Terry Teachout's Blog, page 19

Lookback: the limits of companionability

From 2004:

I like getting along with people--though I wouldn't pay any price for it. But the truth is that my inclination to companionability has never been put to anything like a severe test. I have good friends whose views I think silly, but none who seem to me downright evil (and I believe in the existence of evil). I sometimes wonder what I'd do if I were to learn that a friend of mine had committed a cold-blooded murder. I like to think that I wouldn't have befriended such a person in the first place, and that's probably true--but human nature is complicated enough that I can't say so with certainty....

Read the whole thing here .

Almanac: Moss Hart on laughter in the theater

"Laughter cannot be faked, no matter how much good will an audience has toward an author. For an audience, whether it consists of one person or one thousand, shortly becomes a valid one in spite of itself the moment the mechanism of listening starts to operate. Every author, unless he chooses to be willfully self-deluded, carries a Geiger counter in his inner ear that tells him quickly enough whether he has struck the false politeness of hollow laughter or the real thing. There is no mistaking it."

Moss Hart, Act One

Yeah, I know, it took me long enough...

...but I finally tore myself away from you-know-what long enough to completely update the Top Five and "Out of the Past" modules of the right-hand column with an all-new set of picks.

Take a look, click on the links, and enjoy yourself.

FILM

Living in Oblivion . Mrs. T and I recently treated ourselves to a viewing of Tom DiCillo's prize-winning low-budget 1995 indie flick about the making of (what else?) a low-budget indie flick. Two decades later, it remains one of the funniest and most knowing screen comedies ever made, with wonderfully well-judged performances by Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener. Whit Stillman loves it, and so will you (TT).

CD

Alec Wilder, The Octets 1938-47: Music for Lost Souls and Wounded Birds (Hep, two CDs, now available in the U.S.). The first CD reissue ever of the complete recordings of the Alec Wilder Octet, a studio-only ensemble that played instrumental miniatures in which Wilder fused jazz and classical music to utterly original and winsome effect. The forty-five tracks on this set also include contemporary recordings by other performers and ensembles, among them a group of Wilder-penned chamber-orchestra pieces conducted by none other than Frank Sinatra. I wrote the liner notes, which put the octet's recordings in historical perspective (TT).

HISTORY

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration . I only just got around to reading this Pulitzer-winning 2010 study of the Great Migration, in which Wilkerson talked to and looked at the complicated lives of three of the countless southern blacks who moved north in the '30s, '40s, and '50s to escape the nightmare of racism in the Deep South. It's not so much a piece of formal scholarship as an exercise in historically informed storytelling, but on that level it's a really remarkable piece of work, written with immense sensitivity and packed with a wealth of telling, near-novelistic detail. For once, the subtitle is no exaggeration: this really is an epic story (TT).

MUSICAL

A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder (Walter Kerr, 219 W. 48). A brilliantly effective musical-comedy adaptation of the same 1907 novel by Roy Horniman on which Kind Hearts and Coronets was also based, with Jefferson Mays giving a fabulous performance as the multiple murder victims whom Alec Guinness portrayed in the film (TT).

BOOK

Stephen Lloyd, Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (Boydell, out Mar. 20, now available for preorder). The first full-length biography of the jazz-influenced composer-conductor-critic who wrote Music Ho! and was--or should have been--England's Leonard Bernstein. If you only know him as the model for Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, this meticulously researched, superbly thorough biography will tell you the whole sad story (TT).

Tick-tock

No doubt you've heard more than enough from me about Satchmo at the Waldorf , which is currently in previews at New York's Westside Theatre and will open there next Tuesday, eight days from now. My excuse, if I need one, is that it's hard for me to think about anything else. It's a big deal when a writer's first play opens off Broadway--for the writer, anyway--and I'm finding it increasingly difficult to keep an even strain as the great day approaches.

Prior to last Friday I couldn't quite put my finger on the precise nature of the sensations that I've been experiencing. Then it hit me: I feel as though a loved one were undergoing surgery while I sit in the waiting room, waiting to find out whether she made it. Yes, John Douglas Thompson and Gordon Edelstein, the star and director of Satchmo at the Waldorf, are the best "doctors" in the world, and I trust them completely--but the fact remains that there's nothing more for me do. It's their show now.

I made a couple of minor changes to the text of Satchmo on Wednesday morning. Gordon staged them that same afternoon and John performed them in the evening. The three of us agreed afterward that they should stay in the show...and that's it for me. The show is now "frozen," meaning that what you see on stage this week is what you'll see on opening night. Yes, John continues to refine his performance--he'll do that throughout the run--but the play itself is now officially finished. All that remains is to read the reviews and see how we do at the box office. I'm still showing up at rehearsals, but only because I can't bear to be anywhere else.

It helps that I'm not taking time off from my day job. I saw three shows last week and will see two more this week, and I have three pieces to write, two for The Wall Street Journal and one for Commentary, between now and Thursday. Mrs. T returns from Florida on Wednesday, and my brother and sister-in-law are coming to New York this weekend to see a preview. On top of all that, John and I will be taping a Satchmo-related episode of Theater Talk on Friday afternoon.

In short, I've got plenty to keep me busy, for which I'm infinitely grateful. But it's still going to be a long, long week in the waiting room.

* * *

The Clyde Fitch Report , one of New York's most widely read theater blogs, interviewed me last week as part of its "Critical I" series of conversations with drama critics. The questions were excellent. To find out whether my answers were any good, go here and see for yourself.

Marc Myers of JazzWax asked me five sharp questions about Satchmo at the Waldorf over the weekend. Marc's questions, and my answers, are here .

CD

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Masterworks Broadway, two CDs). A complete performance of Edward Albee's now-classic 1964 play, performed by the entire original cast: Uta Hagen, Arthur Hill, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon. Originally produced for Columbia by Goddard Lieberson and taped four months after the Broadway premiere, this astonishing historical document has never been reissued in any format since its original release. Must listening for anyone who cares about American theater (TT).