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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 25, 2019

The very latest news about Mrs. T

June 25, 2019 by Terry Teachout

For those of you who’ve been keeping up with my reports about Mrs. T’s respiratory crisis and sepsis diagnosis, I know you’ll be pleased to hear that she was released from New York-Presbyterian Hospital late Friday afternoon. From there we drove straight to our farmhouse in Connecticut, where she’ll be receiving IV antibiotics at home for the next few weeks.

Mrs. T’s discharge was a wholly unexpected development that caught us both off guard, so much so that I had to spend all of Friday scrambling to get her back home. On the other hand, there was no longer any reason for her to remain in the hospital, which is not an easy place to sleep, so it was clearly for the best that she be sprung as soon as was practical. Fortunately, she’s now recovered sufficiently to be able to use home oxygen instead of the high-flow hospital-only kind.

So why is Mrs. T in Connecticut instead of our apartment in Upper Manhattan, a stone’s throw from the hospital? For bureaucratic reasons too labyrinthine to summarize intelligibly, she has to receive her outpatient antibiotic infusions there. In addition, she must also pay a number of visits to the University of Connecticut Health Center (where her pulmonary-hypertension doctors are based—New York-Presbyterian is the home of her transplant team). Once the infusions are complete and her UConn appointments wrapped up, though, she’ll return to New York—preferably not by helicopter—and sit tight until we finally get the Big Call.

Alas, I’d already locked in a long list of work-related travel plans when we found out that Mrs. T was going home on Friday (we’d previously had good reason to expect her to be staying in New York indefinitely). As a result, I had to drive back to New York on Saturday night and spend Sunday and Monday reviewing an off-Broadway show and getting ready to hit the road yet again, while Mrs. T’s father and nephew looked after her in Connecticut.

This “break” turned out to be timely, though, because I’m far beyond exhausted: I’ve been on near-nonstop duty ever since I called an ambulance for Mrs. T on June 8, and I’ve never been so tired in my life. That’s why I’m going to depart New York later today for a caregiver’s holiday, something of which I am in urgent need, after which I’ll return to New York and get back to work. I’ll tell you more about where I’m going once I get there. Then I’ll pay my annual visit to the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, from which I return to Connecticut on July 6, there to start preparations for the complicated process of moving us back to Manhattan.

Mrs. T wants you to know that she has been keeping up with your warm messages of support here and elsewhere. She doesn’t yet have the steam to respond to them, but please believe me when I tell you that she is grateful beyond words—literally—to know how many of you care so much.

Lookback: who cares about the Tony Awards?

June 25, 2019 by Terry Teachout

From 2009:

The big news, if you want to call it that, is that the Tonys are now a local story rather than a national one. Scarcely anyone outside New York City watches the telecast. And the ceremony itself is mainly about musicals, which in certain seasons has been understandable, but definitely not this time around. Moreover, the Tonys themselves are about Broadway, which means that the most important new play of the season, Lynn Nottage’s Ruined, and the best straight-play revival to open in New York, David Cromer’s Our Town, both went unmentioned at last night’s ceremony….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Ralph Richardson on acting and music

June 25, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words, we are continually changing the score.”

Ralph Richardson, interviewed by Kenneth Tynan (The Observer, December 18, 1977)

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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