Terry Teachout's Blog, page 231

TT: It was twenty years ago today

Time falls away when I visit my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., though not because Smalltown is in any way behind the times. (No place in America is behind the times--network TV has seen to that.) Rather, it's because I slip slightly out of sync with my big-city routine each time I come here. So far, this trip has been no exception. Not only do I have no deadlines to hit, but in order to check my e-mail, I have to hop in my rented car and drive to one of the three fast-food joints out by the highway that are equipped with free wi-fi. This has the relaxing effect of cutting me off from the ceaseless hum and buzz of New York, and it also puts me in touch with things I wouldn't have encountered in my unpeaceable urban cocoon.

On Sunday I woke up at eight, drove to Burger King, and booted up my MacBook to see what was going on in the world. As I sipped orange juice and downloaded my e-mail, I heard playing in the background a song from Stephen Stills' Manassas, an album that I hadn't thought about, much less listened to, since high school. (Did Stephen Stills ever expect to become Muzak?) It instantly put me in mind of myself when young, sitting in my bedroom and flailing away at my twelve-string guitar, trying as best as I could to master the complicated guitar licks that I gleaned from the albums I bought each week with my carefully hoarded allowance.

As I drove home, I saw a blood-red cardinal perched on a fence post, and marveled at the gaudy sight. The only birds I see in Manhattan are pigeons, which says more about me than it does about Manhattan. I almost never notice things there. Instead, I think about the next thing: the next deadline, the next appointment, the next show I have to review. Not so in Smalltown, where I have time to look at what's around me instead of what's in my head.

Because I grew up in Smalltown, much of what's around me makes me think of my youth, something I don't often do when I'm in New York. Each time I open the front door of my mother's house, for instance, I can see at the end of the block the elementary school that I attended a half-century ago, and if it's recess time on a weekday, I can also hear hundreds of children gleefully yelling their heads off. Fifty years after the fact, I know that Matthews Elementary School was designed in the prairie-hugging manner of Frank Lloyd Wright, and that incongruously worldly fact makes me smile. Back then all I knew was that recess was the time of day I liked least, the hour when I had to pretend to enjoy playing games. If only I could have pretended that I was good at them! Left to my own devices, I would have been more than happy to spend recess sitting at my desk with my nose firmly planted in a book.

In 1991 I published a memoir of my childhood and youth. It contains the following passage:

The bald facts of a big city, its tall buildings and storied landmarks, give it a surface glamour that needs no explaining. A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself.

It doesn't seem possible that I published that book--my first book--twenty years ago. Much has happened to me since then, far more than I ever thought possible, some of it hurtful but most of it lovely and amazing. Among other things, I've practiced my craft on a near-daily basis, and I hope that I write better now than I did then. Yet I continue to stand by that passage, for it seems to me to embody a fundamental truth about what it feels like to return home to the place where you grew up.

I wouldn't want to be a child again, much less a teenager, but I'm glad to see the past all around me each time I come back to Smalltown for a visit. It reminds me of who I am and where I come from, and those are precious things to know.

TT: Getting Follies right

In today's Wall Street Journal I cheer loudly for the new Kennedy Center revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies . Here's an excerpt.

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Of all the major postwar musicals, "Follies" may be the hardest to revive successfully. Not only was it one of the largest-scaled Broadway shows to come along prior to the Era of Falling Chandeliers, but the subject matter of "Follies," a caustic study of two middle-aged marriages gone sour, is disturbing in a way likely to put off casual dinner-and-a-show theatergoers. Factor in Stephen Sondheim's magnificent score, which is too musically complex to be done well by most theater companies and too popular in style to be done at all by most opera houses, and you've got a recipe for obscurity.

Yet "Follies" somehow keeps on getting done, albeit not often, and each production is a magnet for Mr. Sondheim's ardent fans, who will travel as far as necessary to see a performance, be it good, bad or indifferent. So it is great and glorious news indeed that the Kennedy Center's new revival, whose near-ideal cast includes Bernadette Peters and Jan Maxwell, is not just good but superlative....

One of the signal achievements of this "Follies" is that it succeeds in untangling each and every strand of the show's knotty plot. Most of the credit belongs to Eric Schaeffer, the director, whose Signature Theatre has produced more Sondheim revivals than any other regional theater company in America. Mr. Schaeffer is clearly unafraid of the darkness of "Follies," so much so that the first act is bitter enough to sting. Yet he and Warren Carlyle, the choreographer, just as clearly revel in the richness of the knowing pastiche songs with which Mr. Sondheim evokes the popular music of the pre-rock era. It helps that they were given a budget big enough to produce "Follies" on a grand scale--and to hire a top-flight set designer, Broadway's Derek McLane, with enough imagination to make the most of the materials at hand.

