Terry Teachout's Blog, page 261

TT: Landmark

I've spent the past week on Florida's Sanibel Island working on Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington. Yesterday morning I finished writing the second chapter, in which I describe the first eighteen years of Ellington's life. Here are the last two paragraphs. I hope you like them!

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The patterns of Duke Ellington's life and personality were now firmly set, and they looked quite a bit like the complicated shape of life on U Street, the neighborhood in Washington, D.C., where he grew up. The hours he had spent rubbing shoulders with ragtime pianists, Pullman porters, petty thieves, and card sharps in Frank Holliday's poolroom had introduced him to a way of living far removed from the middle-class world into which he had been born. To the end of his life he recalled with undiminished relish the lessons he learned there: "Interns used to come in, who could cure colds. And handwriting experts who would enjoy copying somebody's signature on a check, go out and cash it, and bring back the money to show the cats in the poolroom what artists they were. They didn't need the money. They did it for the kicks. There were also a couple of pickpockets around, so smooth that when they went to New York they were not allowed in the subway. At heart, they were all great artists."

Yet Ellington would never turn his back on the other lessons in life that he had learned from J.E., Daisy, and their genteel neighbors. He regarded them as equally valid, just as he learned as much from listening to "the schooled musicians who had been to the conservatory" as he did from the untrained pianists whose homemade methods he emulated: "Everybody seemed to get something out of the other's playing--the ear cats loved what the schooled guys did, and the schooled guys, with fascination, would try what the ear cats were doing." It did not occur to him that his own elegant carriage was inconsistent with his racial identity, any more than that the authenticity of his music might somehow be compromised by its urbanity. That, he knew, bespoke a constrictingly narrow notion of "blackness." Throughout his life he delighted in pointing out that Harlem "has always had more churches than cabarets," and the composer of Black, Brown and Beige needed no one to remind him that black people came in all shades. "Once I asked him what he considered a typical Negro piece among his compositions," a white friend recalled. "He paused a moment before he came up with 'In a Sentimental Mood.' I protested a bit and said I thought that was a very sophisticated white kind of song and people were usually surprised when they learned it was by him. 'Ah,' he said, 'that's because you don't know what it's like to be a Negro.'"

Never did he harbor the slightest doubt of his own knowledge of what it was like to be a Negro, or his ability to turn that knowledge into music that gave voice to his people's anguish--and aspiration.

TT: Just because

Miles Davis and the Gil Evans Orchestra play Dave Brubeck's "The Duke":

TT: Almanac

"Warming up before a concert is like doing breathing exercises before dying."

Gregor Piatigorsky (quoted in Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette, My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music)

TT: Tune in tomorrow

I'll be making my debut tomorrow night on CUNY-TV's Theater Talk, accompanied by fellow drama critics John Simon and Jacques le Sourd. We'll be talking with Michael Riedel of the New York Post about the best and worst Broadway shows of 2010. Bombs will be thrown!

For more information, or to view the episode on line, go here .

TT: Just because

Hadda Brooks sings "I Hadn't Anyone Till You" in Nicholas Ray's "In a Lonely Place":

TT: The kids are all wrong

I spent the first night of 2011 seeing a very bad off-Broadway revival of Dracula for The Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt from today's review.

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How is it that vampires and zombies (not to mention serial killers, their postmodern cousins) are so hot nowadays? No doubt our undiminished interest in the blood-suckers and flesh-eaters among us says something profound, disturbing and transgressive about American culture, but I'm damned if I know what it is, perhaps because I hopped off that particular train when "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" closed up shop. I have yet to see a single installment of "Twilight," "True Blood" or "The Vampire Diaries," nor do I plan to do so anytime soon. I did, however, snag a ticket to the new Off-Broadway "Dracula," partly because the ever-excellent George Hearn is playing Van Helsing, Buffy's spiritual great-grandfather, and partly because Thora Birch, who was so fine in "Ghost World" and "American Beauty," was supposed to play Lucy Seward, the chief recipient of the sanguinary favors of the Transylvanian count (Michel Altieri).

Ms. Birch, however, got canned when the show was in rehearsal and has since been replaced by Emily Bridges, her understudy. Now that I've seen the play she left behind, I incline to think that she got lucky, for this "Dracula" is a limply staged, unconvincingly acted mess....

You won't have any trouble figuring out the high concept of this production: Except for Mr. Hearn and Timothy Jerome, who plays Lucy's father, everyone in the case is very young and mostly very pretty. The goal, I assume, is to appeal to the teen-and-tween set, but the producers have neglected to hire any familiar faces and favored looks over experience. As a result, some of the performances are ludicrously amateurish. I won't name any names--Paul Alexander, the show's near-unknown, painfully ungifted director, may be the guilty party here--but I heard the chilling sound of unintended laughter at several points in the second act....

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Read the whole thing here .

A scene from the 1979 film version of Dracula, starring Frank Langella:

TT: Head of the Nice Guys Club

Like everybody else with a more than passing interest in musical comedy, I read Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat with the closest attention. I'm surprised that none of the book's many reviewers, so far as I can tell, seems to have mentioned the obvious fact (obvious to me, anyway) that it was inspired by Ira Gershwin's Lyrics on Several Occasions .

In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I compare the two books. The differences between them are exceedingly revealing! Here's an excerpt.

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One of the reasons why "Finishing the Hat," Stephen Sondheim's annotated volume of his song lyrics, has attracted so much attention is because he takes potshots at certain of his colleagues, most notably Noël Coward and Lorenz Hart, the second of whom he calls "the laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists." Some people have been upset by his candor, but I confess to relishing it--though not because I necessarily agree with anything he has to say about the parties in question. Most creative artists of Mr. Sondheim's stature, after all, have strong opinions about their peers, and such opinions, whether positive or negative, don't have to be right to be interesting. To learn that Renoir believed Degas to be the only great sculptor since the 13th century, or that Benjamin Britten loathed the music of Beethoven and Brahms, is to learn something important about Renoir and Britten.

It may be, of course, that one of the things we learn from "Finishing the Hat" is that Mr. Sondheim isn't a very nice person. I wouldn't know--I've never met him--but I doubt that it matters much in the long run whether he's nice or not. Still, I wouldn't go nearly so far as Bernard Herrmann, who wrote the music for such classic films as "Citizen Kane" and "Psycho" and who once told an astonished interviewer that he had no use whatsoever for nice guys....

To which I need only respond with two words: Ira Gershwin.

George Gershwin's older brother and longtime collaborator was known on Broadway and in Hollywood for being an unusually agreeable person. In "No Minor Chords," his 1991 memoir, André Previn recalled that Gershwin was "so unfailingly kind-hearted and soft-spoken that his cronies dubbed him President of the Nice Guys Club." He was also one of the very best lyricists in the business, and in 1959 he published his own annotated volume of his lyrics called "Lyrics on Several Occasions."...

As the structure of "Finishing the Hat" suggests, Mr. Sondheim is closely familiar with "Lyrics on Several Occasions," so much so that he uses the book as a stick with which to beat its author: "Gershwin talks about his lyrics with an ease I miss in most of the examples." I know what Mr. Sondheim means--up to a point....

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Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"Some people take, some people get took. And they know they're getting took and there's nothing they can do about it."

Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, screenplay for The Apartment

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, extended through 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 NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

GOING ON HIATUS ON BROADWAY:

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, on hiatus Jan. 9-31, then open through Feb. 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

TT: The land of lost content

Mrs. T and I took a sunset cruise off Sanibel Island today. This is one of the things we saw: