Barbara Fisher reviewed A Terry Teachout Reader in today’s Boston Globe:

Teachout — music, dance, drama, and literary critic — is a commentator of rare daring. He is funny, astute, straight-talking, strong-minded. He is eager to tackle hard issues, unafraid to identify himself as a highbrow, willing to make value judgments. Beauty is real and worth fighting for, and he is ready to accept the challenge of the ”pesto-and-phallocentrism crowd” and others.

The best pieces in this collection of illuminating and often electrifying short essays — originally published in the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Crisis, New Dance Review, and the National Review — focus on modern dance and jazz. The essays on Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham, and Leonard Bernstein are sensational. Isadora Duncan is a ”top-seeded contender for the title of least intentionally amusing person ever.” But Teachout is outspoken about writers and critics as well. He forcefully defends Willa Cather against ”the mills of trendiness [which] grind ceaselessly . . . in the age of feminist criticism.” He is unafraid to attack the practitioners of black studies and what he calls their ”fellow literary-theory racketeers.” Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman are ”the Nick and Nora of the limousine left.” Dance critic Arlene Croce ”made the mistake of being right at the wrong time.” Just when you feel at ease with his sharp criticism, he goes soft in the last essay, on singer Nancy LaMott, and breaks your heart.

How about that?

I’ve been busy, but I’ve also had three very good days of what a friend of mine calls “arting,” so I’m not complaining:

– On Friday night I saw a press preview of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, which opens Tuesday at Circle in the Square after a successful off-Broadway run. I’ll be reviewing it in next Friday’s Journal. After the show, I went to ChikaLicious, an East Village dessert bar, accompanied by a friend whose first name happens to be (no fooling) Chika. Only in New York….

– The weather on Saturday afternoon was golden, so I strolled across Central Park to an East Side auction house, where I took a peek at a Hans Hofmann lithograph on which I’ve placed an absentee bid (the hammer falls on Tuesday). Cross your fingers–I covet this one desperately.

– From there I returned home to meet Sarah, who was in Manhattan all week to cover the Edgar Awards for “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,” her must-read crime-fiction-and-more blog. I gave her a tour of the Teachout Museum and persuaded her to help me do a bit of manual labor (one of my prints had come unmounted, so we carried it to the neighborhood framer). We dined in the immediate vicinity, then taxied down to the Village Vanguard to hear the Jim Hall Trio. It was Sarah’s first time hearing Hall, and she gave every sign of bedazzlement. As for me, I’d already heard the trio on Wednesday,
but they were even better last night. (Incidentally, the set was recorded for CD release–go here to find out how to buy a copy.)

– Back at home again, I squared off the evening by watching the first hour of Brute Force, a 1947 Popular Front-style prison-break film noir directed by Jules Dassin, scored by Mikl

No more for me today. I just got back from the theater and I am sooooo tired. I’ll post again on Sunday.

Till then.

“I exhort you to restrain the violent tendency of your nature for analysis, and to cultivate synthetic propensities. What’s the use of virtue? What’s the use of wealth? What’s the use of honor? What’s a guinea but a damned yellow circle? What’s a chamber-pot but an infernal hollow sphere? The whole effort of your mind is to destroy. Because others build slightly and eagerly, you employ yourself in kicking down their houses, and contract a sort of aversion for the more honorable useful and difficult task of building well yourself.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Francis Jeffrey, April or May, 1804

For those of you familiar with my all-or-nothing work habits, the fortune I extracted from last night’s pre-ballet cookie will likely make you smile:

Don’t just work hard, work smart.

I’m trying! I’m trying!

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is a triple-header. First up, Jumpers, about which I had nothing but great things to say:

Most playwrights of ideas are content to play with the ideas of others. Tom Stoppard has his own, and in “Jumpers” he serves them up with plenty of hot pepper on the side. Imagine a Broadway show in which a beleaguered professor of moral philosophy agonizes over the existence of God. Then stir in a pin-striped totalitarian sharpie, a half-witted police inspector, a half-crazy musical-comedy star (that’s the professor’s wife), a mute secretary, a jazz trio, eight acrobats and–oh, yes–two murders. That’s “Jumpers,” the frightening farce currently being performed by the National Theatre of Great Britain at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in a revival directed with coruscating flair by David Leveaux….

Next is Raisin in the Sun, a generally outstanding revival that has, alas, a gaping hole smack dab in the middle:

Not to keep you in suspense, but Sean Combs, the Rapper Formerly Known as P. Diddy, can’t act, though he does what I suspect is his best in the revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” playing through July 11 at the Royale Theatre. Not only does he remember all his lines, but he even manages to insert a touch of emotion here and there. Alas, Mr. Combs hasn’t the foggiest idea of how a thirtysomething father from the Chicago ghetto circa 1950 might have looked and sounded. Instead, he portrays Walter Lee Younger as a proto-rapper–blustery, adolescent and phony to the core. That he should have the gall to make his Broadway debut alongside Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald suggests that his capacity for embarrassment is insufficiently developed….

Last and most definitely least, Bombay Dreams:

It won’t be enough if “Bombay Dreams” flops–I’d like to see it removed from the Broadway Theatre with bulldozers at high noon. Not since “Urban Cowboy” have I endured a show so irredeemably stupid as this backhanded “tribute” to the musicals churned out in boxcar lots by “Bollywood,” the Bombay-based Indian film industry. Their simple-minded scripts and drop-of-a-turban production numbers are said to be charming, but you couldn’t prove it by “Bombay Dreams,” a mishmash of tuneless tunes, vapid lyrics, dull choreography, and pointlessly expensive sets (including a sunken on-stage fountain) that put me in mind of an Elvis Presley movie with a billion-dollar budget….

