Archives for August 2007

Sharp-eyed readers may already have noticed a small but significant change in the top module of the right-hand column (a similar change to the masthead is in the works). It’s no accident. As of today, litblogger Carrie Frye, who joined us last month as a guest blogger, comes aboard permanently as the third member of the “About Last Night” team. We couldn’t be happier–and judging by the upward bounce in our readership stats that occurred when Carrie first started blogging with us, our guess is that you feel the same way. She’s a good friend, a good colleague, and more fun than a megawatt zap to the nucleus accumbens. We’re glad she’s decided to let us make an honest woman of her.
For those readers who haven’t yet gotten the message, the three of us sign the headlines of our individual postings as follows:
• Terry is “TT”
• Our Girl in Chicago (also known as Laura Demanski) is “OGIC”
• Carrie is “CAAF”
Welcome to the club, CAAF–and be sure to keep that secret handshake to yourself.

I am, as those who know me are well aware, something of a child at heart. Not surprisingly, then, it pleased me no end when I took my seat in the first ring of Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater last Thursday night and saw that I was surrounded by TV cameras. To be sure, none of them was pointed at me–they were there to telecast Mark Morris’ Mozart Dances on PBS’ Live From Lincoln Center–but even so, I got a huge kick out of the fact that they were an arm’s length from my aisle seat.

“My sister in St. Louis is watching tonight,” my companion for the evening whispered as the lights went down. I liked that, too, just as I liked knowing that some of you would be seeing what I was seeing at the very moment I saw it. I recently blogged about what it feels like to listen to a live album at whose creation you were present. Being in the audience for a live telecast is even more exciting, in part because of the strong sense of community that such an experience creates.

Experiences like these are growing rarer. As I wrote in A Terry Teachout Reader:

The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each “narrowcasting” to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as today’s corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of “lifestyle clusters” whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.

In many ways this new regime is a good thing, even a blessing, but it also takes away the feeling of shared experience that I felt when I watched TV as a boy, knowing that most of the people I knew–as well as millions of people I didn’t know–were watching the same shows at the same time. The movie My Favorite Year, whose climactic scene is a portrayal of a live broadcast of a fictional Fifties TV program not unlike Your Show of Shows, conveys something of that feeling, as does the surviving kinescope of the original 1953 telecast of Marty that I saw earlier this year. That’s what I felt last Thursday, and I loved it.

As for Mozart Dances, I could go on and on about its myriad beauties…but I prefer not to. Mind you, I have no doubt that it is a masterpiece, just as I was sure that Morris’ V was a masterpiece when I saw it for the first time in 2001, and if you pressed me I could easily come up with a lengthy and persuasive explanation of why this should be so. It is, after all, my job to explain the ineffable, though plotless dances are peculiarly resistant to such explanations. (“We dare to go into the world where there are no names for anything,” George Balanchine once remarked to Jerome Robbins.) On the other hand, I wasn’t on the job last Thursday: I was there to enjoy myself, and I didn’t take any notes. Instead I let Mozart Dances happen to me, and when it was over I felt as though I’d come back home from a trip to Eden.

One thing I will say is that this was one of the few times in my life that I’ve been fortunate enough to see a great dance accompanied by world-class musicians. It’s no secret (save to certain tin-eared dance critics) that the New York City Ballet pit orchestra is usually pretty awful, but the unhappy fact is that the vast majority of dance performances in America are accompanied either by second-rate players or by taped music, which is even worse. On Thursday night, by contrast, we got to hear Emanuel Ax, Yoko Nozaki, Louis Langrée, and the Mostly Mozart orchestra perform two Mozart piano concertos (K. 413 and 595) and the Two-Piano Sonata. At intermission I ran into Patrick J. Smith, who knows more about opera than anybody, and the first words out of his mouth were, “Finally–finally–the music is as good as the dancing!” And so it was.

Just before the curtain went up, Mark Morris slipped into the aisle seat across from me, which added an extra frisson to the proceedings. I know Mark a bit–we spent a couple of hours talking over The Letter back in January–and I’ve liked him ever since our first meeting, when he naughtily introduced me to the members of his company as “M’sieur Tee-Shew.” He is, among other things, funny and frank to a degree that can sometimes be unnerving but is more often exhilarating, and I’ve never spoken to him without going away happy. Yet there is always a moment when it suddenly hits me that I’m talking to the choreographer of L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, which has a way of putting a damper on the conversation.

I’ve known four people in my lifetime–maybe five–whom I believe to be creative geniuses, and Mark is one of them. To be in the company of such birds of paradise is inevitably to be reminded of your own limitations. They are not as other men. So I didn’t say much to him at intermission: I simply said hello and told him I thought Mozart Dances was wonderful, and left it at that. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

My recent appearance on XM Satellite Radio’s Downstage Center, the weekly program of the American Theatre Wing, will be archived today on the ATW’s Web site. To listen in streaming audio or download it to your mp3 player, go here.
Howard Sherman, co-host of Downstage Center, wrote the other day to point out some things about the show that I hadn’t realized:

So far as we know, Downstage Center is the only national, weekly radio program featuring sustained conversation about theatre, covering Broadway, Off-Broadway and regional work; commercial and not-for-profit; musicals and plays; and speaking not only with actors, writers and directors, but artistic directors, designers, producers and on occasion, critics (there are a bunch of shows about musicals on both broadcast and terrestrial radio, as well as podcasts). Your interview was our 165th since the show began in April 2004, without a single repeated guest, and every one is available online for free as streaming audio and podcast.

