Terry Teachout's Blog, page 22

Snapshot: Albert Schweitzer plays Bach in Africa

Albert Schweitzer practices Bach on the pedal piano at his hospital in Africa:



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

Almanac: Anthony Powell on the committed man

"His reactions placed him more and more as a recognisable type, spending much of his time in boredom and loneliness, yet in some way inhibited from taking in anything relevant about other people: at home only with 'causes.'"

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

Oasis

I'm flying back to New York on Thursday after a month and a half in Florida. I haven't been on vacation--nothing like it--but my stay wasn't exactly frenzied, either. Everything will change, however, as soon as I get off the plane. Not only must I grapple simultaneously with a snowstorm, a string of press previews and deadlines, and the inescapable turmoil of the fast-approaching opening night of Satchmo at the Waldorf , whose first public preview performance takes place on Saturday, but I'll also be looking after three houseguests this weekend. My life, in other words, will soon be turned upside down and shaken vigorously, and I'm already feeling the weight of what's to come.

In order to calm myself, I went this afternoon to Matisse as Printmaker , a touring exhibition of sixty-three aquatints, color prints, etchings, linocuts, lithographs, and monotypes that is up at Rollins College's Cornell Fine Arts Museum through March 16. I was exceedingly frazzled when I walked into the museum, but within a minute or two I had already started to decompress, and an hour later I was myself again.

I've loved Matisse's sensuous art ever since I first took an interest in painting, but never before have I fully appreciated this oft-quoted, oft-misunderstood remark of his:

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter--a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Art, of course, does many and various things. I doubt, though, that most people who have occasion to reflect on its myriad powers typically think first of its ability to console, to bring serenity to a troubled soul. I was in need of consolation today, and Matisse gave it to me.

Quite a few of the works on paper included in "Matisse as Printmaker" will be familiar to those who know his work well, but one of them, a drypoint called "The Pianist Alfred Cortot," was new to me. Cortot is one of my all-time favorite musicians, a recreative genius--no lesser word is strong enough--whose recorded performances of the music of Chopin, Schumann, Debussy, and Ravel are almost as important to me as the pieces themselves. He was also, I regret to say, a collabo who served as Vichy's High Commissioner of Fine Arts and played in Nazi Germany, and that despicable fact will taint the memory of his artistry to the end of time. Yet the artistry itself was and is beyond question, and it is fascinating to see what Matisse made of Cortot's characterful face in 1927, long before he chose to break bread with Hitler's henchmen.

Would that art existed in a realm beyond such temporal horrors, but it does not and cannot. Yet it is still capable of lifting us out of the world, out of ourselves, and that is what "Matisse as Printmaker" did for me: it gave me solace and brought me a bit of peace on a troubled afternoon.

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Alfred Cortot plays Ravel's Sonatine:

Lookback: Woody Allen's Pygmalion complex

From 2004, some thoughts on Woody Allen's fixations:

On the surface, Annie Hall purports to tell the tale of how his peculiarities alienate the woman he loves, but its true subject matter is how their relationship actually makes Diane Keaton a better person. I suppose this must have been the first on-screen manifestation of Allen's Pygmalion complex, which in Manhattan would explicitly reveal itself as an obsession with malleable young women. The trouble with such fixations, of course, is that even though the obsessed one grows inexorably older, the objects of his affection stay the same age--and we all know where that leads....

Read the whole thing here .

Almanac: Anthony Powell on teasing

"I found later that she was indeed what is called 'a tease,' perhaps the only outward indication that her inner life was not altogether happy; since there is no greater sign of innate misery than a love of teasing."

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

Countdown

The first public preview of the off-Broadway production of Satchmo at the Waldorf takes place on Saturday night at the Westside Theatre. The posters are already up in the lobby, and I'll be flying back to New York on Thursday to take part in the final rehearsals. I'm told by my colleagues that the show is in excellent shape, but it's the public that has the last word, and five days from now they'll be speaking it for the first time.

How do I feel? A bit distracted, sometimes mildly queasy, but mostly pretty calm. This is, after all, the fifth staging of Satchmo to hit the boards since the play was premiered in Orlando three years ago. Of course we've yet to do it in New York, but while the stakes are higher this time around, the experience is pretty much the same--so far.

Perhaps I'll feel differently come Saturday, or on March 4, our official opening night. Perhaps I'll be vomiting backstage, the way Moss Hart always did before a show of his opened. "I have been sick in the men's room every opening night of a play of mine in theatres all over the country," he confessed in Act One, his autobiography. That strikes me as highly unlikely--I can't remember the last time I threw up--but the fact that my first play is about to be produced in New York is even less likely, so you never know.

In any case, I'm not really excited yet, though I'm sure I will be by week's end. What I am is ready. I'm ready to find out how New Yorkers respond to Satchmo at the Waldorf, and to make whatever changes seem justified by their response. To be sure, I'm not expecting to do anything drastic to the script, but once again, you never know.

Mainly, though, I just want to see the curtain go up (figuratively speaking--we don't have one). I started working on Satchmo in 2010. I don't know whether it's as good as it can be, but four years later, I suspect it's just about as good as I can make it. The rest will be up to John Douglas Thompson and Gordon Edelstein--and to you. Come see what we've wrought, and cheer if you feel like it. I hope you do.

Just because: Art Carney plays Kaufman and Hart

An excerpt from a TV production of You Can't Take It With You, directed by Paul Bogart and starring Art Carney, Howard Hesseman, and Jean Stapleton. This adaptation of the stage play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman was originally telecast on CBS in 1979:



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

Almanac: Anthony Powell on egotism

"His manner of asking personal questions was of that kind not uncommonly to be found which is completely divorced from any interest in the answer. He was always prepared to embark on a lengthy cross-examination of almost anyone he might meet, at the termination of which--apart from such details as might chance to concern himself--he had absorbed no more about the person interrogated than he knew at the outset of the conversation. At the same time this process seemed somehow to gratify his own egotism."

Anthony Powell, At Lady Molly's

See me, hear me (cont'd)

If you live in the vicinity of Winter Park, Florida, I'm taking part tonight in a performance of excerpts from Duke Ellington's sacred concerts that will be presented by John Sinclair, Chuck Archard, and a chorus and big band put together by Rollins College's Department of Music. In addition to supplying the narration, I'll be speaking about Ellington's religious beliefs and the history of his three full-evening sacred concerts, which were premiered in 1965, 1968, and 1973.

The performance kicks off at 7:30 at Winter Park's First Congregational Church, 225 S. Interlachen Ave. For more information, go here .

Three's a crowd

In today's Wall Street Journal I review a regional revival, Palm Beach Dramaworks' Old Times , and the Broadway transfer of a new play, Bronx Bombers . Here's an excerpt.

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One of the funniest characters in "Tootsie" is a scraggly-looking avant-garde playwright who sums up his goal in life as follows: "I like it when a guy comes up to me a week later and says, 'Hey, man, I saw your play...what happened?" Many people have been known to come away from the plays of Harold Pinter asking the same thing. It's not that Mr. Pinter's characters utter nonsense--their conversations typically sound like commonplace small talk--but they habitually talk past one another, and you soon realize that what they're saying and what they mean are irreconcilably at odds.

And just what do they mean? In "Old Times," a 1971 Pinter three-hander that has been revived to outstanding effect by Palm Beach Dramaworks, it's unsettlingly hard to know. The situation seems clear enough at first: Deeley (Craig Wroe) and Kate (Shannon Koob), a fortyish married couple, are entertaining a houseguest named Anna (Pilar Witherspoon) who knew Kate 20 years ago. Were they lovers? Possibly. Are Anna and Deeley now competing for the strangely passive Kate's attention? Definitely. Beyond that, though, all is ambiguity, and critics have put forth varying interpretations of the situation portrayed in "Old Times," some of which are peculiar in the extreme. (Maybe Kate and Anna are really the same person! Maybe they're all dead!)

Mr. Pinter never tips his hand, and you need not entertain wild-eyed theories about the "meaning" of "Old Times" to relish the fast-mounting intricacies of the human chess match that is being played out before your eyes. Indeed, one of the best things about this production, stealthily directed by J. Barry Lewis, is that it keeps you guessing all the way to the end--and beyond....

Tony Ponturo and Fran Kirmser, the producers of "Bronx Bombers," have cooked up between them what appears to be a brand-new theatrical genre: the organized-sports docudrama. Working in tandem with playwright-director Eric Simonson, they've now brought three such plays to Broadway. The first one, "Lombardi," which opened there in 2010 and had a 271-performance run, was a smartly crafted piece of commercial entertainment that was more than well-made enough to appeal to playgoers who, like me, knew next to nothing about Vince Lombardi or the Green Bay Packers. Not so "Magic/Bird," an evasive exercise in basketball-themed hagiography that paid tedious homage to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and closed up shop after a month.

"Bronx Bombers" falls somewhere between those goalposts. An evening-long paean to Yogi Berra (played by Peter Scolari, lately of A.R. Gurney's "Family Furniture") and the New York Yankees, it has a pretty good first act, but stalls out after intermission with a dramatically static dream sequence in which Berra and his wife Carmen (Tracy Shayne) entertain a tableful of great Yankees of the past. If you don't know who Elston Howard and Thurman Munson were, you'll find the plot (such as it is) hard to follow, at times to the point of opaqueness....

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Read the whole thing here .