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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 26, 2020

What makes a summer movie?

June 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

I’ve written an essay for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the history of summer movies in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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Summer is here—but there are no movies to mark its coming. With Hollywood in deep-seated disarray and America’s movie theaters still trying to figure out whether they can reopen safely, it’ll likely be at least another year before the next summer movie comes along. But how will we know it when we see it? Exactly what is a summer movie? Can it be something other than a romcom? Must it take place on or near a beach? These questions are harder to answer than you might suppose.

The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote something that came to mind when I first started thinking about summer movies: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” That’s a great definition, one that emphasizes the proliferating eclecticism of American classical music. Is it possible, then, to take a similar tack in defining summer movies? Not unless you believe that “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters” and “Speed” qualify simply because they all came out in June. No matter when it’s released, a film must be unequivocally summer-themed to qualify as a summer movie—and even that alone isn’t enough. Does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” make the cut solely because it takes place during a big-city heat wave? Not really.

It’s more obviously tempting to say that summer movies are always comedies of one kind or another. This comes closer to the truth, though there is no shortage of exceptions….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws:

Imaginary reunion

June 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Original Theater Company/59E59 Theaters webcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. Here’s an excerpt.

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Except for “The History Boys,” which had a solid run on Broadway in 2006 followed by several regional stagings, Alan Bennett’s plays aren’t widely performed in the U.S. He’s best known over here for “The Madness of George III,” the 1991 play whose 1994 film version, “The Madness of King George,” was a box-office hit. The play, however, never made it to Broadway, and neither did “The Habit of Art,” a dual theatrical portrait of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten that was first produced in 2009 by London’s National Theatre, then received its U.S. premiere at Washington’s Studio Theatre. I saw it there in 2011 and was surprised that it had no further success in this country: While not without flaw, “The Habit of Art” is both challenging and entertaining, and I assumed that someone in New York would get around to staging it sooner or later.

Hence my excitement when 59E59 Theaters announced that Original Theatre Company, a highly regarded English touring troupe, would be performing “The Habit of Art” as part of “Brits Off Broadway,” a summer festival of new plays that always has fine things to offer (in recent years, most of Alan Ayckbourn’s U.S. premieres have taken place there). No such luck—the pandemic put paid to this year’s festival—but the good news is that Original Theatre Company and 59E59 Theatres are streaming a previously taped version of “The Habit of Art” that is outstanding in every way….

Lovely though it would have been to see a live performance, I’m struck by how fully this webcast version of “The Habit of Art” conveys the total effect of a play that deserves to be staged in New York when such things become possible again….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Habit of Art:

Replay: Richard Burton talks about Dylan Thomas

June 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Richard Burton talks about Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood in a BBC interview originally telecast on February 15, 1971:

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

Almanac: Rollo May on depression

June 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Rollo May, Love and Will

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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