About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / Archives for main

No worries

by

Not long after my recent car crash, a friend wrote: “Do hope you are feeling recovered, and that the missing patch of hair isn’t too obvious.” (I’d previously mentioned in this space that I’d lost a bit of hair in the accident.) Two days later, she sent me a follow-up message: “Hope you are O.K. Suspect you went through something existential and really sorry if earlier note was glib.”

I was tickled by her scrupulosity, for it hadn’t occurred to me, even for a moment, that there was anything glib about her first message. Nevertheless, it was the second message that set me to thinking. Had I really been through “something existential”? I didn’t feel that way at the time, and I still don’t. Yes, the crash scared me terribly, and yes, I know how very lucky I was to escape without a scratch. Even so, that seems to have been the end of it. I haven’t had any flashbacks, or any bad dreams about car crashes (though I did have a nightmare about the death penalty after watching an episode of The Fugitive two days after the accident). Unnerving though the immediate experience was, it appears to have passed through me without leaving a trace.

Could it be that I’m somehow deficient in imagination, too prosy a soul to have properly appreciated the significance of what happened to me? I rather doubt it, given the lasting effect that my previous brush with death had on me thirteen years ago. Perhaps the fact that I’m thirteen years closer to what Frank Skeffington cheerfully refers to as “the Dark Encounter” in The Last Hurrah has given me a more realistic perspective on such occurrences. Perhaps, too, the fact that I’ve since married a woman who suffers uncomplainingly from a chronic illness that came close to killing her twice in the past few months has taught me that getting hit by an oncoming car without further event, disagreeable though it is, doesn’t begin to compare to living each day in the shadow of the Dark Encounter.

I hasten to add that we all live in that long, impenetrably dark shadow: not even the best of doctors can look at the clock with the blank face and be absolutely sure what time it is. Moreover, I decided quite some time ago that the recognition of death’s inevitability, which came to me comparatively late in life, has done me nothing but good.

Among other things, it helped to make possible the inner transformation that allowed me to become an artist. As I wrote in this space a couple of years ago, shortly after my sixtieth birthday:

I believe that it was Mrs. T who made this transformation possible. But I also believe it wouldn’t have happened had it not been for my belated discovery of what Henry James called “the distinguished thing.” Not only did my newfound consciousness of the inevitability of death set off an interior turmoil that rid me forever after of any semblance of complacency, but it forced me to remember the words of Cardinal Newman to which I alluded in this space when I turned sixty earlier this year: And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,/Use well the interval. Even when I was at my unhappiest, I worked—hard—and I worked just as hard at being the best friend I was capable of being. I had learned not to waste time. That’s why I was ready to take full advantage of my new situation when the wind finally changed.

I’m sure it makes a difference, too, that I’ve been in attendance at a couple of deathbeds in recent years. Having seen a person die, I’m struck by how euphemistically Hollywood, even at its goriest, portrays death. I wrote about this with extra-brut amusement back in 2007:

Truth sometimes finds its way into the movies—accidents happen—but when it comes to death, Hollywood is incapable of honesty, and the bigger the budget, the balder the lies. Real movie stars live forever or die nobly, uttering memorable last words and expiring with a smile; you never see the catheter, or smell the pus. Even the terrible simplicity of violent death is beyond the imaginative grasp of most directors. It always seemed to me perfectly appropriate that when Janet Leigh took her last shower in Psycho, the blood running down the drain was really chocolate syrup.

I used to think that filmmakers lied about death in order to avoid upsetting the public, but now I think they’re more afraid of upsetting themselves. Wrinkled faces can be lifted, troublesome mistresses traded in for newer models, but there is no arguing with the penultimate reality of one’s own demise.

I guess you’ve got to be there, and now that I have, I have a feeling that I’m disinclined as a result to get bent out of shape (so to speak!) by having gotten knocked around on a snowy night by an oncoming BMW. Whatever the reason, I’m definitely grateful to have been left unbruised, both physically and psychically. It’s the safest of bets, after all, that something much worse is bound to happen to me sooner or later, and I’m more than happy to wait patiently until then to find out what effect it’s going to have.

Whatever it may be, I hope I’ll face it bravely, but either way, I’ll have to face it, and if you’ll permit me to quote my personal mantra for the umpteenth time: if there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.

*  *  *

A scene from Heaven Can Wait, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, written by Samson Raphaelson, and starring Don Ameche and Laird Cregar:

A scene from Ghost, directed by Jerry Zucker, written by Bruce Joel Rubin, and starring Patrick Swayze:

Just because: Diana Mitford talks about Adolf Hitler

by

Excerpts from a TV interview with Lady Diana Mosley (formerly Diana Mitford) in which she talks with Mavis Nicholson about her marriage to Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, and their friendship with Adolf Hitler. This interview was originally telecast on April 4, 1977:

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

Two for two at the Irish Rep

by

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, which appears in the paper’s online edition, I review an important off-Broadway revival of Juno and the Paycock. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

With the opening of “Juno and the Paycock,” the Irish Repertory Theatre has put in place two of the three central panels in its “O’Casey Season.” In case you haven’t heard, New York’s best off-Broadway theater troupe is celebrating its 30thanniversary by presenting staged productions in rotating repertory of all three plays in Seán O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy” (along with concert-style readings of his 17 other plays). “The Shadow of a Gunman,” the first installment of the trilogy, opened last month to awe-inspiring effect. Now the Irish Rep has gotten around to “Juno,” a modern masterpiece that was last seen there six years ago in a breathtakingly fine revival starring J. Smith-Cameron and staged by Charlotte Moore, the company’s artistic director. “I doubt that ‘Juno’ will receive a more eloquent or sympathetic production in my lifetime,” I wrote in 2013. I was right, too. This new revival, directed by Neil Pepe, is no better than its predecessor—but it’s every bit as good.

