Archives for 2003

“By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic one’s self.”

Gustave Flaubert, quoted in Irving Babbitt,
Rousseau and Romanticism

(P.S. Can anybody out there supply an exact citation for the original source of this quote?)

Feeling low down and dirty? Here’s a little Monday-morning musical festivity to float your boat. Go here, then click on “Maple Leaf Rag,” and if your computer is equipped to run RealAudio files, you will be treated to three minutes of red-hot jazz, courtesy of www.redhotjazz.com.

(This happens to be one of my half-dozen all-time favorite jazz records of the Thirties, by the way.)

If you’re a regular visitor, check out the right-hand column, which has been extensively updated with fresh top-five items, links to recently published pieces, and other stuff.

If you’re new here, do the same thing.

The MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants” have been known to go to some pretty awful people, but on balance the fine-arts grants have tended to be…well, not altogether bad. Stephen Hough, my favorite classical pianist, got one a couple of years ago, and now Osvaldo Golijov, one of the most interesting and provocative classical composers around, is part of the latest roster of recipients.

If you’re curious about what manner of composer is thought worthy of a MacArthur these days, I can recommend two CDs. This one contains a representative and well-played sample of his chamber music. Also of interest is his extraordinary Pasion Segun San Marcos, about whose New York premiere I had this to say in the Washington Post:

Golijov’s St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a black gospel choir–you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he’s about.

The recording, incidentally, features Luciana Souza, about whom I need only remind you that her appearance with the New York Philharmonic in Central Park this summer was the subject of “About Last Night”‘s first posting. Enough said?

(Nobody asked me, by the way, but I’d sure like to see Maria Schneider get a genius grant.)

In case you’re joining us late (a week late, but who’s counting?), I took up the posting slack during my hard-drive crisis by inviting Our Girl in Chicago, my guest-blogger-on-Fridays, to chime in at will while I was preoccupied with the current crisis. Apparently not everybody noticed that “About Last Night” had grown a second head, even though our postings are signed at the end (mine read “terryteachout,” hers “ourgirlinchicago”). So until everybody gets with the program, we’re going to put our respective initials in the headlines, too, as per above.

Once again, I’m badly behind on the blogmail, for reasons that will be obvious to any of you who have suffered a hard-drive crash. Next week isn’t going to be easy, since I have to reconstitute my e-mail address book, reinstall a couple of applications, write three pieces, see two plays, and finish proofreading and indexing A Terry Teachout Reader. But I’ll start cleaning up the mail before week’s end, and OGIC and I will make sure you always have something toothsome to read while you’re waiting.

Now I’m off to Massachusetts (or Connecticut, or someplace like that) to give a speech about H. L. Mencken. Thanks for your patience, and don’t forget to tell your friends about “About Last Night,” open for business 24/7 at www.terryteachout.com.

I reviewed two newly opened plays in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The first is Little Shop of Horrors, a Broadway revival of the 1982 off-Broadway musical, now running at the Virginia Theatre:

I don’t mind admitting that I came to the theater with malice aforethought. Broadway, after all, plays it so safe these days that I wouldn’t have been entirely disappointed had this safer-than-safe cash cow gone belly up. Instead, it turned out to be a zippy romp, staged and sung to the hilt. Hunter Foster and Kerry Butler are completely charming as Seymour and Audrey, two Skid Row florists brought together by Audrey II, a jumbo Venus flytrap that dines on human blood. Douglas Sills is suitably slimy as Orin, the pain-loving dentist who snorts a little too much laughing gas and ends up as plant food. Audrey II is winsomely monstrous, Scott Pask’s comic-book sets are just right, and even if you don’t especially care for ’50s rock (which I don’t), the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken songs are genial enough. So what’s not to like? Nothing, really, except that the music is TOO DAMN LOUD….

The second is Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events, a play about 9/11 now running at Playwrights Horizons:

How did “Recent Tragic Events” exasperate me? Let me count the ways. For openers, it stinks of cutesy-wutesy postmodernism. Aside from that stupid sock puppet, Mr. Wright bashes us in the face with such trickery as a bell that rings whenever the plot takes what the playwright wrongly supposes to be an unexpected turn (David Ives, call your lawyer) and a chummy stage manager who talks to the audience (Thornton Wilder, call your executor). Stripped of these devices, “Recent Tragic Events” boils down to a feeble sketch about how four vapid sitcom-type characters are transformed by an unimaginable catastrophe. Mr. Wright, a graduate of United Theological Seminary who now writes for “Six Feet Under,” doubtless considers this to be deep thinking (the play’s epigraph is a loooooooong quote from Schopenhauer). I suppose it is, too–six feet deep, to be exact….

As usual, no link, so to read the whole review, march to the nearest newsstand and buy a copy of the Journal. “Weekend Journal,” the section in which my theater column appears, is well worth your while, with or without me.

“Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.”

John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

“Mummy was easily found in the drawing-room, listening to, or apparently keeping quiet during, a Miles Davis record. Gilbert presided at the gramophone, which faithfully rendered that tiny, elementary universe of despair and hatred.”

Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20