Terry Teachout | Page 153 | About Last Night

After Domingo, what?

October 10, 2019 by Terry Teachout

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which appears in the online edition of today’s paper, I discuss the case of Plácido Domingo. Here’s an excerpt.

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The moving finger of #MeToo is pointed straight at Plácido Domingo. That’s big news, not least because he is more than just a legendary opera singer. Mr. Domingo is also a conductor and powerful arts administrator who ran the Washington National Opera from 1996 to 2011 and has been the general director of L.A. Opera since 2003. His is by far the best-known living name in the opera world—a name that is now besmirched by scandal….

To be sure, the doors of most of Europe’s opera companies remain open to Mr. Domingo, for many Europeans regard the #MeToo movement as a manifestation of American sexual puritanism. The Spanish mezzo-soprano Maria José Suarez, who has sung with Mr. Domingo, described him to Cadena SER, a Spanish news-radio station, as “a man who loves women, like I love men, and that is not a problem.” (Anyone who doubts that her attitude is widely shared need only recall that Woody Allen and Roman Polanski continue to be adulated in Europe.) Be that as it may, it it clear that Mr. Domingo’s U.S. performing career is effectively over.

Given the detrimental effects of the allegations against Mr. Domingo on the institutions where he has worked, it’s time for the opera world to give some thought to how crises like this can be better managed….

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Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: Trollope on gossip

October 10, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“But who ever yet was offered a secret and declined it?”

Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage

Snapshot: Frederick Ashton rehearses Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev

October 9, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Frederick Ashton rehearses Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev in his 1956 ballet Birthday Offering at London’s Covent Garden in 1968. The score is by Glazunov:

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

Almanac: Trollope on the need for a healthy ego

October 9, 2019 by Terry Teachout

“Above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington

Whitesplaining in the bedroom

October 8, 2019 by Terry Teachout

Due to an unusually large number of Broadway openings this fall, I’m filing two drama columns for The Wall Street Journal this week. In today’s paper, I review the Broadway transfer of Slave Play. Here’s an excerpt.

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When a new play by an unknown playwright is universally described as “controversial” yet meets with near-universal critical acclaim…well, it’s not controversial. In fact, there’s a better-than-even chance that it’s telling its audiences exactly what they want to hear. Witness Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play,” directed by Robert O’Hara, which has now moved to Broadway after a noisily successful 2018 off-Broadway run….

Since there’s no way to review “Slave Play” without giving away its “reveal,” be forewarned that the following paragraph contains a spoiler: “Slave Play” opens with three interlocking scenes that seem to show whites having sex with their black slaves. In fact, what we’re really seeing are role-playing sessions by three present-day interracial couples who are undergoing “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy,” in which they act out elaborate fantasies of sex with slaves in order to overcome their difficulties in the bedroom (a twist that you’ll almost certainly guess on your own, as I did). Then we watch them participate in a group-therapy session during which it emerges that the whites are all ludicrously earnest “whitesplaining” left-liberal types who cannot begin to fathom why their long-suffering black partners would dream of finding fault with them….

This is, or could have been, fertile material for a take-no-prisoners satire in the manner of Lydia R. Diamond’s superlative “Smart People.” But while Mr. Harris does manage to work in a passable number of sharp-elbowed satirical digs along the way, the first two acts feel more like a short-hitting comedy sketch than anything else….

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Read the whole thing here.

Mr. Armstrong, meet Mr. Shaw

October 8, 2019 by Terry Teachout

A friend of mine sent me this color photograph the other day, remarking that he suspected it was the only time that Louis Armstrong and George Bernard Shaw appeared in the same painting.

It is, as I immediately guessed, by Al Hirschfeld, but I knew nothing about it, and was delighted to learn that it’s a detail from a much larger mural by Hirschfeld that hangs on one of the walls of the Frolic Room, a Hollywood bar. The people portrayed therein are all—or, rather, were—celebrities of the Thirties. I recognized most of them, though a few eluded my grasp.

The Frolic Room opened in 1934 and has been in continuous operation since then. It is, I gather, is the last old-fashioned dive bar on Hollywood Boulevard, a fact universally known to historically aware Los Angelenos that had, I blush to admit, escaped my awareness until now. Located next door to the Pantages Theater, it has a long and elaborate history about which it is amusing to read. While I’ve never been to the Frolic Room, I’ve seen it, and so, most likely, have you. Its distinctive neon sign appears in any number of films, most recently in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and most prominently in Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, in which a key scene involving Jack Vincennes, Kevin Spacey’s character, unfolds there. You can bet that Mrs. T and I will have a drink there on our next visit to Hollywood.

As for whether Armstrong and Shaw are portrayed together in any other paintings…well, I doubt it. If Shaw ever took an interest in jazz, I’m not aware of it, and I can’t imagine that he had any notion of who Louis Armstrong was. But I rejoice to remind you of a discovery that I made while doing research for Pops, my 2009 biography of Armstrong, who was one of the first Americans to own a tape recorder and who eventually amassed a 650-reel collection of private tapes that are now part of the Louis Armstrong Collection at New York’s Queens College. As I wrote in Pops,

Most of them are full of music: “I have all my records on tape, interviews, and every classical number that you can think of….And I index them—why, that’s my hobby.” His collection was an eclectic mishmash that comprises, among other things, Walter Gieseking playing Debussy, Helen Traubel singing the Liebestod, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and Shostakovich’s First Symphony, the original-cast albums of The King and I and South Pacific, recordings of Julius Caesar and Don Juan in Hell, and jazz and pop in profusion: Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berigan, Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, Bert Williams, and a surprising amount of modern jazz, including albums by Stan Kenton, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and George Shearing.

That’s right, Don Juan in Hell. Believe it or not, Louis Armstrong owned a copy of the First Drama Quartette’s 1952 LP recording for Columbia of the “Don Juan in Hell” scene from Shaw’s Man and Superman, directed by Charles Laughton, acted by Laughton, Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke, and Agnes Moorehead, and performed by them all across America. (You can read more about it by going here.) I can’t tell you how often he listened to it or what he thought of it, but he definitely owned it, which might just be my all-time favorite piece of Armstrong trivia. Nor would I be entirely surprised to learn that he loved it, for Satchmo contained multitudes.

If you’ve read Pops, you’ll also know that Armstrong was one of Hirschfeld’s favorite subjects. He drew him countless times, most beautifully and memorably in a 1990 caricature of which I am the proud owner of a pencil-signed lithographic version. It is reproduced in Pops, with the following caption: “Many now feel ill at ease with the old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing entertainer portrayed in this 1990 caricature by Al Hirschfeld, but there was nothing false about Satchmo’s unselfconscious smile.” Nor is there anything remotely false about the Armstrong who shares space with Benny Goodman, Bernard Shaw, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, and Albert Einstein on the east wall of the Frolic Room. May they party there to the end of time.

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A scene from L.A. Confidential:

A video feature about the Frolic Room:

The First Drama Quartette’s 1952 recording of Don Juan in Hell:

Lookback: the Obamas and modern art

October 8, 2019 by Terry Teachout

From 2009:

Much has been written in recent days, most of it silly and some of it ignorant, about the modern art that Barack and Michelle Obama have borrowed to display in the White House….

Read the whole thing here.