The result is a "Follies" that is superior in every way to the lackluster, ill-sung 2001 Broadway revival....


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Read the whole thing here .

This rare home movie shot during a performance of the original 1971 Broadway production of Follies (with an overdubbed soundtrack recorded directly from the production soundboard) shows the transition to the second-act "Loveland" sequence. The set was designed by Boris Aronson:

TT: Almanac

"It was a yawn without beginning or end, a yawn as endless as a Wagner melody."

Milan Kundera, Immortality (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

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 Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 23, 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)

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes July 17, 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)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

IN CHICAGO:

• The Front Page (comedy, PG-13, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

• Porgy and Bess (operatic musical, PG-13, extended through July 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (comedy, PG-13, closes June 12, reviewed here)

• A Minister's Wife (serious musical, G, far too complicated for children, closes June 12, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:

• Life of Riley (serious comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"I wish you had read more books. The foundation must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books. But they must be brought to the test of real life."

Samuel Johnson, in conversation with James Boswell (Boswell, journal entry, Apr. 16, 1775, courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence )

TT: Almanac

"Too much can be read into an artist's biography. I was not immune. In fact, I'd made rather a career of it. History books love these kinds of necessary development. Schoenberg's story (and its ghoulish fictional alternative) could support a biographical argument about his work one way or the other. The jigsaw fits together easily enough: forget the pieces left in the box."

Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

TT: Snapshot

Peggy Lee sings "When the World Was Young" on The Judy Garland Show in 1963:



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

TT: Into the woods

In theory, Mrs. T and I divide our time between New York City and an old farmhouse deep in the woods near Storrs, a college town located in the quiet corner of Connecticut. Alas, this theory has taken a beating of late. We flew down to Florida in January so that I could put in my annual stint as a scholar-in-residence at Rollins College , our new home away from home, and I didn't set foot in Storrs again for the better part of five months. No sooner did I return to Manhattan than I got stuck on Broadway, reviewing show after show, and in Philadelphia, seeing Danse Russe onto the stage. Not until Memorial Day was I able to pack a bag, rent a car, drive to northeast Connecticut, and rejoin Mrs. T at our little place on Chaffeeville Road.

New York is...well, it is what it is and then some, and if that's what you want, you know what to do. I've lived there for a quarter-century and find it hugely stimulating. Most of the time I love catching cabs and sitting on the aisle and seeing my beloved friends whenever I please. But regular readers of this blog don't need to be reminded that I'm a small-town boy from way back, and New York, for all its self-evident splendors, does have a sneaky way of grinding you down.

Not so Storrs, which is as tranquil as a cloud study by Constable, so much so that longtime residents not infrequently refer to the town as "Snores," sometimes affectionately and sometimes wryly. Mrs. T, as it happens, was born near Storrs and moved back to her old home town many years later, and when I visited her for the first time five years ago, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time there as I could.

I sleep better in Storrs, flinging my bedroom window open to hear the gentle sounds of the night, and I write better, too, no doubt because of the near-complete lack of opportunities for distraction. In New York I have to be constantly on guard in order to get anything done. In Storrs, by contrast, I can sit down at my desk secure in the knowledge that nobody is likely to bother me.

Needless to say, I didn't plan to spend the whole spring in Manhattan, and by the time I finally managed to hit the road on Monday, I was well and truly frazzled, in part because I'd spent virtually all of Sunday writing a 2,500-word essay from scratch. But no sooner did I cross the state line than I felt my cares melting away, and when I pulled into our driveway, smelled the deep-green scent of the meadow across the way, and heard the neighborhood rooster, who has the confusing but endearing habit of crowing not at sunrise but whenever he pleases, I knew I was home again.

I hasten to point out that I'm not--repeat, not--on vacation. I have to write and file two Wall Street Journal columns this week, and once they're done, I have plenty of other work to do before we go back to New York on Friday to see the Mint Theater Company 's revival of Rachel Crothers' A Little Journey. But I don't have to start writing until Wednesday, so Mrs. T and I plan to take today off. We're going to sleep late, have lunch at the Vanilla Bean Café , then go for a nice long drive to nowhere in particular. Come evening we'll eat a home-cooked supper, curl up on the couch, and watch a movie.

That sounds to me like the best of all possible days, spent in the company of the best of all possible wives. So if you'll excuse me, I've got plenty of nothing to do, and I need to get started.

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Mildred Bailey and the Delta Rhythm Boys sing Alec Wilder's "It's So Peaceful in the Country" in 1941:

TT: Almanac

"Any book born of a grudge is built on sand."

Wesley Stace, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

TT: Almanac

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy