Terry Teachout's Blog, page 241

TT: Snapshot

Paul Lynde, June Carroll, and Alice Ghostley in a very rare kinescope of excerpts from New Faces of 1952 , originally telecast in 1960. The songs are "Guess Who I Saw Today" and "Boston Beguine":



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

TT: Almanac

"Technology never changed anything except to make us more efficient at being who we were all along."

Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl (Mar. 29, 2011)

TT: Just because

Steely Dan plays "Peg" live in 2003:

TT: Double-header

Danse Russe will be premiered in Philadelphia next Thursday, and Paul Moravec and I are beating the bushes to spread the word about opening night. This afternoon we'll be talking about our second opera with John Schaefer on my favorite radio show, WNYC's Soundcheck. By a strange and wonderful coincidence, the first half of the program will be devoted to a debate about the merits of Steely Dan's Aja , one of the few pop albums of my college days to which I still listen regularly and with the utmost pleasure. Afterward, Paul and I will talk about and play excerpts from Danse Russe.

Soundcheck airs between two and three p.m. ET. To listen live via terrestrial radio, tune to 93.9 on your FM dial (no static at all!). To listen via streaming audio, go here .

TT: Almanac

"You're only as good as your last compliment."

Chelsea G. Summers (posted on Twitter, Apr. 4, 2011)

TT: The sound of spring

The Bill Evans Trio plays "Spring Is Here":

TT: Why doesn't my heart go dancing?

Time was when I prided myself on ignoring the weather. Rain or shine, cold or hot, I rose above it, paying no psychic attention to the outside world. Or at least I pretended to pay no attention--and very often I even fooled myself.

In recent years, however, I've discovered, somewhat to my embarrassment, that the weather matters to me, and having spent good-sized chunks of the past two winters in Florida, I now find that it matters a lot. Fall remains my favorite season, but I like sunshine, and when I returned to New York from Winter Park last month, the near-complete absence of it sent my general frame of mind into a low-grade tailspin. So when the sun came briefly out last week and spring declared itself to be here de facto, I rejoiced.

Given the fact that I've just finished writing a libretto for an opera about the making of The Rite of Spring, this would seem to be a perfectly logical thing to have done. But for the moment, Danse Russe is going on without me. Yes, it's being rehearsed in Philadelphia, but I'm completely tied up with Broadway press previews, and it won't be until next Monday's piano dress rehearsal that I'll finally be able to get out of town and see what Andrew Kurtz and Center City Opera Theater have wrought.

Don't take this as indifference. I'm enormously eager to see what Danse Russe looks like on stage--but for the moment there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I can't get out of New York for anything short of a life-or-death crisis, and the opening of my second opera, sad (or not) to say, doesn't qualify. So far as I know, everything is going just fine down in Philadelphia, and my presence isn't required. Paul Moravec and I put the opera through an elaborate workshop process, and we hope we fumigated it enough to kill all the bugs. No doubt we'll need to make some last-minute fixes, just as we did for the premiere of The Letter in 2009, but my guess is that if we do, they'll be small.

So here I sit, thankful that spring has made its belated appearance and wishing that I were at today's rehearsal. Instead I'm writing about a Broadway show that I didn't much like and keeping one eye on the clock, since I have to go down to Paul's Upper West Side Apartment and tape a radio interview about Danse Russe later today. Life is what it is, and it rarely works out precisely as we'd like--which is no reason not to be basically happy with most of it, and wildly happy with some of it. Just because I wish I were somewhere else doesn't mean I'm not glad to be here.

