Terry Teachout's Blog, page 260

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• 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:

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 13, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

TT: Margaret Whiting, R.I.P.

TT: Almanac

"The business of the dramatist is to keep out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene-shifter."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Milton"

TT: Out of joint

I'm in suspended animation, sort of. I was supposed to fly last night from Sarasota, Florida, to New York's Kennedy Airport, but my flight was canceled in the afternoon and rescheduled for this morning. Later in the day my new flight was canceled, leading to a mildly amusing absurdity: JetBlue then rescheduled me to arrive in New York at 11:32 Thursday morning and depart again for Sarasota at 12:18 that same afternoon.

Not that it mattered, since I'd needed to get to Manhattan in time to see two plays on Wednesday, a matinee and an evening performance, and meet with a stage director in between shows. The canceled flights thus took away the point of my trip, so I decided to be sensible and sit tight in Sarasota for two extra days.

And what am I doing here? Nothing out of the ordinary. Last night I wrote another chunk of the third chapter of my Duke Ellington biography, on which I've been working since Mrs. T and I arrived in Florida last week. I got up this morning, ordered a room-service breakfast, knocked out my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and e-mailed it to New York. We're staying at a waterfront hotel, and though it's too brisk to swim, the sun is shining brightly, so the next thing on my agenda is a walk.

Needless to say, I'm going to keep on chipping away at the Ellington book while I'm here, but neither Mrs. T nor I has ever been to the Ringling Museum of Art , so an afternoon field trip may be in order. On Friday night we'll go to Asolo Rep's revival of Twelve Angry Men , which is why we came to Sarasota in the first place. The next day, weather permitting, I'll fly up to Philadelphia for the workshop performances of Danse Russe about which I posted earlier today.

I have, in short, plenty to do, but I'm still at loose ends. My life requires me to live by the clock, and it always throws me for a loop when that clock gets stopped, whatever the reason may be. Last week's vacation on Sanibel Island was part of a carefully wrought plan--seven days of relaxation--and so doing nothing seemed all right to me. Today, by contrast, I ought to be be tearing up and down the snowy streets of Manhattan, slipping and sliding from one appointment to the next. Instead I'm sitting in a hotel room in Sarasota, looking at the sun on the water and feeling vaguely guilty.

Such guilt, I suspect, is one of the curses of modernity: these days precious few of us know know how to turn loose the passing hours and let them go unregretted. Perhaps I'll feel better about their passing later today, and I already know I should regard it as an act of grace. For the moment, though, I can't shake off the nagging suspicion that I'm somehow to blame for their demise.

TT: Two giant steps

Danse Russe , my latest operatic collaboration with Paul Moravec, will be given two staged workshop performances this weekend, the first on Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware, and the second on Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia, where Center City Opera Theater will be giving the world premiere on April 28. This one-act opera is a backstage comedy about the making of The Rite of Spring, and Paul and I have been busily revising it ever since the first workshop performance in November. These latest performances are open to the public, and assuming that the sky doesn't fall again, stranding me somewhere in Florida, I'll be present at both of them.

For more information, go here .

TT: Snapshot

Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang play "Wild Cat" in King of Jazz:



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

TT: Almanac

"There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing the fiddle. In all other things we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing."

Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell, Life of Johnson)

TT: If you've got to be stranded...

...there are definitely worse places than Sarasota in January. This is the view from our hotel room:

TT: What I do for love (and money)

Mrs. T are packing our bags this morning on Florida's Sanibel Island. I won't soon forget what a blissful time we've had there, but if anything can put our happiness out of my mind, however temporarily, it's my schedule for the next seven days, which is more than a little bit crazy.

Later today we'll drive north to Sarasota to spend a few days catching up with Asolo Rep , whose revival of Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo made my Wall Street Journal best-of-2010 list . Unfortunately, there's a catch, which is that I have to drop Mrs. T off in Sarasota this afternoon and fly north to New York so that I can see two plays there on Wednesday, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Desert Cities . Then I'll fly back down to Sarasota to see Asolo's Twelve Angry Men--and then I'll fly back up to Philadelphia to attend a pair of staged workshop performances on Saturday and Sunday of Danse Russe, my new opera. I'll also be catching a play in Philly, the Arden Theatre revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten . The craziness is over a week from today, when I return to Florida and begin my latest residency at Rollins College's Winter Park Institute . Whew!

In case you're wondering, I've been watching the weather, and it looks like I'm going to get into New York tonight before the snow starts in earnest. My hope is that by the time I'm supposed to leave, the runways will be clear and I can fly back down to Florida without incident. We'll see--and so will you. In the meantime, don't expect to hear much of anything from me other than travel updates! This is, to put it mildly, one of those weeks....

TT: Almanac

"Bureaucracy forms a truly supranational freemasonry, with the same quirks, the same incalculable workings of the mind, and the same lack of logic."

Joseph Szigeti, With Strings Attached: Reminiscences and Reflections