All the more reason to listen, either via the ATW archives or by subscribing to XM, of which I am a very big fan. You can do the latter by going here.

“I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was–there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,–and methought I had,–but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.”
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I gather from a number of recent news stories that it’s considered bad form to edit your own Wikipedia entry. As far as I’m concerned, that’s hogwash. Ever since I noticed that people in search of biographical information about me were cribbing it from my entry, I edited it carefully, started watching it like a hawk, and have continued to update it regularly. I didn’t write the original entry, however, and have done my best to ensure that its tone remains neutral and purely informational (except for the last sentence of the second paragraph, which is the work of the original author!).
Earlier today a radio host on whose show I’ll be appearing next week–watch this space for details–asked me to send him my bio.
“I’d be glad to,” I said, “but you can just check my Wikipedia entry.”
“Those things aren’t very trustworthy, are they?” he asked.
“This one is,” I replied grimly.

One more from the road: my Wall Street Journal drama column is about two regional-theater musical revivals that make use of Jerome Robbins’ original choreography.
From New Hampshire, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s West Side Story:

Of all Robbins’ shows, “West Side Story,” in which the plot of “Romeo and Juliet” is transplanted to a New York slum circa 1957, is hardest to revive without his choreography. To be sure, it can be done–Joel Ferrell re-choreographed the show to fine effect for Portland Center Stage last year–but to do so is inevitably to invite comparison with the finger-popping dances that made it into the 1961 film version and so became familiar to millions of moviegoers who would never see “West Side Story” on stage. For most of us, these vaulting, vibrant sketches of teenage passion are as much a part of “West Side Story” as Leonard Bernstein’s jazzy score, and any director who omits them does so at his own risk.
Brian Swasey, the man at the helm of the Seacoast Repertory Theatre’s revival of “West Side Story,” has opted for modesty over daring. “Who am I to think I can create something better than Jerome Robbins?” he writes in his program note. I admire his good sense–and I also admire the way in which he has managed to cram Robbins’ dances into a downstairs theater whose stage isn’t much larger than my Manhattan living room. My third-row seat was no more than 10 feet from the action. To see “West Side Story” in so intimate a setting is viscerally thrilling in a way that no big-house performance can possibly hope to rival….

From Maine, the Ogunquit Playhouse’s King and I:

Steven Yuhasz directed the revival of “The King and I” now playing at Maine’s Ogunquit Playhouse, a 75-year-old purveyor of resort-town musical comedy that bills itself as “Broadway on the Beach.” He has wisely chosen to stick with the original choreography, and Susan Kikuchi’s (mostly) faithful recreation of Robbins’ Thai-style dance-and-mime version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is one of the production’s highlights. The dancing isn’t up to Broadway standards, but Robbins’ conception is so strong and vivid that it needn’t be executed perfectly in order to be perfectly charming….

No free link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of Friday’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my drama column and all the rest of the Journal‘s arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber to the Online Journal, the column is here.)

I recently paid a visit to the Gropius House, not far from Walden Pond, which Walter Gropius designed for himself in 1938. Touring this remarkable house a few months after seeing Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House for the first time caused me to start thinking about why so many Americans dislike midcentury modern architecture–even though they respond enthusiastically to other forms of modern art. The end product of these speculations was my next “Sightings” column, which will appear in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Regardless of how you feel about midcentury modernism, I think you’ll find it interesting.
Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and give it a read.

• I usually sleep deeply and well, and so tend not to remember my dreams. On the rare occasions when I do recall them after waking, they’re almost always commonplace, nothing like the elaborate doozies that some of my friends regularly bring back from the Land of Nod. Every once in a while, though, I manage to eke out something interesting. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, I dreamed that I sat in with Louis Armstrong (we played “Mack the Knife,” and the piano player was rushing). He was performing in the large, anonymous-looking waiting room of a hospital located on a hill, and when I awoke I realized with a start that it was Cape Girardeau’s Southeast Missouri Hospital, the place where I was born. Pretty good for an Armstrong biographer, huh?

Last night’s dream was similarly exotic, as well as similarly related to my childhood. I dreamed that the studio of Helen Frankenthaler (whose Grey Fireworks is part of the Teachout Museum) was located in the basement of my mother’s home in Smalltown, U.S.A., the house where I grew up. My mother, it seemed, had somehow neglected to share this fact with me–apparently she didn’t find it unusual enough to mention–and I only happened to discover it when I went downstairs during a visit and found a tall stack of unfinished canvases next to the water heater.

After I woke up, I realized that the woman who played Frankenthaler in my dream was Illeana Douglas, who had a nice little role in Ghost World but whom I haven’t seen on screen for a number of years. (That’s pretty good casting, actually.)

As usual, the part of the puzzled middle-aged dreamer was played by me.

• Max Roach is dead. He was a great and influential jazz drummer, one of the very best who ever lived, though I can’t say that he was one of my personal favorites–I always found his sound to be flat and grey. Still, he made far more than his share of memorable recordings, of which Sonny Rollins’ Saxophone Colossus, a 1956 album to which I return at least once a year, shows him off to particularly good effect. His solo on “Blue Seven” (which exists in notation in the second volume of Burt Korall’s Drummin’ Men) is a classic by any reckoning, mine included.

Mr. JazzWax pays a heartfelt and intelligent tribute to Roach here.