Terry Teachout's Blog, page 37

TT: Almanac

"Derision or mockery always involves contempt and so is gravely sinful, so that theologians rightly hold mockery for the worst sin of the tongue we can commit against our neighbor."

St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

TT: Almanac

He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars

General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.

William Blake, "Jerusalem"

TT: Lookback

From 2003:

I've lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you'd think I'd have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday's immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world.

My cab swept me across the Triborough Bridge and the Upper East Side, past the Guggenheim Museum and through Central Park, straight to the front door of my building. I trotted up the steps, unlocked the door to my apartment, and turned on all the lights. A quick look at the walls assured me that all my prints were present and accounted for: here an Avery, there a Marin, Frankenthaler over the couch, Wolf Kahn over the mantelpiece. I dropped my bags, locked the door, and sighed deeply. Once again I had made the impossible journey from Smalltown to New York, from home to home....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Snapshot

The Dutch National Ballet dances the first movement of George Balanchine's Symphony in C, set to the music of Georges Bizet:



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

TT: Almanac

"There are a good many theatre people whom I suspect of arranging just a shade more than is absolutely necessary to be under constant fire, merely to indulge themselves in a public exhibition of their innate grace under pressure."

Moss Hart, Act One

TT: The private world of Satchmo

This wonderful photo was taken in February of 1971 in the master bathroom of Louis Armstrong's home in Corona, Queens, two weeks before the events portrayed in Satchmo at the Waldorf , my one-man play about Armstrong's last gig. It was originally published in Time, but I saw it for the first time today:

TT: Almanac

"I do not mean to suggest that luck per se plays the major part in success, theatrical or otherwise; but I venture to guess that in the grand design of any successful career the element of luck has been a powerful factor. Perhaps luck is too easy a word--too all-inclusive. A sense of timing would be more accurate--or perhaps a quirk of character that enables its fortunate possessor to tread the main path and never swerve from it. Every successful person I have ever known has had it--actor or businessman, writer or politician. It is that instinct or ability to sense and seize the right moment without wavering or playing safe, and without it many gifted people flicker brilliantly and briefly and then fade into oblivion in spite of their undoubted talents."

Moss Hart, Act One

TT: Just because

Stan Getz plays Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" at Montreux in 1972, accompanied by Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, and Tony Williams:



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

TT: Almanac

"Theater is essentially poetry. Film is essentially documentary, passively recording whatever data flow in front the camera. Is the enemy naturalism, which says if it looks authentic then it is authentic? For me, the very essence of theater is to reveal to the audience the invisible forces that shape and color and carbonate our lives. Write that on the blackboard a thousand times."

John Guare, preface to Landscape of the Body

TT: Twice in a lifetime

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway repertory runs of No Man's Land and Waiting for Godot, plus the premiere of Amanda Peet's first play, The Commons of Pensacola . Here's an excerpt.

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How do you market highbrow theater? Cast British actors, then turn your show into an event. That's how the Ian McKellen-Patrick Stewart production of "Waiting for Godot," first seen on London's West End in 2009, made it to Broadway just four years after Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodwin and John Glover appeared there in a splendid staging of Samuel Beckett's recherché masterpiece. Mounted on its own at so brief an interval, "Godot" might have been a tough sell, but Messrs. McKellen and Stewart and their producers figured out how to sweeten the pill: They're presenting "Godot" in repertory with Harold Pinter's even less penetrable "No Man's Land." The result? Sold-out houses every night. Snob appeal and artistic seriousness, however, are by no means incompatible, and while neither show is perfect, both are very much worth seeing.

Indeed, "No Man's Land," which was last seen on Broadway in 1994, is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a revival so creatively acted and sensitively staged by Sean Mathias that you'll be mulling it over for days after you depart the theater....

The first act of "Waiting for Godot," by contrast, is almost entirely unsatisfactory, and the reason why is plain to see. "Godot" is a black comedy about the meaninglessness of life, one whose dramatic rhetoric owes as much to baggy-pants slapstick as it does to existentialism, and it works best when done by comic actors like Mr. Lane (or Bert Lahr, who played the same role in the 1956 Broadway premiere). Neither Mr. McKellen nor Mr. Stewart fills that bill--they come off as Great Actors playing the parts of Great Comedians...

Amanda Peet, a smart, witty actor who found out that it's hard for a woman to land decent roles in Hollywood once she turns 40, decided to buck the odds by branching out and writing a play. Instead of starring in it, though, she talked Sarah Jessica Parker into taking over the role she'd written for herself. The result is "The Commons of Pensacola," in which Ms. Parker plays the fortysomething daughter of a woman (Blythe Danner) with a secret that is both embarrassing and illegal. Like Zoe Kazan, another first-class actor who writes plays on the side, Ms. Peet has a sharp ear for the way real people talk, and except for the last scene, which feels tacked on, "The Commons of Pensacola" is a very soundly made piece of theatrical goods....

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Read the whole thing here .

A 1978 telecast of the original production of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and directed by Peter Hall: