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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 2021

The return of N.C. Hunter

April 30, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review the Mint Theater Company’s webcast of N.C. Hunter’s A Picture of Autumn. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Changes in theatrical fashion, however desirable, tend to cause unintended collateral damage. N.C. Hunter is an especially poignant case in point. For a time in the ’50s, he was both successful and admired, a specialist in Chekhov-flavored studies of the postwar decline of England’s middle class in which such top-tier stage actors as Edith Evans, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were eager to appear. Then John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” a furious attack on England’s class system that was as blunt as a blow from a blackjack, dynamited London’s West End in 1956, and older playwrights like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan were shoved into the wings to make way for a new generation of Angry Young Men, as Osborne and his contemporaries were dubbed by the press. While their work revitalized a theatrical scene that had grown etiolated through lack of innovation, it also devastated the careers of several tradition-conscious playwrights who were still doing first-rate work. Hunter was one of them: Though he continued to write until his death in 1971, he vanished into the memory hole of obscurity.

Enter New York’s Mint Theater Company. Dedicated to finding and producing “worthwhile plays from the past that have been lost or forgotten,” the Mint gave the U.S. premiere of Hunter’s “A Picture of Autumn” in 2013, following it up three years later with the first New York revival of “A Day by the Sea” since its brief Broadway run in 1955. I knew Hunter by name but had never seen or read any of his work, and it amazed me to discover that far from being a faded back number, he was an artist of real stature.

Now the Mint is webcasting “A Picture of Autumn” as part of a series of broadcast-quality archival videos taped at live performances, and the strong impression the play made on me when I first saw and reviewed it has been confirmed: It is a work of great distinction…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Scenes from the dress rehearsal of A Picture of Autumn:

Replay: Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee sing “I Got Rhythm”

April 30, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Dinah Shore and Peggy Lee sing “I Got Rhythm” on an episode of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, originally telecast by NBC on May 17, 1959:

(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 the sense of humor

April 30, 2021 by Terry Teachout

‘Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in history or in legend as having died of laughter.”

Max Beerbohm, “Laughter”

Almanac: Max Beerbohm on the price of genius

April 29, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.”

Max Beerbohm, “No. 2, The Pines”

Snapshot: Erroll Garner plays “Misty” in 1961

April 28, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Erroll Garner plays his “Misty” on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on March 26, 1961:

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

Almanac: Henry James on tradition

April 28, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.”

Henry James, “Robert Louis Stevenson”

Lookback: a visit to the memory hole

April 27, 2021 by Terry Teachout

From 2016:

In December of 1969, Esquire invited twenty-five venerable celebrities to offer end-of-the-decade advice, most of it predictably platitudinous, to the magazine’s younger readers….

My question is this: how many of those names do you recognize?

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Evelyn Waugh on the rich

April 27, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

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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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