Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“After luncheon, we played prisoner’s base, and I at once realised that there is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourselves.”
Maurice Baring, The Puppet Show of Memory
Count Basie’s band, introduced by Steve Allen, performs at New York’s Birdland. This performance is an excerpt from a rare kinescope of The Steve Allen Show, originally telecast by NBC on July 22, 1956:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Memory is the greatest of artists, and effaces from your mind what is unnecessary. What is necessary and what is wanted comes mysteriously at the beck and call of the artist.”
Maurice Baring, Have You Anything to Declare?
From 2005:
Read the whole thing here.George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, the two greatest music critics of modern times, got all sorts of things wrong, but even at their most willful they never failed to be both interesting and artful. I’d rather read Thomson on, say, Paul Hindemith (whom he completely misunderstood) than Olin Downes on anything, even though Downes was more likely than Thomson to be “right” on any given subject. The trouble with Thomson is that he was violently prejudiced and thus unreliable. The trouble with Downes is that he was boring. Whom would you rather read?…
“I’m not sure he made a flat-out great film ever—I mean, a film as good as Chinatown, where the story works on its own terms but you know you’ve seen a parable about human nature delivered at the same time. “
David Thomson, “One Hell of a Life” (Guardian, December 1, 2006)
E.M. Forster talks about himself and his work on Monitor. This interview was originally telecast by the BBC on December 21, 1958:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which ‘we’—and at the word ‘we’ you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something ‘we always do.’”
C.S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” (lecture, King’s College, University of London, 1944)
* * *
Sixty-six years ago, everyone who saw “The Crucible” on Broadway knew perfectly well that Arthur Miller’s dramatized account of the Salem witch trials was really “about” the House Un-American Activities Committee’s noisy quest to get Communists to “name names” of their fellow Reds and so escape the blacklist. As such, the play was generally thought to be theatrically effective but aesthetically ham-fisted, even by left-of-center critics like Kenneth Tynan who might reasonably have been expected to applaud Miller for attacking HUAC.
Today, though, many people under the age of 50 who see “The Crucible” are likely to know little or nothing about HUAC, and to the extent that they know anything more about the Salem witch trials, it is often solely from having seen the play itself (it was successfully filmed in 1996 and is still widely taught in schools). Would that modern-day Americans were less ignorant, but their ignorance, paradoxically enough, works to the play’s advantage, since it makes it easier for imaginative directors to stage “The Crucible” not as a this-means-that allegory about McCarthyism but as a much less clearly defined cautionary tale of what can happen when fanatics—whatever the source of their fanaticism—seize hold of the levers of power.
Eric Tucker, however, has come at the play from yet another direction. The animating premise of his new staging, jointly produced by Bedlam, his own company, and the Nora Theatre Company of Cambridge, Mass., is wholly in keeping with the #MeToo moment: “In a culture in which power resides in the hands of men—who do you trust?” If his statement of purpose sounds suspiciously reductive to you, fear not: Mr. Tucker is the least reductive of artists, and his forceful, fast-moving “Crucible,” which will transfer to New York in November, will send you home filled not with smug self-confidence but anxiety-making doubt….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.Eric Tucker talks about The Crucible: