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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• 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)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, closes Sept. 12, reviewed here)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:

• The Taming of the Shrew/Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN LENOX, MASS.:

• Richard III (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

• The Taster (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

• The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SANTA CRUZ, CALIF.:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

• Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

“He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise, i.e., cannot do something else.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #825 (Munich, 1908)

Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on Superman and wrote the libretto for Virgil Thomson’s Lord Byron, is interviewed in the Sturges House, designed and built by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939 and bought by Larson and the late James Bridges in 1967:

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

Orson Welles said it, and he was right: “We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.” So it was pleasant indeed to receive this e-mail from a good and gifted friend:

You will survive as much more than a footnote in the Marsden Hartley catalogue.
Brazil and I say so.

True or not, it sure is nice to hear–not to mention inspiring.

“The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #951 (1915)

Pops: A Vida de Louis Armstrong has just been published in Brazil by Larousse. One of my Brazilian friends saw Pops in a bookstore over the weekend, took a photo of the display with her cellphone, and sent it to me via e-mail. It’s a bit fuzzy, but I think you’ll get the idea.
Here is the Portuguese catalogue copy, which is surprisingly intelligible, even to a monoglot like me:

Esta é a biografia definitiva de um gênio nascido na sarjeta que se tornou uma celebridade conhecida nos quatro cantos do mundo.
O biógrafo Teachout pesquisou e avaliou a vida e o trabalho de Armstrong como ninguém jamais o fez. Da infância pobre, do precoce interesse pela música, de sua vida em Nova Orleans até a mudança para Chicago, e muito além, o autor mergulha fundo na história desse ícone da música.
Tudo na medida exata. Palavras e sentimentos. Segredos e crueza. Síntese e exagero. A medida exata para alguém chamado Louis Armstrong.
Imperdível!

This is the first time that any of my books has been translated into another language and published by a major foreign house, and seeing as how I have a special love for Brazil and its music, I’m touched that I should have made my international debut south of the border.

“The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.”
Paul Klee, diary entry #733 (December 1905)

In 2006 Mrs. T and I successfully bid on a copy of “Apples on Table,” a 1923 lithograph by Marsden Hartley. Though he’s never been popular, Hartley was, with John Marin, one of this country’s first important modernist painters, and I’ve loved his work ever since I became familiar with it.

Needless to say, it had never occurred to me that I might actually be in a position to own a Hartley, but I discovered, very much to my surprise, that his lithographs were and are not only rare but obscure. He made only eighteen, most of them in smallish editions of twenty-five. They are scarcely ever exhibited–the only show devoted to Hartley’s prints, so far as I know, took place at the University of Kansas in 1972–and even those connoisseurs with a special interest in Hartley typically know little or nothing about them.

Because they’re so obscure, Hartley’s lithographs don’t cost anything like what you’d expect to pay for a pencil-signed print by a major American modernist. If memory serves, we paid $3,800 for “Apples on Table” in 2006, at a time when Hartley’s oil paintings were selling for as high as two million dollars. That’s not chump change for an impecunious critic, but we managed to scrape it together, and “Apples on Table” has hung over the dinner table in our Manhattan apartment ever since. It’s the first thing I see each time I unlock the front door after a long absence, and the sight of it never fails to warm my heart.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a form letter–an old-fashioned piece of snail mail, thank you very much–from Gail R. Levin, a Maine-based scholar who is working on a catalogue raisonné of Hartley’s lithographs. Levin’s goal is to track down every surviving copy of all eighteen prints, and to this end the auction house from which Mrs. T and I bought “Apples on Table” gave her our address.

The text of the letter is self-explanatory:

We plan to publish a handsomely illustrated, thoroughly researched and updated edition of Hartley’s stunning lithographic production….Would you please assist me in my research by filling out the attached data sheet for this and any other Hartley lithograph you might currently own?

I confess to having been thrilled by Levin’s letter. To be sure, several of the pieces that Mrs. T and I own can be found in existing catalogues raisonnés, but this will be the first time that our ownership of a work of art has been acknowledged by an art historian. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but I can’t help but be excited by it.

As I wrote six years ago apropos of my purchase of a Max Beerbohm caricature that is listed in Rupert Hart-Davis’ 1972 catalogue of Beerbohm’s drawings:

So there it was in black and white: my Max is officially known in the world of Beerbohmiana as “Hart-Davis 631.” It was publicly exhibited at the Leicester Galleries, Max’s London dealer, in 1913, and mentioned in a review of the show by Eddie Marsh, one of those semi-eminent Edwardian litterateurs who is constantly popping up in books, diaries, memoirs, and letters of the period. Presumably some even less eminent Edwardian bought it from the Leicester Galleries, for “Mr. Percy Grainger” has never been reproduced, nor was Hart-Davis able to establish its ownership as of 1972, the year he published his catalogue; it was invisible to Beerbohm scholars between 1913 and last week, when it came into my possession.

I felt a little shiver of excitement as I looked at the entry for Hart-Davis 631. My Max may not be famous, but it nonetheless has an official existence, of which I am now a part. If a younger scholar should someday take it upon himself to update the catalogue, he will add “OWNER Terry Teachout” to the entry for Hart-Davis 631. I find that a pleasant prospect. Even if The Skeptic and the Teachout Reader should crumble irrevocably into dust, I will live forever as a footnote to the lives of two men far greater than myself: not only did I rediscover the manuscript of A Second Mencken Chrestomathy among H.L. Mencken’s private papers and edit it for publication, but I was the first recorded owner of Hart-Davis 631.

Such frissons are, I believe, a legitimate part of the myriad delights of collecting art, even on a modest scale. Most of us, after all, never come to the attention of historians: we are members of the anonymous legions of those who, as Thomas Gray put it in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” are born to blush unseen. Yet I suspect that anyone who writes a book feels at one time or another the longing that Mencken summed up in a private memorandum that he wrote on the first day of 1927: “I have done a great deal less than I wanted to do and a great deal less than I might have done if my equipment had been better, but this, at least, I have accomplished, and it is one of the principal desires of man: I have delivered myself from anonymity.”

Needless to say, I cannot speak the same words with anything remotely approaching H.L. Mencken’s self-confidence. To be sure, I like to think that Pops and The Skeptic might possibly survive me, but I’m not counting on it. Biographers write not for posterity but for their own generation, and rarely if ever are their efforts remembered in the long run save as footnotes to the subsequent efforts of their successors.

For this reason, I don’t think there’s much chance that anyone will remember me a hundred years from today, unless they happen to be perusing Gail Levin’s files and stumble across her research into the provenance of “Apples on Table,” in which case they will know that a copy of this exquisite hommage to Cézanne was once owned by an otherwise unknown couple named “Terry and Hilary Teachout.” By then Mrs. T and I will be long gone, and our handsome print will presumably be giving pleasure to a person or persons as yet unborn.

As for the two of us, we will, if nothing else, exemplify the last stanza of Philip Larkin’s great poem about the tombstone of a long-forgotten English couple:

The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

So, too, shall it be for Mrs. T and me. Even if no stone should mark our final resting place, our marriage is now inscribed in the scholar’s book of life.