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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for September 2020

Snapshot: Milton Berle appears on This Is Your Life

September 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Milton Berle is the guest on an episode of This Is Your Life, hosted by Ralph Edwards and originally telecast live by NBC on June 6, 1956:

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

Almanac: Jane Austen on feigning affection

September 30, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.”

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Lookback: on reading really fast

September 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

From 2004:

Speed reading, if that’s what I do, comes naturally to me: I’ve never taken a course in it. I think I’m glad I read so quickly, but it’s like spelling really well or having perfect pitch, two of my other peculiar endowments–a convenience, nothing more, especially for a working journalist….

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Matthew Arnold on character and beauty

September 29, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.”

Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent

Just because: Connie Boswell appears on The Ed Sullivan Show

September 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

Connee Boswell sings “Basin Street Blues,” “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” and “Rockin’ Chair” (with Woody Herman) on a 1950 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show:

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

Almanac: Max Beerbohm on mediocrity and genius

September 28, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.”

Max Beerbohm, “Dan Leno,” Saturday Review (November. 5, 1904)

Almanac: H.L. Mencken on demagogues

September 25, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.”

H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Is this our future?

September 24, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Irish Repertory Theatre webcast of Geraldine Hughes’ Belfast Blues. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Geraldine Hughes gave a great performance earlier this year in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s webcast of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a “staging” so technically innovative and incontestably superior in artistic merit that it set a high-water mark for online theater in America. Now Ms. Hughes is back, this time with “Belfast Blues,” her 2003 autobiographical one-woman play about how she grew up in and survived Northern Ireland’s violent Troubles. Filmed live at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2019, it was first performed in New York in 2005, at which time I saw and reviewed it. I was impressed then, but I’m even more impressed a decade and a half later…

“Belfast Blues” starts out as a sweet comedy about growing up poor—four kids to a bed, no indoor plumbing—in an urban slum. You don’t have to be Irich, much less Catholic, to be charmed by Ms. Hughes’s tales of her childhood, including a vignette about her first communion (“If you chew it, you go to hell”) that made me laugh out loud, something that doesn’t often happen when you’re watching a show alone. She conjures up character after character smoothly and skillfully, eschewing props and scenery to assist in spinning her illusions. All she needs is her lovely, accent-perfumed voice and infinitely expressive eyes (the “Belfast blues” of the title) to lure you into a world that she recalls with understandably mixed but rarely harsh feelings.

The tone of Ms. Hughes’ play is so joyous at first that you’ll sit up straight when she refers, in passing and with deceptive casualness, to “the first child killed in the Troubles.” With these words, she starts to change the key of “Belfast Blues,” and a few minutes later, the overheard words of a soldier put you fully on the spot: “So far, one fatality. Young boy. Decapitated, sir. Blew his f—ing head off.” From then on, the happy parts are tightly interwoven with violence…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A trailer for Belfast Blues:

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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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