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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

What Lincoln Center wrought

October 8, 2020 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal“Sightings” column, I write about the effect of the building of Lincoln Center on the Metropolitan Opera and the arts throughout America—and how its influence has left performing-arts groups in other cities less well-equipped to battle COVID. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Met’s underlying problem is the 3,800-seat Metropolitan Opera House, which is too big for any good purpose, artistic or otherwise, and whose size will make it impossible for the company to scale down its future operations to allow for the shrinking of its aging, COVID-averse audience. But, then, all of Lincoln Center’s auditoriums (save for Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont and Mitzi E. Newhouse Theaters) are too big to be used with any kind of artistic flexibility and have long posed similar problems to the organizations that perform in them—problems that COVID has intensified.

How did this happen? Blame Robert Moses.

Fifty-four years after the Met tore down its midtown home and moved to Lincoln Center, it is easy to forget that America’s first and biggest multi-purpose performing arts center was built by Moses not merely to prove to the world that New York was a major player on the international arts scene, but also to employ the fine arts as an engine of urban renewal of the Upper West Side. It succeeded on both counts. Lincoln Center was in those far-off days the “home” of George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price and Beverly Sills, an irresistible draw for arts lovers of all kinds. To put these giants on the same campus was bound to make Lincoln Center a magnet for audiences.

The success of Lincoln Center would inspire the building of similar urban performing-arts centers all over America, among them (to cite only a few examples) Atlanta’s Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center, Dallas’ AT&T Performing Arts Center and Washington’s Kennedy Center. Alas, the powers-that-be responsible for their creation could not have foreseen the myriad socio-economic changes that would cause their audiences to move to the suburbs—much less changing demographics and the explosive emergence of convenient Web-based home-entertainment options that have undercut all performing-arts groups. Moreover, many of them do not house fully professional performing-arts ensembles of any kind, much less top-tier groups….

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Read the whole thing here.

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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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