Archives for December 2017

“Well, the worst part of being old is rememberin’ when you was young.”

John Roach and Mary Sweeney, screenplay for The Straight Story

The Mills Brothers perform “Tiger Rag” in The Big Broadcast, directed by Frank Tuttle and released in 1932:

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

“There’s no one knows your life better than a brother that’s near your age. He knows who you are and what you are better than anyone on earth.”

John Roach and Mary Sweeney, screenplay for The Straight Story

From 2007:

At various points along the way, I was sure I was going to be a lawyer, a high-school teacher, a jazz musician, and a psychotherapist, and I fully expected to pursue each of these professions within the borders of the Midwestern state where I was born. Instead I wake each morning, climb down from the cozy loft in which I sleep, turn on a small electronic device that in my youth was unimaginable save to science-fiction writers, and spend the day writing about the arts. I don’t live in a house, don’t own a car, don’t have a lawn to mow, don’t know any of my neighbors. I am, in short, a New Yorker, living an unreal life in an unreal city: I love it, but I don’t quite believe it….

Read the whole thing here.

“Some will not look on suffering because it creates responsibility.”

Fulton J. Sheen, Those Mysterious Priests

With two previews and five performances of Billy and Me under our belts, everyone at Palm Beach Dramaworks is finally starting to unwind. The previews and opening-night performance all went smoothly and securely, and the audience response was wholly gratifying. I sit in the middle of a lot of audiences, and I know what it feels and sounds like to be surrounded by people who are paying the closest possible attention to a show. That’s the way it’s been with Billy and Me: everybody in the theater watches the play in silent stillness, and the explosion of applause at the end of each act is immediate and genuine.

As for me, I responded to the opening-night performance in much the same way that I did to my very first opening night eight crowded years ago, when the Santa Fe Opera premiered The Letter:

I watched it like a hawk. I was holding my wife’s hand from beginning to end, but she told me later that I never took my eyes off the stage. “It felt like you weren’t there at all,” she said. My ears registered the sound of laughter in unexpected and gratifying places, a sure sign that the audience was on top of the plot. Yet I couldn’t spare a glance for anyone around me, not even Hilary. All I wanted to see was the performance itself. I didn’t feel nervous–it was as though I were watching a show that someone else had written. Once or twice Paul reached back from the aisle seat in front of me and tapped me on the leg as if to say It works! Otherwise I was completely caught up in the action on stage.

To cast a cold eye on your own handiwork—to turn loose the controls of the ship and be a mere passenger—is a strange sensation, one that I suspect will always be disorienting to me, though it’s also gratifying. For the first time since I arrived to West Palm Beach five weeks ago, I was able to relax and enjoy myself and do nothing but pay attention. I know I’m far too close to the play itself to judge its merits, but I also know that the first production was and is as good as it could possibly be. Nick Richberg, Tom Wahl, and Cliff Gordon are giving electrifying performances, Bill Hayes’ staging is richly detailed, and the design of the show is exemplary in every way. I might add that we’re definitely hearing “the sound of laughter in unexpected and gratifying places,” and I treasure every chortle.

Needless to say, no credit is due to me for any of these things, least of all the laughs, very few of which were premeditated by the playwright. Every theatrical production is a collaboration, and I have no doubt whatsoever that my collaborators on Billy and Me are getting the most out of what I put on the page—and then some.

And what next? Well, we close on December 31, and the calendar is blank thereafter. To be sure, several companies have already asked to read the script, and a number of artistic directors are coming down to see for themselves how it plays on stage. Still, there’s no possible way for any of us to know what, if anything, will come of that attention, and it doesn’t matter in the least: for the cast and crew of Billy and Me, there is only now.

I have a week’s worth of publicity appearances to do before I return to Connecticut, cold weather, and Mrs. T, but I’m already shifting mental and emotional gears as I prepare to put the premiere of my second play behind me and get on with my everyday life and its onrushing complications. The theater teaches many hard but priceless lessons, the most important of which is to live for the work alone and take no thought for the morrow. I wrote Billy and Me to be performed by Palm Beach Dramaworks, and if no one else should take it up—as has been the case to date with The Letter—then I will still have the blissful, ineffaceable memory of the work itself, and the wonderful new friends that I made in the course of doing it.

