About Last Night

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

• Rocky (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• London Wall (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 20, reviewed here)

“It’s quite possible I believe to love without understanding, hard to understand without loving.”
The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood

• Dana Tyler of WCBS talked to John Douglas Thompson and me about Satchmo at the Waldorf yesterday morning. The interview (which was great fun) will air this Sunday at eight a.m. on CBS 2 News Sunday.
• This week’s New York Times “In Performance” video features a scene from Satchmo in which John switches from Louis Armstrong to Joe Glaser and back again–a superbly vivid demonstration of his virtuosity, which continues to astonish me each time I see the show.
You can view the video by going here.
• Finally, Satchmo has been nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award, presented by the Off-Broadway League, in the “Outstanding Solo Show” category. My heartfelt congratulations to John, Gordon Edelstein, and all of our indispensable colleagues. (“I hope you sleep O.K. with this,” a friend wrote. I didn’t!)
To read the Hollywood Reporter‘s story about this year’s Lortel nominations, go here. The winners will be announced on May 4. Alas, I already have plans to see a show in Connecticut, but I’ll be there in spirit.

Jean-Pierre Rampal plays Debussy’s “Syrinx” on TV in 1957:

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

“When I started to see the analyst, I had a powerful feeling of guilt about my whole situation, and could not believe it was right to eliminate this feeling. My talks with him put it into perspective, until I was nearer to accepting it. ‘In this life you pay for everything, for every happiness,’ he said.”
The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood

From 2004:

It happens that I’ve just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I’m going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That’s where I’d hung my copy of William Bailey’s aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.
No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it’s surprising–astonishing, really–how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints….

Read the whole thing here.

I did a fair amount of work on the blog this morning, updating the top-five and Out of the Past modules and pruning the “About Terry’s Play and Opera Libretti” and “About Terry’s Books” modules to make them more concise and easily navigable. If you’re curious, take a look at the right-hand column.