Six days ago I was putting the finishing touches on a Wall Street Journal drama column. I was bone-tired and still a bit wheezy from my recent illness, and every sentence was a struggle. At length I decided I was done, hit a couple of keys on my iBook and sent the column to my editor, packed a bag, stumbled downstairs, and hailed a cab.

Ten minutes later I was in Grand Central Station, surrounded by cold-eyed soldiers in camouflage outfits. Ten minutes after that I was on a train, surrounded by a dozen brass-voiced construction workers who were chatting in the manner of the towel-snappers in a high-school locker room. The air conditioner was broken and the temperature inside the car was 95 degrees. (I know this because one of the construction workers had a thermometer and was taking bets from his friends on how hot it was.) At first I tried to look at the whole thing as a spiritual exercise, but I gave up at Spuyten Duyvil and spent the next half-hour longing for my fellow passengers to drop dead.

The construction workers bailed out at Peekskill and the car fell blessedly silent. A few minutes later the train pulled into Cold Spring. No sooner had I finished the three-block walk to the Hudson House Inn than I felt the weight of the past three weeks slipping once more from my shoulders. I checked in, took a cold shower and a long nap, and spent the next day and a half doing nothing. Not exactly nothing, of course–you never do “nothing,” just as there’s no such thing as “silence” outside of an empty anechoic chamber–but as little as it’s possible for a work-obsessed urbanite to do. I ate five good meals, read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, indulged in a little light channel-surfing, and sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, listening to the birds and crickets and watching the sailboats glide by. Outside of chatting with the very nice women at the front desk and talking to my mother and three friends on my cell phone, I doubt I spoke more than a couple of hundred words aloud.

Come Thursday morning I repacked my bag, walked back up the hill to the train station, and returned in due course to my desk in Manhattan, where 158 e-mails awaited me. Since then I’ve
seen an off-Broadway play
and visited a downtown club, written a set of liner notes for a CD by a band I like, spent a day at the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, watched a movie on TV, listened to my first Ani DiFranco album, and made my last corrections to the second-pass proofs of All in the Dances.

Had these things happened a month ago, I would have hastened to cram them into a breathless “Consumables” posting, but I was persuaded to do otherwise after running across my own obituary on the Web:

Critic Terry Teachout Consumes Too Much Art, Violently Explodes

MANHATTAN

“Most biographies are built around a series of abiding questions. They are often the same questions, such as, Did you love her? or Were you happy? or Didn’t he know that was a mistake? It is in their nature, and their beauty, that such questions can never be satisfied. There may be answers, but they are usually too many, or too terrific–‘Rosebud’ is one of those great answers that makes it harder to know the question.”

David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles

I’m in today’s Wall Street Journal, this week with a report on my recent visits to three long-running Broadway musicals, The Lion King, Mamma Mia!, and Movin’ Out. I was curious to see how they’d look and sound after such long runs–especially in the summer, when Broadway shows are typically hit by a plague of cast changes and substitute performers. The results, not surprisingly, were mixed.

The Lion King looked best:

One reason why it’s so solid after all these years is that Julie Taymor’s puppet-driven staging doesn’t require world-class acting to make its effect. It’s less a traditional musical than a pageant, and at its best it’s a transportingly beautiful one. The catch is that none of the current principals are especially good singers, meaning that many of the solo numbers fall flat. This underlines the only other weakness of “The Lion King,” which is that it is two shows, not one. The bold stage pictures and thrilling African-style choral numbers that make it so powerfully original sit uneasily alongside the juvenile fart jokes and insipid Elton John-Tim Rice ballads that make it so painfully Disneyesque. Even at its most cartoonish, “The Lion King” is worth seeing–very much so–but the producers should think about bringing in some new blood….

Mamma Mia! is also in great shape, if you can stand the show:

Broadway debutante Jenny Fellner and Broadway veteran Dee Hoty, the stars of the current cast, are terrific (Ms. Fellner charmed my socks off), and the rest of the company backs them up with improbable enthusiasm. Whether that’s enough to put a smile on your face depends on your tolerance for camped-up dance routines set to artificially flavored bubblegum rock. Mine, I learned, is low.

I had similar problems with Movin’ Out:

“Movin’ Out,” the Billy Joel-Twyla Tharp all-dance “musical” (the only performers who sing are the members of the onstage band), also benefits from the energetic dancing of its excellent ensemble, which includes several members of the original cast, most notably Ashley Tuttle, an American Ballet Theatre ballerina who is delightful in the nice-girl role. I was warned in advance that I’d be seeing the usual summertime miscellany of subs and alternates, but whoever they were, they hoofed their hearts out.

The band, alas, has clearly performed Mr. Joel’s greatest hits several hundred times too many and is now on automatic pilot–competent but robotic. As for the choreography, it looks like every other kids-at-the-gym dance that Ms. Tharp has choreographed over the past three decades, and the vestigial plot, in which three New Jersey boys go off to Vietnam and learn about life’s cruelty, merely serves to make the proceedings more pretentious….

No link. For further theater-related opinionizing (including playgoing advice for visiting Republicans and their families), you can (A) buy today’s Journal or (B) subscribe to the online edition by going here. Both options are excellent.

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”

P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

A reader writes:

Could you please name five jazz CDs the beginning listener should own?

Another reader writes:

I have loved watching dance over the years, but have almost no idea of what goes where and why. Could you please recommend four or five books that might give me a formal and historical introduction to the art?

I love e-mail like this, and I never get tired of answering it.

To Reader No. 1, here are five CDs containing music that I listen to often, all of it jazz but otherwise extremely varied in style:

– The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.

– Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington’s best pre-LP recordings.

– Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop’s key figure.

– Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.

– Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to “fuse” jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.

If you don’t like any of these recordings, you probably won’t like jazz.

Reader No. 2 should read these books, in this order:

– Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Hyperion). The best introductory book about ballet ever written, by the much-admired dance critic of The Wall Street Journal.

– Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale). A comprehensive, well-written, impeccably reliable history of ballet and modern dance.

– Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (Yale). The only available collection of writings by the most important dance critic of the century.

– Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A superbly edited one-volume collection of reviews by the outstanding dance critic of the postwar era.

And, if I do say so myself:

– Terry Teachout, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt). A short book about the greatest of all choreographers, written specifically for those who have either just discovered Balanchine’s ballets or are eager to do so. It’s out in November.

Speaking of All in the Dances, I just wrote and e-mailed to Harcourt, my publisher, a draft of the “flap copy,” publisher-speak for the description of the book and its author that will appear on the dust jacket. Here’s what I wrote:

Martha Graham said that watching George Balanchine choreograph a ballet was like “watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance.” Twenty years after his death, the ruthless, enigmatic founder of New York City Ballet still dominates the world of dance. He worked with Serge Diaghilev–and Sam Goldwyn. He made ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky–and to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A Russian

From the New York Times:

After Mr. Bush’s Davenport speech, his motorcade zoomed toward the nearby town of Bettendorf, where it stopped at a small farmers’ market. The president hopped out of his limousine, strode over to Ken Thomsen’s corn stand and bought some half-dozen ears with cash from his pocket. Then he peeled back one of the husks and bit into a raw ear….

Less than 24 hours later, the roadshow was in Ohio as the talk show host encouraged his listeners to speak up with queries for “Ask President Bush.”

“Go ahead, yell it out,” the president said. “If I don’t like the question, I’ll reinvent it.”

“Journalist Murray Sayle reputedly said there were only three kinds of pieces: 1) ‘We name the guilty man’; 2) ‘Arrow points to defective part’; and 3) ‘Everything you knew about X is wrong.'”

Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles (Aug. 9, 2004)