Rightly or wrongly, though, I can’t help but let myself hope that the story of Billy and Me, as proved to be the case with Satchmo at the Waldorf, has only just begun.

UPDATE: The Palm Beach Daily News ran a front-page feature story about Mrs. T and me:

New medications have extended her life, but now she needs a double lung transplant and heart surgery.

Her condition worsened just as Teachout was preparing to go to West Palm Beach to rehearse Billy and Me. Usually, she accompanies him, but she’s too sick now to travel.

She insisted he go because he and William Hayes, Dramaworks’ producing artistic director, who’s directing the show, have been working on the play for nearly two years.

Plus “I wanted him to have time away from me and not think about me 24-7,” she said from their home in Connecticut….

Read the whole thing here.

In addition to writing about theater and the other arts for a living, I also blog in this space purely for my pleasure. Here are ten of my favorite posts from the year almost past:

• February 27 “Victor 18255-A, the first jazz record, was cut in New York one hundred years ago yesterday, five years after the word ‘jazz’ first appeared in print.”

• February 20 “Don’t get me wrong: I’d like it if more politicians appreciated the role of the fine arts in American life. Nevertheless, I think it’s silly to expect them to appreciate art, much less to suppose that doing so would make them better people.”

• March 13 “That is how I will always remember Gary Burton, as a silver-haired septuagenarian playing with the sacred fire and total assurance of a young man with his whole life ahead of him. We should all go out like that.”

• March 20 “Marsden Hartley was a major American painter, to my mind a great one. Robert Hughes called him “the most brilliantly gifted of the early generation of American modernists,” a judgment with which I increasingly incline to agree. Yet his work has never come close to receiving its due.”

• June 13 “Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” turns fifty years old next month, and we’re still listening to it—and talking about it. I was eleven years old when Gentry’s most famous record was released, and I have the strongest possible memories of the haunting impression that it made on me. I couldn’t hear it often enough. I still find it haunting a half-century later, albeit for somewhat different reasons.”

• June 26 “Like many other major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal has started presenting special events for its subscribers. The editors approached me a few weeks ago about taking part in a theatrical event, a post-show talkback that I would moderate. When asked what show I thought might be most attractive to our readers, I suggested, among others, the Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, which I had recently reviewed with unbridled enthusiasm. They liked the idea and promptly went to work.”

• October 9 “Mrs. T and I ate fresh corn on the cob and tomatoes for dinner for three nights in a row last week. My long-lost childhood self would have boggled at the thought of so unswerving a diet: I was moderately vegetable-aversive and also had a medium-sized tomato problem. It wasn’t until I met Mrs. T and started summering in rural Connecticut that I discovered the joys of dining on fresh vegetables bought at farm stands close to home.”

• November 1 “If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that Mrs. T and I have been profoundly happy throughout the decade we’ve spent together. Nevertheless, she is, as the saying goes, sick and tired of being sick and tired, which is why she’s ready to roll the dice and undergo a double lung transplant.”

• November 14 “Regular readers of this blog know that Giorgio Morandi is one of the modern artists whose work I love most. I’ve written about him often, most notably here and here, and I’ve long dreamed of owning one of his etchings, a medium of which he was a supreme master. Indeed, I actually dared to bid on a Morandi etching at Sotheby’s in 2003, an experience that left me feeling more or less the way I felt when, long ago, I foolishly sat in with my betters at a Kansas City jam session and got blown off the stand.”

• November 20 “I flew down to West Palm Beach two weeks ago, and we’ve been rehearsing Billy and Me, my new play, ever since. ”

Pete Seeger plays his “Living in the Country” on an undated episode of Rainbow Quest, originally telecast on WNJU-TV in 1965 or 1966:

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