Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Rudyard Kipling speaks about writing and truth in an undated film clip from the Thirties. This is thought to be the only surviving sound footage of Kipling:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”
Rudyard Kipling, “On the Strength of a Likeness”
From 2005:
I am now officially the Honorable Terry Teachout, having been sworn in this morning (together with Gerard Schwarz and James Ballinger) as a member of the National Council on the Arts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dropped by to administer the oath. It was a near-run thing, for Justice O’Connor didn’t know when she agreed to do the honors that she and her Supreme Court brethren would be hearing the Terri Schiavo case today. “We had a busy morning!” she said as she arrived, still wearing her judicial robes….
Read the whole thing here.“I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both.”
Flannery O’Connor, letter to Betty Hester, June 28, 1956
A five-year-old Flannery O’Connor appears in a rare 1932 Pathé newsreel segment about a chicken she taught to walk backwards:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I think you probably collect most of your experience as a child—when you really had nothing else to do—and then transfer it to other situations when you write.
Flannery O’Connor, letter to Maryat Lee (February 24, 1947)
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Lovers of large-scale musicals have been feeling more than usually deprived by the Covid-19 pandemic. In theory, it shouldn’t be impossible to webcast a musical, but it’s technically very difficult—too many people, too much stuff going on—and the only one I’ve reviewed, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s wonderful revival of “Meet Me in St. Louis,” was a scaled-down version in which the actors “phoned in” their performances, taping them from their separate homes, after which they were edited together in the studio. So it is inspiring to report that Virginia’s Signature Theatre, one of the top American regional theaters that specialize in musicals, is webcasting “Simply Sondheim,” a fully-staged 33-song revue directed and choreographed by Matthew Gardiner and performed in the company’s empty 275-seat theater by 12 singers and a 15-player pit orchestra. No, it’s not “Sweeney Todd” on a Broadway-sized stage, but it is fabulously fine in its own right and comes across with irrepressible vitality on a small screen….
The Mint Theater Company continues its webcast series of broadcast-ready archival videos of its shows with Hazel Ellis’s “Women Without Men,” directed by Jenn Thompson and taped at a 2016 off-Broadway performance. It’s another of the Mint’s out-of-nowhere finds, a 1938 all-female ensemble piece by a prodigiously gifted Irish playwright who wrote two well-received dramas, then put down her pen. “Women Without Men,” the second of them, is a group portrait of the contentious teachers of a Protestant girls’ boarding school in Dublin, and as usual with the Mint, it is so stageworthy as to make you wonder why it vanished from sight eight decades ago….
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Read the whole thing here.Norm Lewis sings “Being Alive” in Simply Sondheim:
“The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.”
Tennessee Williams (in conversation with Kenneth Tynan, 1955)