Archives for 2021

Move on

December 7, 2021 by Terry Teachout

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

Once a month since September 2017, Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal; Elisabeth Vincentelli, contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker; and Peter Marks of the Washington Post have gotten together to talk about what’s going on in the American theatre.
After a wonderful four-year run, we are sad to say this is the last episode of Three on the Aisle. We hang up our hats with a discussion of Stephen Sondheim’s legacy, and a reflection on how theatre has grown and changed over the years we’ve been making the show. Thank you all for listening, and we’ll see you on the aisle.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

Lookback: Paul Taylor, R.I.P.

December 7, 2021 by Terry Teachout

From 2018:

Part of the durability of [Paul Taylor’s] dances arises from the subtlety with which they dramatize the opposing polarities of man’s divided self— male/female, dark/light, primitive/civilized, innocent/knowing—and set them in motion on stage, there to collide with one another, sometimes comically and sometimes fatally. Rarely does a Taylor dance express an emotion without also hinting at its inversion. This dualism is part of what makes his work at once ambiguous and accessible…

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Bob Dole on perseverence

December 7, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way.”

Bob Dole (speech, 1996, quoted in his New York Times obituary, December 5, 2021)

Just because: Marcel Marceau in 1975

December 6, 2021 by Terry Teachout

Mime artist Marcel Marceau introduces and performs his “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death” in 1975:

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

Almanac: Matthew Arnold on progress

December 6, 2021 by Terry Teachout

“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.”

Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible

He went down to the crossroads

December 3, 2021 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Lantern Theater Company’s hybrid-theater streaming production of Me and the Devil. Here’s an excerpt.

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Robert Johnson’s celebrity was wholly posthumous, the result of the 29 records that he cut in 1936 and 1937. An itinerant regional blues singer and guitarist born in Mississippi in 1911, he performed mainly in small towns in the Mississippi Delta, and his death at age 27 prevented him from attaining wider renown. Very little is known of his life, and it was not until 1961 that Columbia released “King of the Delta Blues Singers,” an LP containing 16 of his 78 rpm sides that found its way into the hands of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Their enthusiastic response (Mr. Clapton called Johnson “the greatest blues singer who ever lived”) secured his well-deserved fame at long last.

Enter Steve H. Broadnax III, a prominent regional stage director who made the big leap to New York with impressive productions of “The Hot Wing King” and “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” It turns out that Mr. Broadnax is also a playwright, and he has now collaborated with Charles Dumas on “Me and the Devil,” a one-man musical bioplay about Johnson whose premiere production, directed by Mr. Broadnax, was taped in June by Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company for later streaming. It is first-class in every way….

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Read the whole thing here.

Robert Johnson performs “Me and the Devil Blues”: