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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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It’s tasty, but is it art?

November 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review two off-Broadway shows, Seared and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Here’s an excerpt.

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Like many other prolific artists, Theresa Rebeck is notoriously inconsistent. Her plays rarely make it all the way to the finish line without stumbling, and they too often mix comedy and drama to uncertain effect. Even so, more than enough of them have been more than sufficiently interesting that I keep coming back in the hope that she’ll nail it next time. Well, she has: “Seared,” a frenetic four-hander about a neurotic chef (Raúl Esparza, who is absolutely terrific) who thinks he’s an artist, is an impeccably built commercial comedy with serious overtones that never interfere with the laugh lines. It’s staged with screwball punch by Moritz von Stuelpnagel and performed by a glittering ensemble cast on a set designed by Tim Mackabee that looks just like the kitchen of a boutique restaurant….

Ntozake Shange’s “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” (the once-trendy orthography is hers) is a “choreopoem” (her word, too) about seven young women of color who reflect in free verse and something more like prose on their lives and problematic prospects. It moved from the Public Theater to Broadway in 1976 and, to everyone’s amazement, ran there for 742 performances, but hasn’t had a major revival since. Now the Public is bringing it back, this time in an off-Broadway production directed by Leah C. Gardiner, choreographed by Camille A. Brown and performed by a splendidly tight and unified ensemble…

My own feelings about “For Colored Girls” are mixed. It is, not at all surprisingly, a period piece, at all times earnest to a fault, and the poetry is very much of its time: “this waz an experiment/to see how selfish I cd be/if I wd really carry on to snare a possible lover/if I waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another.” Not so the prose vignettes, which offer unvarnished glimpses of black urban life (“god seemed to be wipin his feet in her face”) that are bold, pithy, compelling and, most important of all, immediately relevant to the present moment….

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To read my review of Seared, go here.

To read my review of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, go here.

A video featurette about Seared:

A montage of scenes from for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf:

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (14)

November 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” Throughout the coming month, I’ll write about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

14. Crosby, Stills & Nash (Atlantic)

Rock and roll had been around long enough by 1969 for the groups that first caught my ear to have since spawned what were then known as “supergroups,” bands whose members had defected from other bands for reasons of their own. Crosby, Stills & Nash, for instance, consisted of David Crosby of the Byrds, Stephen Stills of Buffalo Springfield, and Graham Nash of the Hollies, all of whom had jumped ship (or, in Crosby’s case, been pushed) from the bands that made them famous. Their music combined shimmering three-part group-harmony vocals with tight, meticulously overdubbed instrumental tracks on which Stills did most of the playing, causing him to be dubbed “Captain Manyhands” by his colleagues.

Why did their music connect so strongly with thirteen-year-olds like me? In my own case, sheer prettiness had something to do with it. “Helplessly Hoping” and “Marrakesh Express” were neither harsh nor abrasive, and the way in which Crosby, Stills & Nash blended acoustic and electric instruments with their warm, sweet-toned vocals was unmistakably related to the older styles of the pop-conscious folksingers like Judy Collins for whom I had fallen a year or two earlier. (It didn’t hurt when I discovered that “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” one of the hit singles from Crosby, Stills & Nash, was about Collins, who was and is a beautiful woman, and that she was then romantically involved with Stills, who wrote it.) Above all, I responded with excitement to the album’s uncanny precision and technical polish—every note was in place—which gave me a goal to shoot for in my own music-making.

Whatever the reasons, Crosby, Stills & Nash were big in 1969, and got even bigger when Neil Young, also formerly of Buffalo Springfield, joined the group a year later for its second album, Déjà Vu. I heard them on the radio, saw them on stage in Woodstock, and listened to both albums over and over again, trying—mostly in vain—to play their self-written songs on the not-very-good acoustic guitar that my father had obligingly bought me. I actually talked my mother into taking down the lyrics to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” in shorthand so that I could sing them correctly. Had I started a band of my own, I’m sure that’s just what I would have wanted it to sound like.

Before long, though, I started to lose my taste for their grit-free ensemble style, which increasingly struck me as more than a little bit sugary as I encountered other, more harder-edged varieties of rock and roll. It is, needless to say, perfectly possible to like both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Live at Leeds, but most listeners do end up tilting more or less strongly one way or the other.

As for their songs, I now blush to admit that I used to be thrilled by the lyrics, most of which now strike me as the worst kind of irony-challenged pop pseudo-profundity. Take “Wooden Ships,” in which Crosby, Stills, and Paul Kantner, one of the founding members of Jefferson Airplane, portrayed a world destroyed by nuclear war and imagined themselves as “the few survivors, escaping on a boat to create a new civilization.” I’d forgotten until I listened to it the other day for the first time in years that “Wooden Ships” has what must be the most shy-making opening line of any of the once-beloved rock songs of my youth: “If you smile at me, I will understand/’Cause that is something everybody, everywhere does/In the same language.” What can I tell you? We boomers couldn’t get enough of that kind of thing.

To be sure, I can still appreciate and respect the immaculate craftsmanship of Crosby, Stills & Nash, which is the squeaky-clean embodiment of what instrumentalists call “clean picking.” Moreover, there are a couple of songs that I continue to enjoy, above all Crosby’s “Guinnevere,” a genuinely haunting ballad that Miles Davis, of all people, liked enough to cover in his latter phase as a sort-of-rocker. Of the two dozen albums on this list, though, Crosby, Stills & Nash is the one to which I have returned least often in adulthood. Whatever its other virtues, most of it simply isn’t adult fare, not in the way that Miles and the Beatles are capable of holding the attention of mature ears and minds. It is in every way music by and for the young, and thus can have little to say to older people beyond reminding them of how very young they were once upon a time.

(To be continued)

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“Guinnevere,” from Crosby, Stills & Nash:

Crosby, Stills & Nash perform “Wooden Ships” at Woodstock in 1969:

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To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

Replay: Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson in 1972

November 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Ben Webster and Oscar Peterson perform Webster’s “Poutin’” in Hanover, Germany, in December of 1972. The bassist is Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen and the drummer Tony Inzalaco:

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

Almanac: Kierkegaard on individualism

November 1, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Even though every individual possesses the truth, when he or she gets together in a crowd, untruth will be present at once, for the crowd is untruth.”

Søren Kierkegaard, undated journal entry, c. 1846-47

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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