No link. Go buy Friday’s Journal. (And yes, Aaron, it only costs a dollar, nyaah nyaah nyaah!)

“I move my head imperceptibly, because of his moustache which brushes against my nostrils with a scent of vanilla and honeyed tobacco. Oh!…suddenly my mouth, in spite of itself, lets itself be opened, opens of itself as irresistibly as a ripe plum splits in the sun. And once again there is born that exacting pain that spreads from my lips, all down my flanks as far as my knees, that swelling as of a wound that wants to open once more and overflow–the voluptuous pleasure that I had forgotten.”

Colette, La Vagabonde

• Thursday wasn’t nearly so busy as Wednesday: I wrote a speech in the morning, met Maud for lunch, then came back home and blogged a bit. (My scheduled nap slipped through the cracks.)

As for the evening, I just got back from seeing New York City Ballet dance
George Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Walzer. It was the first time I’d seen NYCB since writing All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, and the first time the company has danced Liebeslieder Walzer in several seasons. Here’s what I said about it in the book:

New York City Ballet toured the Soviet Union in 1962, the first time Balanchine had been there since his defection thirty-eight years before. “Welcome to Russia, home of the classical ballet,” a Soviet official told him as he stepped off the plane in Moscow. “Thank you,” he replied without missing a beat, “but America is now home of the classical ballet. Russia is home of the old romantic ballet.” But that didn’t mean he had turned his back on the romanticism of his youth. Liebeslieder Walzer (1960, music by Brahms) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1962, music by Mendelssohn), for example, were both profoundly romantic in every sense of the word–as well as formally innovative.

Liebeslieder Walzer is set not in a sky-blue void but a candle-lit ballroom where four aristocratic-looking young couples in evening dress spend an hour waltzing together, accompanied by the four singers and two pianists with whom they share the stage. The couples are entangled in subtly differing ways (one of the women, for example, appears to be older than her partner-lover), though there is no plot or Tudor-style “acting” to give away their intimate secrets. Romantic ends are achieved by modern means: all you see are the setting and the steps, with everything else left to the imagination. The dancers drift outdoors into a moonlit garden and the curtain falls for a breathless moment. When it rises again, the ballroom itself is flooded with moonlight, the women are wearing tutus and toe shoes, and the decorous ballroom dancing of the first act is replaced by the heightened gestures of ballet. At the end, the women reappear in their party gowns, and the couples listen in stillness to the last waltz, whose words, sung in German, are by Goethe:

Now, Muses, enough!
You strive in vain to show
How joy and sorrow alternate in loving hearts.
You cannot heal the wounds inflicted by love;
But assuagement comes from you alone.

“The words ought to be listened to in silence,” Balanchine wrote, surely thinking of the joys and sorrows of his own complicated life.

The costume change midway through Liebeslieder Walzer is a stroke of fantasy as stunning in its quieter way as the climactic flying lifts of The Four Temperaments. Balanchine revealed its meaning to Bernard Taper: “In the first act, it’s the real people that are dancing. In the second act, it’s their souls.” But more than a few members of the ballet’s earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of “love-song waltzes,” would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein were watching a performance together. “Look how many people are leaving, George,” Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, “Ah, but look how many are staying!” Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its “persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse,” and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.

That isn’t a bad description of Liebeslieder Walzer, but reading it immediately after having seen the ballet is somewhat disheartening. To capture the smallest part of its mystery and complexity would have taken me at least a chapter, which I didn’t have to spare. In any case, few things are more futile than trying to describe a Balanchine ballet in words, least of all this profound meditation on romantic love. All I really hoped to do was make the reader want to go see it, which you can do on Saturday and next Tuesday at the New York State Theater. (Go here for details.)

The program also included Symphony in C, about which I last had occasion to write in a piece about a performance by American Ballet Theatre that I saw only a few short weeks after 9/11:

Then, too, there was George Balanchine’s Symphony in C, which received its long-overdue ABT debut. Few other modern artists working in any medium have had Balanchine’s uncanny ability to transport the attentive viewer into a better-ordered universe of romance and grace–and humor. So it was with Symphony in C. As the curtain rose for the ten thousandth time on that familiar stageful of women in white tutus poised before a blue backdrop, one felt the world snap back to normal again–just what all the pundits had been assuring us would never happen. It put me in mind of a poem by Edwin Muir, “Reading in Wartime,” that makes the case for sonnets about skylarks: “Boswell’s turbulent friend/And his deafening verbal strife,/Ivan Ilyich’s death/Tell me more about life,/The meaning and the end/Of our familiar breath,/Both being personal,/Than all the carnage can,/Retrieve the shape of man,/Lost and anonymous.”

I guess that isn’t dance criticism, but I like it anyway, if only because it brings to mind an evening that meant a great deal to me at the time.

• Now playing on iTunes: Ernie Wilkins’ “The Jazz Connoisseur,” recorded in 1961 by Harry James and most recently available as part of Jazz Masters: Harry James, a Verve anthology of James’ MGM recordings. I was introduced to this up-tempo swinger by a musician friend who several years ago underwent a life-threatening operation that left him partly paralyzed. He later told me that listening to “The Jazz Connoisseur” as he lay in his hospital bed helped give him the courage to carry on. I can’t claim to know exactly what he meant–I’ve never been that sick–but I do know a wonderful big-band performance when I hear one, and this definitely fills the bill.