About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Waltzing in the Windy City

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In this morning’s Wall Street Journal I write about Chicago Shakespeare Theater‘s production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:

In Gary Griffin’s production, “A Little Night Music” is sung by actors, played on an all-but-bare thrust stage in a smallish house, and accompanied by a 14-piece orchestra. Lush it isn’t, but the gain in intimacy almost completely offsets the musical losses. Though some of the cast members have unappealing voices, they can all act, and Kevin Gudahl, who plays Fredrik Egerman (the role created on Broadway by Len Cariou), wears both hats with apparently effortless flair. Jenny Powers is every bit as good as Petra, the sexy maid–I loved the way she sang “The Miller’s Son,” the best song in the show–and Michael Cerveris struts about quite nicely as Count Carl-Magnus, who expects absolute fidelity from his long-suffering wife Charlotte (Samantha Spiro) despite his absolute unwillingness to reciprocate….


I wrote enthusastically in this space two weeks ago about Chicago Shakespeare’s recent production of “Rose Rage,” Edward Hall’s single-evening version of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI.” That one company should have been simultaneously presenting so fine a staging of “A Little Night Music” seems to me just about miraculous. I’d always heard that the Windy City was a class-A theater town, but I didn’t know it was home to so versatile a resident troupe. I hope Stephen Sondheim makes a point of coming to see this “Night Music,” which runs through February 15. I moved to Manhattan a decade after the original Broadway production, but I can’t imagine it having been more effective than this one. Like “Rose Rage,” it’s good enough to play New York without a tweak.

I have equally enthusiastic things to say about the songs and singing of Amanda Green:

Amanda Green has yet to bring a show to Broadway, but it isn’t for lack of trying–or talent. She sang a batch of her songs last Friday at the Ars Nova Theater, assisted by a flying squadron of musical-comedy and cabaret colleagues, and I laughed so hard I thought I’d split a rib.


Ms. Green, who wrote the lyrics for “For the Love of Tiffany,” one of the high points of last summer’s New York International Fringe Festival, specializes in murderously witty songs that crackle with Sondheim-style wordplay, transposed into a postmodern key. (Can you imagine the composer of “Passion” turning out a Bruce Springsteen parody?) Nor is she afraid to stick a red-hot poker into her own heart: “If You Leave Me, Can I Come, Too?” is “funny” like a Dorothy Parker suicide note….

No link, so run–don’t walk–to the nearest newsstand, pony up $1 for a copy of this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and read the rest of what I wrote, plus other good things written by my fellow Journal-ists.

TT: Almanac

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“Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”


Pascal, Pens

TT: Centennial

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Last night I went to the New York State Theater to watch New York City Ballet dance Apollo, Prodigal Son, and Serenade on the hundredth anniversary of the birth of George Balanchine. It was bitterly cold in Manhattan, but the house was still full of familiar faces: balletomanes and critics, aging ballerinas and budding bunheads, old friends of Balanchine and young choreographers looking for inspiration. Though I’d seen all three ballets danced the week before, I couldn’t imagine staying home. I’ve witnessed most of the great occasions of state since Balanchine’s death–the company’s 50th-anniversary celebration, Suzanne Farrell’s last Vienna Waltzes and Jerome Robbins’ last bow, the memorial services for Robbins and Tanaquil Le Clercq, Balanchine’s fourth wife–and so I thought it right to be on hand to celebrate the birthday of the man who opened my eyes to ballet 17 years ago.


On paper, it was just another repertory program, the kind that rarely inspires anything remotely approaching a sense of occasion nowadays, but no sooner did the lights go down than I knew something was different. The orchestra launched into the fanfare-like introduction to Apollo, the curtain flew up to reveal Nikolaj H

TT: That’s all, folks (for the m-m-moment)

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Absolutely no more stuff from me today. I’ve got to write, dawn to dusk (a review of Thomas Mallon’s Bandbox and another chunk of my George Balanchine book), then it’s off to Lincoln Center to watch New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the master.


For now, I leave you in the tender hands of Our Girl in Chicago, who may or may not have something on her mind. And even if she doesn’t, there’s plenty of stuff to read. I’ll be back tomorrow with my weekly Wall Street Journal theater teaser, plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post.

TT: Almanac

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“That’s all any of us are–amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.”


Charlie Chaplin, screenplay for Limelight

TT: The butler did it (not)

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Says God of the Machine:

Nothing is worth seeing or reading that isn’t worth seeing or reading twice, and the second time you know how it turns out. Dickens wrote three endings for Great Expectations; Hollywood tests movies with alternate endings all the time. What happens in the last two pages or the last thirty seconds just cannot make that great a difference. The chick in The Crying Game is really a dude, and Kevin Spacey’s Keyser Soze, OK? If you’re watching a movie or reading a book to find out what’s going to happen, I suggest, with all due respect, a more productive use of time, like filing your corns or catching up on the details of Britney’s annulment.

Read the whole thing here.


With all due respect to a smart blogger, this is only half right. As I once wrote (in a radically different context) in a New York Times piece about series TV:

The term “classic” is commonly used to describe fondly remembered TV shows of the past. (I searched for the phrase “classic TV” on Google the other day, and came up with 86,300 hits.) To call a work of art “classic,” however, implies that it is something to which we return time and again, making new discoveries with each successive encounter. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, but though I suppose the day may come when it no longer has anything new to say to me, I still find it a source of apparently inexhaustible interest, and try to see it at least once a year. Every art form has produced innumerable masterpieces which, like The Four Temperaments, demand to be experienced repeatedly–every art form, that is, except for series television….


Hill Street Blues was the first TV drama I ever went out of my way to see, and were there world enough and time, I might even consider watching the first few dozen episodes again. But while I still remember how much I liked Hill Street Blues, I can’t recall much else about it–only a few isolated moments from two or three episodes–whereas I could easily rattle off fairly complete synopses of, say, Citizen Kane or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or whistle the exposition to the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony. To qualify as a classic, a work of art must first of all be good enough to make you want to get to know it at least that well.

On the other hand, our first experience of a work of art is qualitatively different from all successive experiences, precisely because we don’t know what’s going to happen. The lure of cumulative revelation is not trivial, but significant: it helps to build the tension that is ultimately discharged in catharsis. Forget the precisely balanced phrases, the delicate half-tones and perfect edits. If you’re not watching a movie or reading a book to find out what’s going to happen–or listening to a symphony, or watching a ballet–then you’re missing the point, at least on the first go-round. Every truly great work of art is coarse at first sight. That’s part of its greatness.


As for me, I’d never want to know how a masterpiece ends prior to experiencing it for the first time. To be told what happens is to be cheated of the opportunity to sprint breathlessly from beginning to end, propelled by the overwhelming desire to know–and what happens in the last two pages, or the last thirty seconds, can make all the difference in the world. Think of the finale of The Four Temperaments, with its spectacular, gravity-dissolving lifts that sum up all that has gone before. Or the explosive stutter of the final chords of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony. Or the very last sentence of “The Turn of the Screw,” which slams like an oak door in the face of the stunned reader. No one should be deprived of the opportunity to come completely fresh to those climactic moments, any more than a child should be deprived of its childhood. The more refined pleasures that come with repeated exposure can wait–and will.

OGIC: The bad news in brief

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Poynter has the scoop on the direction the New York Times Book Review is likely to take under Chip McGrath’s yet-to-be-named successor, and it ain’t pretty for fiction readers.

OGIC: Fortune cookie

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“It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make-believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic–shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity.”


Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”

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