First performed in 1924, “Juno” is, like “Shadow,” a domestic tragicomedy set in Dublin at a time when Ireland was cloven by political violence. The title characters are Jack (Ciarán O’Reilly), a lazy, jobless braggart whose family and friends call him “the Paycock” (i.e., peacock) because of his windy vanity, and Juno (Maryann Plunkett), his long-suffering wife, whose hope-starved life is upended when Jack receives an unexpected inheritance from an estranged cousin. This being a Seán O’Casey play, you know at once that no possible good can come of the money, and even though the immediate results of the bequest are uproariously farcical, what happens at evening’s end to Juno, her loud-mouthed husband and their two hapless children (Ed Malone and Sarah Street) is terrible almost beyond belief.

Jack has the flashiest part, and Mr. O’Reilly, who also played him in 2013, nails it, strutting from scene to scene and chasing his modest potbelly around the stage as if it were the drum major of a marching band. Nevertheless, it is the actor who plays Juno on whose stooped shoulders rests the ultimate success of any revival of “Juno and the Paycock,” and Ms. Plunkett, like Ms. Smith-Cameron before her, is more than equal to the challenge. Her performance is strikingly subdued—she never raises her voice, not even once—but the effects of prolonged disappointment are etched so deeply on her features that she needn’t say a word to win your sympathy….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A featurette about the Irish Rep’s revival of Juno and the Paycock:

Isn’t she loverly?

by

The twenty-eighth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Most of this episode is devoted to an in-studio interval with Laura Benanti—who is, in case you were wondering, one of the nicest, smartest, and funniest people on the face of the earth. We enjoyed every minute of the time we spent with her.

Here’s an excerpt from American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:

Laura Benanti stops by the studio for a long interview covering everything from being “born a 45-year-old gay man” to finally getting to play Eliza Doolittle, her dream role, in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center. Plus that time Arthur Laurents almost made her quit a show.

Then the critics go around the table to talk about John Guare’s Nantucket Sleigh Ride at Lincoln Center, White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks at the Public Theater, and Aaron Posner’s JQA at Washington’s Arena Stage.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Replay: John Gielgud in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version

by

Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, starring John Gielgud and Angela Baddeley, adapted for radio by Cynthia Pughe, and originally broadcast by the BBC on January 30, 1958:

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

Almanac: Christopher Hampton on lying

by

“I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.”

Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist

The man who set Clint Eastwood to music

by

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I discuss a new book about one of the world’s most important film-music composers. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Which classical violinist has been heard by the largest number of people? Was it Jascha Heifetz? Itzhak Perlman? I’d put my money on…Louis Kaufman. Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of him, though. He’s best remembered not for his immaculate performances of the concertos of Vivaldi (he cut one of the very first records of “The Four Seasons”) but for his day job: Mr. Kaufman, who died in 1994, was one of golden-age Hollywood’s top studio musicians. Not only did he play the sweet-toned violin solos that Max Steiner wrote for the soundtrack of “Gone With the Wind,” but he also served as concertmaster for the house orchestras that recorded such film scores as Hugo Friedhofer’s “The Best Years of Our Lives,” Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Adventures of Robin Hood,” David Raksin’s “Laura” and Franz Waxman’s “Sunset Boulevard.”

Kaufman’s playing, like that of countless other hugely talented artisans whose destiny it was to labor off camera, is known to millions of moviegoers who have never heard his name. The same thing, alas, is true of any number of major film composers who work out of sight and for the most part out of mind. Fortunately, a few of them have won the recognition they deserve. Take Ennio Morricone, the subject of “Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words” (Oxford), a newly published collection of interviews with the phenomenally prolific 90-year-old Italian composer who has scored more than 400 films and TV shows to date, among them “Cinema Paradiso,” “The Hateful Eight,” “In the Line of Fire,” “The Mission,” “Once Upon a Time in the West” and “The Untouchables.” Mr. Morricone is one of the few Europe-based film composers to be at all widely known in the U.S., in part because he’s worked on a number of Hollywood hits. The list of his celebrated fans, which includes Quincy Jones, Yo-Yo Ma, Pat Metheny and Bruce Springsteen, is almost as long as the list of movies he’s scored.

If you’re looking for a gossipy memoir, go elsewhere. “In His Own Words” presupposes a fair amount of musical knowledge going in, and it also assumes that you’ll know a lot about the many Italian movies that Mr. Morricone has scored. But read it with patience and respect and you’ll learn plenty about the subtle craft of film scoring and the career of one of its most eminent practitioners….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Excerpts from a 2004 concert in which Ennio Morricone led the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in excerpts from his film scores:

October 2025
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts