About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Show, tell, and repeat

by

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway opening of The Inheritance. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

When the AIDS epidemic laid waste to a generation of gay men, it simultaneously forced those who had been rejected by their families to come together as a community to cope with the devastation wrought by the disease. The story of how they did so, and the cascading effect that their heroic efforts would have on successive generations of gays in America, is the subject of “The Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s new two-part play, which was reviewed with wild enthusiasm when it ran in London’s West End in 2018. The critical consensus was that Mr. Lopez had written a stage epic worthy of comparison with Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” But while such comparisons were inevitable, “The Inheritance” fails to justify them. Ambitious though it is, “The Inheritance,” whose two installments run for well over six hours, is at once sentimental and static—far too much of it feels like a novel being read out loud from cover to cover—and the parts that work, poignant though they often are, fail to redeem those that don’t….

“The Inheritance” is fundamentally novelistic in method and scope, so much so that large parts of it are driven not by dialogue but by third-person narration that is passed from actor to actor: “Eric recognized within the first few minutes of their first date Toby’s potential for greatness.” “And also his capacity for destruction.” “Both possibilities attracted him.” As a result, far too much of the play is told, not shown, and I quickly grew impatient with Mr. Lopez’s unwillingness to let the audience watch what is happening instead of forcing them to hear about it over and over again.….

*  *  *

To read my review of The Inheritance, go here.

The trailer for the West End production of The Inheritance:

Almanac: Cynthia Ozick on the autodidact

by

“To be a writer is to be an autodidact, with all the limitations, gaps, and gaucheries typical of the autodidact, who belabors clichés as though they were sacral revelation.”

Cynthia Ozick, “Toward a New Yiddish”

Snapshot: Allegra Kent dances in George Balanchine’s Symphony in C

by

Allegra Kent, Conrad Ludlow, and the New York City Ballet dance the second movement of George Balanchine’s Symphony in C. The score is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C, composed shortly after Bizet turned seventeen. This performance was filmed in a Berlin studio in 1973:

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

Almanac: W.H. Auden on living in New York

by

“In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman whould very soon go mad.”

W.H. Auden, “The Justice of Dame Kind”

Lookback: on mood music

by

From 2006:

I set my iBook on shuffle play the other night and sat down at the kitchen table to fill up my seven-day pillbox. (Don’t let anybody tell you that the life of a Manhattan drama critic isn’t exciting!) As Aimee Mann started singing “Deathly,” I glanced at the clock, saw that it was eleven, and suddenly found myself remembering a conversation I had thirty-odd years ago with a long-lost college friend. She was a slightly older married woman who had long, ash-blonde hair, thin legs, and a bone-dry sense of humor, all of which I found irresistibly (and unrequitedly) appealing. Those were the days when I was hosting a late-night jazz show on the campus radio station, and my friend remarked that she liked it when I played “eleven o’clock music.”

“What’s eleven o’clock music?” I asked innocently.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “Music to…you know. That’s when my husband and I like to do it.”

This offhand remark promptly triggered a near-incapacitating spasm of jealousy…

Read the whole thing here.

The twenty-five record albums that changed my life (25)

by

Various forms of the records-that-changed-my-life meme have been making the rounds lately, so I came up with my own version, which I call “The Twenty-Five Record Albums That Changed My Life.” I’ve written about one of these albums each weekday in the rough order in which I first heard them.

25. Steely Dan, Aja (ABC)

When I was young, the people I knew embraced pop music as an act of self-definition. It wasn’t just something to which we listened in order to be entertained: we cared about it. To proclaim that your favorite album was Blue or Live at Leeds or Workingman’s Dead, then, was to say something revealing about yourself, a fact of consuming interest to anyone who sought to understand you.

This is why I would never have said, at least not after I moved to Kansas City to go to school, that the Band’s “brown album” was my favorite rock album. Love it though I did, The Band was rootsier and less contemporary than I wanted to be, a kind of Depression-era rock album, whereas I saw myself as a modern-day city dweller in the making. In addition, I was also starting to play jazz, and even though I didn’t yet think of myself as a full-blown jazzman, the music of Count Basie and Charlie Parker and Miles Davis was nevertheless becoming increasingly central to the artistic identity that I was in the process of constructing.

It stood to reason, then, that Steely Dan’s Aja should have hit me hard when it came out in the fall of 1977. For Aja wasn’t a fusion album, even though the title track featured a tenor saxophone solo by none other than Miles Davis’ Wayne Shorter: it was, rather, a rock album, but one made by two pop musicians, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, who had fully assimilated the language of jazz and integrated it into their way of thinking about pop music. It was, at bottom and in every sense of the phrase, a musician’s album.

