Terry Teachout's Blog, page 102

TT: The takers and the "tooken"

In today's Wall Street Journal I review two outstanding Florida productions, Palm Beach Dramaworks' A Raisin in the Sun and Orlando Shakespeare's Othello . Here's an excerpt.

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What makes a play political? Sometimes it's all in the timing. "A Raisin in the Sun," Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 drama about a black family that wants to move to a white neighborhood, doubtless came across as strongly political when it first opened on Broadway. How could it have been otherwise? Fifty-four years later, though, "Raisin" seems not so much a here-and-now assault on racism as a history play about black culture in the Eisenhower era, and what hits you hardest is the unflinching truthfulness with which Ms. Hansberry has enacted the hurtful and universal complexities of family life.

Though it's been nine years since "Raisin" was last seen on Broadway, it was already receiving its fair share of regional productions prior to the 2010 premiere of "Clybourne Park," in which Bruce Norris imagined what might have happened to the house that the Younger family bought in the early '50s. The success of Mr. Norris' toothless little satire, however, has inspired still more companies to revive the original play on which it is based, which is what brought me down to West Palm Beach to see "Raisin." I already knew that it was effective, but Palm Beach Dramaworks' production, simply staged by Seret Scott and acted to perfection by a phenomenally well-chosen cast, suggests that it is in fact one of the finest American plays of the 20th century...

Traditional stagings of Shakespeare's plays are hard to come by these days, and it's refreshing to be reminded, as Orlando Shakespeare is currently doing in its outstanding version of "Othello," that the greatest of all English-speaking playwrights can scrape along quite nicely without hip costumes or self-consciously clever directorial touches. Brian Vaughn's production takes place in 16th-century Venice and Cyprus, not Greenwich Village or Nazi Germany, and unfolds on a flexible Elizabethan-style unit set designed by Bert Scott that hurls you from scene to scene with electric swiftness. Nothing is allowed to divert your attention from Shakespeare's harsh portrayal of jealousy run rampant, and the cast tells the tale briskly and forcefully....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation."

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

TT: On the nose

Rick Brookhiser reminded me last night to strike the Jane Chord of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington:

The Jane Chord, to which Bill Buckley introduced us years ago, is a concept originally promulgated by Hugh Kenner. The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver--the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built--and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it's still a good game to play....

I rejoice to report that the Jane Chord of Duke is, believe it or not, He/true. Success is inevitable!

TT: Two's company

Now that I've finished Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, I find myself thoroughly disconcerted to have written two jazz biographies in a row.

I was typecast as a specialist in music throughout the first part of my career as a writer, and I worked very hard for a very long time to extract myself from that pigeonhole. Least of all did I ever want to be seen as someone who wrote exclusively or primarily about jazz, not because I didn't love it passionately but because the audience for jazz isn't all that large. In any case, my cultural interests have always extended far beyond the compass of jazz in particular and music in general, and I was determined to get myself into a position where editors thought of me first and foremost as a generalist, a "utility outfielder" who knew as much about Chekhov and Vuillard as Fauré or Bix Beiderbecke.

In time that started to happen, and now it's come to pass. Not only am I The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, but I also write a biweekly cultural column for the Journal in which I range as far afield as I like, and my title at Commentary was changed four years ago from "music critic" to "critic-at-large." Between 2002 and 2009 I published biographies of H.L. Mencken , George Balanchine , and Louis Armstrong , and I also published a self-anthology of essays that covers every branch of artistic endeavor save for the visual arts, in which I have since immersed myself.

Hence it feels strange to have returned to the same well for the second time in a row, and to have written about a pair of closely contemporary jazz musicians. The fact is that my decision to write two jazz biographies signifies nothing more than that I thought it would be both interesting and fun (which it was) to write about Duke Ellington. My cultural horizons are still wide, and they show no signs of shrinking in middle age. If anything, I spend less time thinking about music now than I did, say, five years ago.

All that said, I've enjoyed spending an extended period of time (for me, anyway) pretending to be a specialist. I have no trouble understanding the appeal of being a scholar who spends his whole life digging the same hole deeper and deeper, and who knows pretty much everything there is to know about one person. I could easily have gone in that direction, and I think it would have made for a satisfying life.

But I didn't. For some reason that I don't fully understand, I decided around the time that I graduated from college that I didn't want to specialize in anything, thus ensuring that I wouldn't become an academic, much less a professional musician. Instead I write about all of the arts, and of late I've branched out to become a playwright and opera librettist as well. It's always been my goal to emulate the composer-critic-conductor Constant Lambert , who figures prominently in the pages of Duke and whom Anthony Powell described as having "an unrivalled capacity, amounting to genius, for seizing on the essential point in any of the arts." I'm the furthest thing from a genius--I've known enough geniuses to know that--but I'm proud to have been able to transcend mere dilletantism and function as a true professional in more than one field.

To be sure, I am now officially in a position to call myself the biographer of the two greatest jazz musicians of the twentieth century. I can absolutely guarantee you, however, that I won't be shooting for three. If I write another biography, which I'd like to do, it will almost certainly be about somebody who isn't a jazz musician, a choreographer, a journalist--or a man.

Who might she be? Beats me. But if and when when the right woman comes along, I'll know. And if not, I'll write another play instead. Or an opera. Or something completely different.

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Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande, a 1927 setting of a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell, performed by Jack Gibbons, Sally Burgess, the Opera North Chorus, and the English Northern Philharmonia, conducted by David Lloyd-Jones:

TT: So you want to see a show?

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:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (musical, PG-13, closes Mar. 10, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Other Place (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 3, 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 IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Laughter on the 23rd Floor (comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Picnic (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 24, reviewed here)

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, closes Mar. 3, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog."

Joseph Conrad, Victory

TT: Finishing another hat

Mrs. T and I arrived at Siesta Key, Florida, on Monday afternoon. I resumed work on Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington as soon as I brought the bags up from the car, and didn't knock off until two a.m. I finished editing the manuscript at three p.m. the next day, then e-mailed it to Gotham Books in New York, after which we went out to dinner to celebrate.

Not that I felt especially celebratory. I've been working so unremittingly hard on the book for the past few months that I mostly feel relieved. Duke, on which I started working three years ago, is my longest book to date--183,700 words, counting the back matter. Considering all the other things that I've done since 2010, I'd say that relief is an entirely appropriate thing for me to be feeling right now.

Today, as it happens, is my fifty-seventh birthday. I'm not inclined to celebrate that august occasion, either, though I know that I should, if only to pay tribute to my continuing good fortune. Much has changed since I wrote these words seven years ago, but for the most part I still stand by them, especially the last sentence. (What about that mysterious woman whom I mentioned in the first paragraph? Reader, she married me.)

To those who've been sending me best wishes, my most humble thanks. I am so very, very lucky in my friends. And yes, I'm taking the day off.

TT: Snapshot

Philip Larkin talks about and reads his poem "For Sidney Bechet." The video is a clip of Bechet performing "Petite Fleur":



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

TT: Almanac

"All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity--it is to destroy it."

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

TT: Lookback

From 2004:

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I've been doing it for years, and I can't offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person's life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth....

Read the whole thing here .