Archives for December 2009

Bill Evans plays “My Foolish Heart”:

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

The Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens will be hosting a book party at two p.m. on January 9 to celebrate the publication of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The party will take place inside the home where Armstrong lived during the last quarter-century years of his life, and I’ll be reading from Pops and signing copies of the book.
Here’s what I wrote about the house when I last visited it in 2004, just as I was starting to write Pops:

I rented a car and headed for Queens, accompanied by Stephanie Steward, my research assistant. We’d been planning for weeks to spend a day visiting the Armstrong house and archive–an orientation tour for Steph, so to speak. The house was opened to the public as a museum last October, but as I turned the corner onto what is now Louis Armstrong Place for the first time in three years, I saw that nothing much had changed but the street sign. The block was still shabby but respectable, a textbook example of a working-class neighborhood, and except for the garage, which has been turned into a reception center and museum shop, the house looks the way it did in 2001: the same gaudy wallpaper, the same gold faucets, the same touchingly elaborate furnishings, right down to Tony Bennett’s oil painting of Armstrong. Steph’s eyes were as big as hubcaps. As for me, I felt like laughing and crying at the same time….

I can’t wait to go back.
The party is open to the general public, but space is strictly limited, so if you’re interested in stopping by, call 718-478-8274 or e-mail reservations@louisarmstronghouse.org now to make a reservation.
For more information, go here.

“Men are what their mothers make them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life

Because Christmas falls on a Friday this year, my last Wall Street Journal drama column of 2009 is appearing today. In it I review two out-of-town shows, Signature Theatre’s Show Boat in Arlington, Virginia, and Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s Twelfth Night. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Everybody loves “Show Boat,” but nobody does it. Why? Because it’s too big for most theater companies to put on without busting their budgets wide open. Indeed, many under-50 musical-comedy buffs now know “Show Boat” from James Whale’s elegant 1936 film version rather than from actually having seen the show on stage. Harold Prince’s mammoth 1994 production, performed in the 2,000-seat Gershwin Theatre, was the last time that it was brought to Broadway. That’s what made Eric Schaeffer’s slimmed-down Signature Theatre revival so potentially significant. From James Kronzer’s ultra-plain set to Jonathan Tunick’s brand-new 14-piece chamber orchestrations, Mr. Schaeffer’s “Show Boat” is designed to bring the pioneering 1927 musical within reach of regional companies that simply can’t afford to present it on a large scale.
Such vest-pocket productions are all the rage, and some, like John Doyle’s “Sweeney Todd,” have been both artistically and financially successful. I wish I could say that Signature’s “Show Boat” was as effective, but it doesn’t quite work, and the main reason, I suspect, is that the show simply doesn’t lend itself to small-scale presentation. “Show Boat” is conceptually big, both in setting and in musical scale. Even though Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II forged the modern language of musical comedy more or less from scratch, “Show Boat” still has much in common with the classical operettas that came before it (“Ol’ Man River,” indeed, is unabashedly operatic in scope). A production that fails to do justice to its expansive aspect is thus likely to feel, as this one does, cramped and ungenerous….
“Twelfth Night” has a way of inspiring the companies that perform it. I’ve yet to review a production of Shakespeare’s most likable comedy that failed to please me, and some, like the whirligig Shakespeare & Company staging that I saw this past summer in Lenox, Mass., have been uncommonly fine. Bonnie J. Monte’s sweet-tempered version, now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, is one of the best to come my way in recent seasons–and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the few to privilege poetry over slapstick….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“I am in a holiday humor.”
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong was featured today on ABC’s Good Morning America as one of the best holiday books of 2009. Among the other titles mentioned were Teddy Kennedy’s True Compass, Andre Agassi’s Open, Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and Dean Koontz’s Breathless–unusual company for me!
To read the complete list, go here.

Mrs. T and I finally made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., in one piece last Friday night. Since then we’ve been watching the weather in New York on TV and doing as little as possible (though I’m talking to the BBC by phone later today and still have a couple of pieces to write between now and Christmas).
I feel as though I’ve been on the go without a break for most of 2009, which isn’t so far from the truth. I’ve been so busy that I’m having trouble relaxing: I can’t seem to switch off my Oh-God-What-Now-O-Meter. Fortunately, Smalltown has no chain bookstores, TV stations, or lecture series to lure me back down the road of excess. All I really have to do is kick back, hang out, and sleep late. I plan to read a couple of new books, watch a little TV, and open my presents on Friday morning. That ought to do me very nicely.
I’ll blog a bit this week, including the usual daily postings, but nothing too strenuous. I think I’ve earned a break, and Mrs. T and my mother agree. In case you’re wondering and/or worried, they’re taking very good care of their weary boy.
Enjoy the week. I know I will.

Favorable notices of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong are now appearing in such quantity that I’ve stopped trying to keep up with them. I did, however, take special note of Louis Bayard’s review in the Washington Post:

Maybe we need a half-century’s distance to see this gifted man without the filter of politics, to regard his grin not as an accommodation to the white world but as the distillation of his soul. In the end, true goodness may be the hardest quality to pin down, or to accept, in art, but that is what Armstrong’s music abounds in, even at its most commercial. He was, in Teachout’s lovely phrase, “a major-key artist,” whose “lavish generosity of spirit was part and parcel of his prodigal way of making music.” That prodigality is our gift, and Louis Armstrong, I am happy to report, is still grinning at us. Upon finishing this definitive life, the reader is instructed to flip to the discography, download every last song, listen and grin the hell back.

I was no less pleased by a review in the Seattle Times that made an equally important, insufficiently mentioned point about Pops:

To state the obvious: Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong had a seminal role in the development of jazz. Wall Street Journal critic Teachout makes that case anew in this sympathetic, musically astute bio–but with none of the grinding axes marring some recent biographies of a revered trumpeter-singer called “Pops” by his fellow players.

I’ve also done a couple of dozen radio interviews about Pops in the past couple of weeks, with still more to come between now and the end of January. Two that I especially liked were aired by KUSC, the station of the University of Southern California, and WILL, the station of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Both are now available on line, and you can listen to them by going here and here.
More anon!