Archives for April 2004

“He was experiencing that stage of love which seems to consist only of patient waiting, but his nature was better suited to it than some would have been.”

Barbara Pym, Less than Angels

I returned from North Carolina this afternoon (about which more tomorrow) and promptly set to work on “About Last Night,” which (as I’m sure you know) hasn’t exactly been in the front of my mind for the past month or so. Now that All in the Dances is finished, I’m raring to go, and I’ve started out by completely updating the right-hand column, in which you will now find:

– A fresh set of Top Fives

– My latest “Second City” column, which appeared in today’s Washington Post

– Two new pieces in “Teachout Elsewhere”

I start blogging in earnest on Monday, and I have lots of stuff up my sleeve, so watch this space.

It’s nice to be back.

Very indirectly via Chicha (who flatters me ever so sweetly), here’s a RealAudio sound clip of James Joyce reading
“Anna Livia Plurabelle” in 1924, plus Sylvia Beach’s fascinating reminiscence of how the recording happened to be made.

Dig that brogue.

“Resolve: To be altogether more advanced and intelligent, to have more friendships and fewer affairs, to write and read more than I eat and drink, to revisit Paris and write a prize novel.”

Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground

No rest for the weary: I spent the whole damn day writing the last of four pieces that came due the same week as All in the Dances, my Balanchine book. This one was my monthly Commentary essay, about Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich and Stalin and Richard Kostelanetz’s Aaron Copland: A Reader (aren’t you wondering how those two books fit together?), and it ended up being four thousand words long. I started it Thursday morning and finished it at 11:30 Thursday night. Now I’m going to bed. Tomorrow (today, actually) I’ll catch a plane to Raleigh, N.C., to spend two days looking at Carolina Ballet, and I’ll be back some time on Sunday.

Until then, there will be no further blogging from me. In fact, there will be no further writing of any kind from me. Not counting the book and the blog, I’ve produced roughly 8,000 words of publishable prose since Monday morning, and that’s soooo much more than enough. Right now you couldn’t pay me to inscribe a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader. (Really!)

Believe it or not, though, it’s nice to be back. I missed you while I was gone, a lot. And though I still have Balanchine-related chores awaiting me next week–I’ve got to choose the illustrations–I plan to spend plenty of time right here at “About Last Night.” So keep your eyes peeled for further cultural bulletins.

See you Sunday.

It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, reviewing Arthur Penn’s revival of Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox, starring Richard Dreyfuss and Eric Stoltz, and Barbara Cook’s Broadway.

Sly Fox isn’t perfect, but it’s damned good for what it is:

“Sly Fox” is, of course, Mr. Gelbart’s very loose rendering of Ben Jonson’s “Volpone,” relocated from seventeenth-century Venice to nineteenth-century San Francisco, where the noted conman Foxwell J. Sly (Mr. Dreyfuss) and his not-so-trusty servant Simon Able (Mr. Stoltz) have set up shop for the purpose of fleecing a bunch of equally dishonest folk. In this modernized version, little of Jonson’s play survives but the plot (Mr. Gelbart claims not even to have read Jonson, relying instead on a 1927 German-language adaptation of “Volpone” by Stefan Zweig), atop which are sprinkled several thousand jokes about greed and hypocrisy. All the characters talk like Groucho Marx, squeezing off punchlines like bullets from a burp gun, and while many go wide of their targets, enough hit the bull’s-eye to keep you flailing with laughter….

As Sly, Mr. Dreyfuss is going up against still-vivid memories of George C. Scott and Robert Preston, his predecessors in the role, and though I never saw either of them on stage, my guess is that he falls a little bit short, perhaps because he’s–well, a little bit short. I envisioned Foxwell J. Sly as a Falstaffian rascal, and Mr. Dreyfuss’ finicky voice and compact frame didn’t quite live up to my expectations. Nevertheless, he’s more than good enough to get the job done, and even better as Judge Thunder J. Bastardson, under whose wary eye the cast of “Sly Fox” conducts a seminar on scene stealing that is glorious to behold.

As for Barbara Cook’s Broadway, well, it’s pretty fabulous:

Speaking of old pros, Barbara Cook used to sing ingenue roles on Broadway back in the Fifties and Sixties, the salad days of musical comedy. Now she’s 76 years old and stars in one-woman shows about those same salad days. Her latest such effort, “Barbara Cook’s Broadway,” is running through April 18 at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, the same house where Christopher Plummer is starring in “King Lear,” also through April 18. (Ms. Cook performs on Mr. Plummer’s days off.) Go see it. She sings 15 wonderful show tunes, some familiar and some not, all interpreted in a totally straightforward style that keeps the spotlight on the songs, not the singer. When not making music, Ms. Cook tells tales out of school, including an anecdote about Elaine Stritch that’s worth at least half the price of admission.

No link. Just buy the Journal, O.K.? It’s only a dollar.

I found this note in my e-mailbox yesterday:

I’m so proud. I saw the the headline “Finishing the Book” and immediately knew you were going to be referencing Sunday in the Park with George.

As someone in my early twenties just emerging from a South Georgia town about the size of Smalltown, U.S.A. (15,000, give or take), I’ve been following “About Last Night” eagerly from its beginning last summer, and it’s been a welcome expansion of my horizons. I’ve got you to thank for Avenue Q, Helen Frankenthaler, and TMFTML, just to name a few. It’s also occasionally been a reassurance. (Maybe there’s not something wrong with me because I don’t love Virginia Woolf; maybe I shouldn’t consider a rural background a permanent sentence to second-class cultural citizenship….)

I’m afraid that it’s a deceptively seductive medium, and I’ve come to feel oddly close to you and OGIC and many of the people in your right-hand column after what’s nearly been a three-season-immersion. There was a little inner debate on whether to address you as “Terry” or “Mr. Teachout.” South Georgia won. I’ve really got no reason to write other than to say thank you.

P.S. Congratulations on the Balanchine book. I hear that sort of thing isn’t easy, any way you look at it.

Right from the start, Our Girl and I hoped that “About Last Night” would be read not just in New York, Chicago, and cities of similar size and presumed sophistication, but all over the country. Well, we got our wish. Yes, we’re most frequently read in the eastern time zone of the United States, but most days we also get hits from as many as thirteen other time zones, along with mail from readers living in the most unlikely-sounding places–only it turns out that they’re not so unlikely after all. Modern communications technology has made the world of art universally accessible to all who care to partake of it, and the Web has gone beyond that to transform the cultural conversation. Time was when people like OGIC and me did all the talking. Now it’s a two-way street.

So to our happy reader from South Georgia, as well as to all the rest of you out there in cyberspace, our thanks for listening–and even more for writing. We feel every bit as close to you as you do to us. And don’t forget to tell your friends what they’re missing.

I went to Harcourt yesterday afternoon to drop off the manuscript of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, the book whose fitful progress I’ve been chronicling on this blog for the past three months. Oddly enough, I’d never seen the headquarters of my new publisher, with whom I signed a two-book contract a little less than a year ago (the contract was delivered and collected by messenger), so I thought it would be both courteous and fun to bring in the manuscript myself.

I showed up a few minutes early and waited briefly in a lobby decorated with photographs of noted Harcourt authors past and present, wondering whether the day might come when I would be deemed worthy of display cheek by jowl with T.S. Eliot and Alice Walker. Then Andr