Michael Duffy understood this—up to a point, anyway—when he reviewed Aja for Rolling Stone:

Aja will continue to fuel the argument by rock purists that Steely Dan’s music is soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be. But this is in many ways irrelevant to a final evaluation of this band, the only group around with no conceptual antecedent from the Sixties. Steely Dan’s six albums contain some of the few important stylistic innovations in pop music in the past decade. By returning to swing and early be-bop for inspiration—before jazz diverged totally from established conventions of pop-song structure—Fagen and Becker have overcome the amorphous quality that has plagued most other jazz-rock fusion attempts.

“Peg” and “Josie” illustrate this perfectly: tight, modal tunes with good hooks in the choruses, solid beats with intricate counterrhythms and brilliantly concise guitar solos. Like most of the rest of Aja. these songs are filled out with complex horn charts, synthesizers and lush background vocals that flirt with schmaltzy L.A. jazz riffs. When topped by Fagen’s singing, they sound like production numbers from an absurdist musical comedy….

That said, it’s true that I didn’t read Duffy’s review, or anything else about Aja, until many years later. I simply bought the album when it came out, put on “Black Cow,” the first track, and understood in a single, all-encompassing flash of perception that this was my kind of rock, and always would be. I’d experienced the same kind of aesthetic revelation when, a year or two earlier, I saw Chinatown, my first film noir, on TV. It was as though I’d pulled on a bespoke suit for the first time: by wearing it, I knew who I was. Small wonder that I spent hours in the practice room, figuring out the changes to “Deacon Blues” by ear. I was determined to make them my own—and I did.

I’ve kept on listening to pop music, and making fresh discoveries about it, in the forty-two years since Aja came out. But none of those subsequent discoveries has been truly life-changing, at least not in the way that my first hearing of Aja permanently changed my relationship to the music of my youth. From then on, I approached pop music as an adult, and what I wrote about The Band in this space the other day applies with equal force to Aja: “Having once heard it, I knew what popular music at its very best was capable of saying about human experience, and have never again gladly settled for anything less.”

(Last in the series)

*  *  *

“Black Cow,” the first track from Aja:

A video featurette about the making of “Peg”:

A video featurette about the making of “Deacon Blues”:

*  *  *

To read about album #1, go here.

To read about album #2, go here.

To read about album #3, go here.

To read about album #4, go here.

To read about album #5, go here.

To read about album #6, go here.

To read about album #7, go here.

To read about album #8, go here.

To read about album #9, go here.

To read about album #10, go here.

To read about album #11, go here.

To read about album #12, go here.

To read about album #13, go here.

To read about album #14, go here.

To read about album #15, go here.

To read about album #16, go here.

To read about album #17, go here.

To read about album #18, go here.

To read about album #19, go here.

To read about album #20, go here.

To read about album #21, go here.

To read about album #22, go here.

To read about album #23, go here.

To read about album #24, go here.

Just because: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings Schubert

by

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings “Der Leiermann,” a song from Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, accompanied by Alfred Brendel. This performance, subtitled in English, was taped for German TV in 1979:

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

Once again, with feeling

by

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Pennsylvania revival of Once. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The commercial triumph of “Once,” which moved to Broadway in 2012, ran there for 1,168 performances and won eight Tony Awards, was one of the happiest—and least likely—theatrical success stories of the past decade. Nor is the story over yet: If you missed out on “Once,” or merely want to see whether it’s as good as you remember, Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Playhouse is giving it a warm-hearted revival directed by Travis Greisler that’s as satisfying as the original production, maybe even more so.

By all rights, “Once” shouldn’t have gotten to Broadway at all, much less become a smash hit. It’s a soft-spoken, small-scale show performed on an uncomplicated unit set by a cast of 13 singer-actors who play their own instruments. Nor is it a full-fledged musical: “Once,” which is based on John Carney’s 2007 film, feels more like a play with songs, and the folk-pop score, by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, is nothing special. And while it’s a love story, it’s a very particular kind of love story, a should-they-or-shouldn’t-they tale of two Dubliners (Matt DeAngelis and Mackenzie Lesser-Roy) who fall hard for one another but have pressing responsibilities that pull them in opposite directions. A musical for adults, in other words, told with a forthrightness that’s guaranteed to put a lump in your throat….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A video featurette about Once:

May 2025
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts