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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 4, 2019

Who’s on first? Lydia R. Diamond!

July 4, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone. Here’s an excerpt.

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Lydia R. Diamond made a premature but promising Broadway debut in 2011 with “Stick Fly,” a serious comedy about an upper-class black family that didn’t quite work but whose best parts left no doubt of her formidable talent. Five years later, “Smart People,” a sharp-witted satire of the academic monoculture at Harvard in which everything worked to glistening perfection, opened off Broadway and marked her as an up-and-comer. Now Ms. Diamond is back with a second off-Broadway premiere, “Toni Stone,”whose title character was the first black woman ever to play pro baseball. 

Like its predecessors, “Toni Stone” introduces you to a world about most of us know precious little—the Negro Leagues, in which Satchel Paige played and Jackie Robinson got his start—and does so in a way that is both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining. Directed with terrific zest and potent physicality by Pam MacKinnon and featuring a star-making turn by April Matthis, it’s the show that should have introduced Ms. Diamond to Broadway…

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Toni Stone:

The one best book about Broadway

July 4, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.

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What’s it like to put on a show, and what kinds of people do so? I can think of any number of theatrical memoirs and biographies that are as readable as good novels, starting with Moss Hart’s “Act One.” But if what you want to know is how Broadway works, and why it usually doesn’t, the best book to read was written 50 years ago by a man who never managed to write a successful play. It’s William Goldman’s “The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway,” still in print and as relevant as ever. Smart, catty and comprehensively well-informed, “The Season” tells truths that have withstood the cruel test of time, which is another way of saying that when it comes down to basics, nothing much changes on Broadway….

A half-century after the fact, it’s startling how contemporary “The Season” sounds….

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Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Calvin Coolidge on American citizenship

July 4, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“American citizenship is a high estate. He who holds it is the peer of kings. It has been secured only by untold toil and effort. It will be maintained by no other method. It demands the best that men and women have to give, but it likewise awards to its partakers the best that there is on earth. To attempt to turn it into a thing of ease and inaction would be only to debase it. To cease to struggle and toil and sacrifice for it is not only to cease to be worthy of it but is to start a retreat toward barbarism. No matter what others may say, no matter what others may do, this is the stand that those must maintain who are worthy to be called Americans.”

Calvin Coolidge, “Freedom and Its Obligations” (speech, May 30, 1924)

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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