Terry Teachout's Blog, page 128

TT: Almanac

"My most concise, and memorable, lesson on editing came one day in 1958 when Groucho took me with him to visit George S. Kaufman in his New York apartment. For me, it had the aura of a visit to a tall, tin guru. I remember his being seated in a chair with his long legs seeming to be entwined at least twice around each other.

"'Here's a young director,' Groucho said. 'Tell him how to direct.'

"'Well,' Mr. Kaufman said, 'if you have a script, and it says, "Sit down, I want to talk to you," cut that out.'"

Robert Dwan, As Long as They're Laughing!: Groucho Marx and You Bet Your Life

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:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

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

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Marry Me a Little (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Misalliance (serious comedy, G/PG-13, far too talky for children, closes Oct. 27, reviewed here)

• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes Oct. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:

• Skylight (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Oct. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Lovers (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 20, reviewed here)

TT: One (more) to grow on

The opening night of Long Wharf Theatre's production of Satchmo at the Waldorf couldn't have gone better. The house was sold out to the walls--the box office was turning away people--and the audience responded rapturously. As for John Douglas Thompson, he lit the afterburners. I've never seen him give a bad perormance, but what he did on Wednesday night, even by his own high standards, was very, very special.

By the time Mrs. T and I made it home from the cast party, Frank Rizzo, the drama critic of the Hartford Courant had already tweeted a link to an online preview of his review, which will appear in Friday's Courant:

Thompson gives masterful duo-performamces and Teachout creates a well-crafted drama of a good-hearted, soulful, gifted man dealing with a world that isn't always so wonderful.

(I also liked the headline: "Old Man With a Horn.')

I've had better days...but not many, and not by much.

TT: Once in a while the moon turns blue

No more rehearsals, no more previews: Satchmo at the Waldorf opens tonight at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven.

At this point I don't have much of anything left to say, so instead I'll post a link to a piece whose third paragraph was surely designed to keep me modest. The author originally spelled my name "Teacher Teachout." (Yes, it's been fixed.) I've spent my whole life spelling my last name for people who can't quite bring themselves to believe that it's spelled the way it sounds, but this was the first time that anybody ever fouled up my first name!

Thanks to everyone out there for your kind words of encouragement. The adventure that is Satchmo at the Waldorf is far from over, but this is still a big night for all of us up in New Haven. Long Wharf is one of America's top regional theaters, and I never imagined that my play would ever be done there. Now it's happening.

I'm reminded of the scene from the play in which Louis Armstrong talks about his rise to fame:

And then, this one night we playing in a movie house and they show this Looney Tunes cartoon before the feature, and you know what? I'm in it. Look up at the screen and there's this trumpet-playing angel...and it's me. Can't get no more famous than that.

Clean Pastures , the cartoon in question, is no longer shown on TV--Friz Freleng's well-meaning caricatures of Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Stepin Fetchit, the Mills Brothers, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Fats Waller are now understandably regarded as racially insensitive--but in 1937 Armstrong would surely have seen it as proof of his decisive emergence as a full-fledged pop-culture icon.

Needless to say, I'm not famous and never will be. There's no such thing as a famous playwright anymore, much less a famous critic. Still, I have no doubt that it's going to feel very special--perhaps even a little bit eerie--for me to sit in the audience tonight and watch my first play being performed on the stage of Long Wharf Theatre.

As W.H. Auden wrote in his libretto for Benjamin Britten's Paul Bunyan, "Once in a while the odd thing happens,/Once in a while the dream comes true." So it does. So it has.

TT: Snapshot

The Bad Plus performs a jazz version of Igor Stravinsky's Apollo:



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

TT: Almanac

"When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, 'What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?'

"'They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,' Pa said. 'Go to sleep, now.'

"But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

"She thought to herself, 'This is now.'

"She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago."

Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (courtesy of The Rat )

TT: Almanac

"The only thing we know about the future is that it is going to be different."

Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

TT: Lookback

From 2006:

I'm not inclined to be forgiving of anyone who plays pattycake with totalitarianism, but if there's been a truly great creative artist whose sins against humanity amounted to much more than first-degree talk, I'm unaware of it.

Mind you, I have no illusions about the ennobling power of art. I've spent too much time around artists not to know better than that. Daily megadoses of beauty won't make you a better person unless you were a good person to begin with. What keeps great artists out of trouble is that they're too busy making art to do much of anything but talk. It's the second- and third-raters who end up working for the Ministry of Truth, where they burn off their frustrations by rejecting the grant applications of their betters (or sending them to concentration camps)....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Back in action

I've finally updated the Top Five and "Out of the Past" modules of the right-hand column with a septet of fresh picks. Forgive my delinquency--and please take a look.

TT: Almanac

"The topical is poison."

Flannery O'Connor, letter to Betty Hester, Sept. 1, 1963