Terry Teachout's Blog, page 191

TT: Almanac

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

TT: They don't make Christmas specials like they used to (III)

Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory, starring Geraldine Page, directed by Frank Perry, and originally telecast on ABC Stage 67 in 1966. Capote is the narrator and wrote the teleplay:



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

TT: The sound of hope

Laura Newell plays the solo harp interlude from Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols:

TT: The best theater of 2011

In today's Wall Street Journal I talk about the shows, directors, performers, and theater companies that made the strongest and most favorable impressions on me in the year just past.

Among those mentioned:

• Best new play: Stephen Adly Guirgis' The Motherf**ker with the Hat

• Best revival: Classic Stage Company's The Cherry Orchard

• Best musical revivals: Porgy and Bess at Chicago's Court Theatre and Show Boat at Connecticut's Goodspeed Musicals

• Best Shakespeare revival: Amanda Dehnert's Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

• Performer of the year: Chicago's Carrie Coon

To find out what and who else delighted me in 2011, go here .

* * *

Carrie Coon talks about the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which she appeared earlier this year. The production, directed by Pam MacKinnon and also starring Tracy Letts, is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in the fall of 2012:

TT: Almanac

"I was almost killed once in a car accident. I was drunk and I ran off the side of the road and I turned over four times. They took me out of that car for dead, but I lived. And I prayed last night to know why I lived and she died, but I got no answer to my prayers. I still don't know why she died and I lived. I don't know the answer to nothing. Not a blessed thing. I don't know why I wandered out to this part of Texas drunk and you took me in and pitied me and helped me to straighten out and married me. Why, why did this happen? Is there a reason that happened? And Sonny's father died in the war. My daughter killed in an automobile accident. Why? You see, I don't trust happiness. I never did, I never will."

Horton Foote, screenplay for Tender Mercies

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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Apr. 29, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Chinglish (comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Apr. 29, reviewed here)

• Follies (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 22, reviewed here)

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, reviewed here)

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)

• Stick Fly (serious comedy, 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)

• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, extended through Jan. 29, reviewed here)

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

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Cherry Orchard (drama, G, too serious for children, extended through Jan. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Neighbourhood Watch (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Jan. 1, reviewed here)

TT: They don't make Christmas specials like they used to (II)

An extremely rare kinescope of the opening of Mr. Charles Laughton, a Christmas-eve special originally telecast on NBC in 1951 and based on Laughton's one-man stage shows:

TT: From my mailbox

A reader writes:

O.K., so you didn't like Christopher Hitchens. And you're certainly entitled to your views about speaking frankly about the recently departed. (And you're right--Hitchens would have agreed with you on this.)

But did you have to be so self-aggrandizing, as usual? Who cares whether you liked him or not? For you, of all people, to call him "vain" is absurd. You write about yourself far more often than Hitchens wrote about himself.

This is clearly not a fellow who should be reading blogs!

TT: Almanac

"A comedy is the form in which the unsayable is said and that, thus, for a moment, breaks the corrosive cycle of repression."

David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business

TT: Snapshot

The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, sings Peter Warlock's "Bethlehem Down":



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