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Tom Lehrer sings about the coming of spring:

TT: The case of the disappearing duo

The Criterion Collection has just put out superbly produced home-video versions of Topsy-Turvy , Mike Leigh's wonderful 1999 movie about the making of The Mikado, and Victor Schertzinger's fascinating 1939 film version of The Mikado as performed by members of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, for whom the operetta was originally written in 1885. These releases are the subject of my "Sightings" column in today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

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Why are the comic operettas of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan so rarely seen in fully professional productions nowadays? "H.M.S. Pinafore," "The Gondoliers," "The Mikado" and "The Pirates of Penzance" are immortal masterpieces whose musicality and stageworthiness have been proven time and again. Opera companies mount them from time to time, most recently when Chicago's Lyric Opera gave the deluxe treatment to "The Mikado" in December. Yet their popularity has diminished sharply in this country, so much so that I've had only one occasion to review a Gilbert and Sullivan revival by an important American theater company, when the Utah Shakespearean Festival did "Pinafore" in 2006.

I can't tell you why G & S (as they're known to their fans) have fallen on such hard times, but I'm delighted to report that you can now relish them in your living room....

"Topsy-Turvy" is the smartest backstage movie ever made, a deeply knowing fictional study of how a theatrical production takes shape. The acting, especially that of Jim Broadbent as the irascible, anxiety-ridden Gilbert, is as convincing as it is possible to be....

The 1939 film version of "The Mikado" is noteworthy in part because it, too, is so well sung and played. (The conductor, Geoffrey Toye, had extensive experience performing the G & S operettas in the theater.) But the most remarkable thing about the film is that it preserves a now-dead theatrical tradition. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which closed its doors in 1982 after a century of continuous activity, prided itself on performing the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan in a manner consistent with the intentions of Gilbert himself, who staged all of their premieres. Though the "Mikado" film is not a literal record of a stage performance, much of it is closely based on the way that the company had been doing "The Mikado" ever since it opened more than a half-century earlier....

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Read the whole thing here .

"Three Little Maids from School Are We," as performed in the 1939 film of The Mikado:

TT: Almanac

"When I'm in a room where nobody knows me I know I'm in the real world."

Virgil Thomson (quoted in Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle)

TT: The fine art of tearjerking

Once again, I'm climbing out on a limb and panning--kind of, sort of--what I suspect is going to be the popular favorite of the current Broadway season, Lincoln Center Theater's transfer of the London production of War Horse . Here's an excerpt.

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"War Horse" was a big hit in London, and it will be a big hit at New York's Lincoln Center Theater. It can't fail, and it shouldn't. Never again will you see such visually poetic, technically self-assured craftsmanship as is on near-continuous display in this large-cast stage version of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 children's novel about the adventures of a horse called Joey--played onstage by a life-sized puppet--who is sold to the British cavalry in 1914 and shipped to France, where he is ridden into battle and lost behind enemy lines. Anyone who fails to respond to "War Horse" on the level of pure spectacle simply doesn't like theater.

Unfortunately, there's a catch, and it, too, is big: "War Horse" is the most shameless piece of tearjerking to hit Broadway since "The Sound of Music." If that doesn't stop you in your tracks, buy your tickets now. Otherwise, read on and be forewarned.

The synopsis of "War Horse" with which this review began is all you need to know about the events of the play, which is a straight-off-the-rack pageant of sibling rivalry, youthful rebellion, crazy courage and folk songs. Since critical etiquette forbids the revelation of surprises, even when they're not surprising, suffice it to say that what happens thereafter is a cross between "Black Beauty" and "Saving Private Ryan." Small wonder that Steven Spielberg is turning "War Horse" into a movie--only without the puppetry. That, however, will be like performing "La Bohème" without the music, since the puppetry is the point of the show. All of the animals in "War Horse" are "played" by puppets whose operators are visible to the audience, and it is this deliberate renunciation of conventional theatrical illusion that enables the poetry. You know that Joey and his fellow horses are mechanical dummies, but they are manipulated with such uncanny sensitivity that words like "realism" and "naturalism" quickly fade into irrelevance....

So...what's not to like? The fundamental flaw of "War Horse" is that Nick Stafford, who wrote the script "in association" (that's how the credit reads) with South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company, has taken a book that was written for children and tried to give it the expressive weight of a play for adults. Not surprisingly, Mr. Morpurgo's plot can't stand the strain. Dramatic situations that work perfectly well in the context of the book play like Hollywood clichés onstage....

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Read the whole thing here .