This has been quite a year for Mrs. T and me, in some ways difficult, in others gratifying. We’ve seen a hundred shows, moved to a new neighborhood in Manhattan, taken a full-fledged vacation, driven up Highway 1 from San Diego to San Francisco, spent two wonderful months in residence at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and generally kept moving–far too much for our mutual good, I fear, but we did what we had to do and it didn’t kill us, so that’s that.

I doubt that the year to come will be much less busy, but I hope and expect that it will be even more satisfyingly eventful. Next week we start making our circuitous way to Winter Park for a second residency, in the course of which, among other exciting things, I’ll be directing excerpts from my first play, a one-man show about Louis Armstrong called Satchmo at the Waldorf, about which much more in due course. I’ll also be buckling down to write a sizable chunk of my next book, Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington, and zooming all around the country in search of memorable theater. Sooner or later we’ll unpack the rest of the boxes in our new apartment and start rehanging the Teachout Museum in earnest.

What Mrs. T and I won’t do is take our good fortune for granted, starting with the astonishing fact of our being together. It is, I suspect, exceedingly rare for two people in the middle of life to make a marriage as close as this one has become. When you marry late, every day is a surprise and a blessing. I nearly died five years ago this month, at exactly the same moment that I met and fell in love with Hilary, which makes what has happened to us (and what didn’t happen to me) all the more poignant.

I take a dark view of many, perhaps most things, but I try very hard to live life with a smile. Somewhere or other Joseph Epstein wrote that H.L. Mencken’s lifelong pessimism never stopped him from getting a good dinner, which seems to me exactly the right attitude toward the world and its myriad woes. I know that they exist, but I also know that I am a lucky man, and so long as my luck holds, I hope never to do it the injustice of ingratitude.

On that note, I wish for all of you the happiest and most hopeful of new years. May you laugh often, cry only when you want to, and never be bored!

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report from Chicago on the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It is a very great production. Here’s an excerpt.
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When not writing plays like “August: Osage County” and “Killer Joe,” Tracy Letts acts. In David Cromer’s 2005 Off-Broadway staging of Austin Pendleton’s “Orson’s Shadow,” he played an effete, stuttering drama critic; in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s 2009 Chicago revival of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” he played a sleazy penny-ante thief. This time around he’s playing George, the hard-drinking, switchblade-tongued small-town professor who is at the molten center of Steppenwolf’s new production of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It’s a part that couldn’t be more different from the others in which I’ve seen Mr. Letts, and what he does with it makes me wonder whether there’s a better character actor to be found on the American stage today.
What is most striking about Mr. Letts’ performance, though, is that it doesn’t stand out from the rest of this remarkable show. Instead, Mr. Letts is part of an ensemble cast whose four members, directed with uncommon subtlety by longtime Albee collaborator Pam MacKinnon, function as an exquisitely well-coordinated ensemble in which nobody ever makes a false move. In the wrong hands, “Virginia Woolf” can come off as a hysterically overwrought insult marathon. In the hands of Mr. Letts, Amy Morton, Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks, it feels as though you’re sitting quietly in a corner of the room, watching four people get tight, shed their inhibitions and admit to themselves and one another that their hopes and dreams have come to naught….
A note for East Coast theater buffs: Steppenwolf’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” will transfer to Washington, D.C., on Feb. 25, where it will be performed as part of Arena Stage’s Edward Albee Festival. Whether in Chicago or Washington, it’s a show you mustn’t miss.
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Read the whole thing here.
In 1962 Columbia Masterworks recorded a performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Arthur Hill, Uta Hagen, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon, the four members of the original Broadway cast. Here’s an excerpt from that album, which has been out of print for decades:

Glynis Johns and Len Cariou sing “Send in the Clowns,” from Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:

Man is a victim of dope

In the incurable form of hope.

Ogden Nash, “Good-by, Old Year, You Oaf or Why Don’t They Pay the Bonus?”

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, on hiatus Jan. 9-31, then open through Feb. 20, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING TONIGHT IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN MADISON, N.J.:

• I Capture the Castle (comedy, G/PG-13, suitable for unusually precocious children, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, reviewed here)

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion