Terry Teachout's Blog, page 77

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:

• Annie (musical, G, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Nance (play with music, PG-13, closes Aug. 11, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, closes Sept. 1, reviewed here)

• Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (comedy, PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, closes July 28, most performances sold out last week, original production 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)

• The Weir (drama, PG-13, closes July 7, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Caucasian Chalk Circle (drama with music, PG-13, closes June 23, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN CHICAGO:

• The Misanthrope (verse comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"War is like love, it always finds a way."

Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children

TT: See me, hear me (cont'd)

Now that I'm millimeters away from putting Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington to bed, the time has come to face the public. On Tuesday night I'll give the first public reading anywhere--yes, anywhere--of an excerpt from the prologue to Duke.

The occasion is a program called "Music to Your Ears" that's being presented by Big Umbrella Nonfiction, a Manhattan-based reading series that takes place each month at the impeccably cool 2A . I'll be sharing the bill with Touré, author of I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon , and Brendan Jay Sullivan, author of Rivington Was Ours: Lady Gaga, the Lower East Side, and the Prime of Our Lives . While I'm not entirely sure that I'm hip enough to share a stage with these gentlemen, I'll don the black outfit and give it my very best shot.

Quoth the press release:

There will be $4 whiskey deals, there will be books for sale courtesy of McNally Jackson, there will be giant video projection, as usual. There will be a great time had.

I regret to say that Duke is not yet on sale, but you can pre-order a copy by going here .

2A is at 25 Avenue A. The proceedings start at eight p.m. For more information, go here .

TT: Snapshot

DeFord Bailey plays "Pan American Blues" at the Grand Ole Opry in 1967:



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

TT: Almanac

"Show interest in her goodness--for no one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand."

Bertolt Brecht, The Good Person of Sezuan

TT: Lookback

From 2005:

Perhaps my powers of concentration have been diminished by advancing age, or maybe I've simply become more sensitive to the emotion-evoking power of music. (I cry more easily now than I did a decade ago.) Whatever the reason, I now find music more distracting than I used to, and I no longer listen to any kind of music while working on first drafts. Editing is different, and unless I'm doing battle with a tight deadline, in which case I prefer to struggle in silence, I sometimes listen to music when I'm polishing a piece, though I don't really hear it. Sometimes I'll put on a symphony or concerto, start chipping away at an unpolished draft, and emerge from a deep trough of concentration to realize--always with surprise--that the piece of music to which I was "listening" is almost over....

Read the whole thing here .

TT: Almanac

"To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated."

Bertolt Brecht, "Notes on Philosophy"

HOW HITLER DESTROYED GERMAN MUSIC

" The Vienna Philharmonic recently issued a report by a group of independent historians in which the orchestra officially acknowledged for the first time the closeness of its relationship to the Third Reich. Not only had half its players become members of the Nazi Party by 1942, but all 13 of its Jewish players had been fired four years earlier and five of them later died in the camps. A few weeks later, Der Spiegel published a 6,000-word essay called "Wagner's Dark Shadow: Can We Separate the Man from His Works?" in which Dirk Kurbjuweit dealt no less honestly with the continuing inability of many German music lovers to grapple with the fact that Richard Wagner was a virulent anti-Semite whose writings directly influenced Adolf Hitler..."

TT: Just because

A rare kinescope of Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan dancing the drag roles of Cinderella's ugly sisters in the 1957 BBC telecast of Ashton's Cinderella. The score is by Sergei Prokofiev:



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

TT: Almanac

"I am not prepared to enter into the concept of luck, as it is vulgarly called: philosophically it is indefensible; in daily experience we see it to exist."

Patrick O'Brian, The Mauritius Command