Akhtar at Arena Stage, The Mother by Florian Zeller at the Atlantic, and Burn This by Lanford Wilson on Broadway.

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

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

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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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