Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Langston Hughes reads his poem “The Weary Blues” on the CBC in 1958, accompanied by a jazz combo:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Flying Stars”
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.This week the critics discuss the recent Tony Awards announcement and surrounding controversy, and the imminent opening of some live theatre productions in New York, including the Donmar Warehouse’s Blindness. They also reflect on a listener question about sound design, and discuss the many changes that the theatre ecology is continuing to undergo. Their picks this week include Party Hop by Natalie Margolin (on YouTube), Undermain Theatre’s production of St. Nicholas by Conor McPherson, and the Working Theatre’s American Dreams, which was mentioned in a previous episode by our guest Tamala Woodard.
In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.
“She hasn’t got any intellect to speak of; but you don’t need any intellect to be an intellectual.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Scandal of Father Brown”
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I take a look at a little-known survey that sheds light on the future of theater in America. Here’s an excerpt.
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As theater lovers wait restlessly for Broadway to resume performances after the coronavirus pandemic has been brought under control, the revival of “The Music Man,” which stars Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster and is now set to open on February 10, 2022 (yes, I know, we’ll see), is the show that has stirred up the most excitement. That’s no surprise, since it’s a great musical with a dream cast. But for me, the most interesting news about the American musical is not the latest rescheduling of an as-yet-hypothetical revival: It’s the release of a statistical survey that, read carefully, serves as a crystal ball in which you can see the possible future of American theater.
Dramatics, a monthly magazine for theater students and teachers, has been publishing since 1938 an annual survey of the musicals and plays most often produced by American high schools. Thousands of drama teachers throughout the country supply Dramatics with the data for these lists, and National Public Radio has taken on the daunting task of compiling all of the surveys, thus making it possible to see how the favorites have changed over time….
You may wonder why anyone other than their parents should care about what musicals high-schoolers are performing. Certainly most journalists seem not to: So far as I know, NPR is the only major media outlet to take note of the most recent of these surveys. But I think they’re making a mistake. According to Dramatics, nearly 50 million people attend high-school musicals each year, most of them young people for whom they serve as an introduction to the musical as a genre. It stands to reason, then, that the shows they see and in which they perform today will have a powerful influence on the ones they’ll want to see on Broadway ten years from now—or 40….
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Read the whole thing here.A scene from Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird:
Shirley Horn sings “Here’s to Life” with John Williams and the Boston Pops in 1993. The arrangement is by Johnny Mandel:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
From 2016:
Read the whole thing here.I remember quite a lot about my ten-year-old self and the town in which I lived—but not much about the rest of the world. Just the other day I looked up Wikipedia’s timeline of events in 1966, thinking that I might find a bit of fodder for a Wall Street Journal column about the fiftieth anniversary of something or other. It was, not surprisingly, an eventful year, but I was struck most forcibly by how little I noticed at the time about its most consequential occurrences. Nineteen sixty-six was, among many other noteworthy things, the year in which Lenny Bruce, Montgomery Clift, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Hofmann, Buster Keaton, Evelyn Waugh, and Clifton Webb died, but I didn’t yet know who any of those men were…..