Monday, April 13, 2015
“I was just thinking that life makes almost everyone into something that he never exactly wanted to be, and then the time comes when he can’t very well be anything else.” John P. Marqu…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, April 10, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I devote extra space to three newly opened Broadway transfers, Hand to God, Wolf Hall, and Gigi. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Nothing is more exci…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I try to calculate the odds against a straight play’s succeeding on Broadway. Here’s an excerpt. * * * The conventional wisdom abo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“A friend in power is a friend lost.” The Education of Henry Adams
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, April 9, 2015
Kathy Teachout, my sister-in-law, has just retired from the city council of Smalltown, U.S.A., after two consecutive terms. She succeeded David, my brother, who had previously held the same …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM“He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.” Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, April 8, 2015
Rare are the dreams of childhood that come true at last, but one of mine, much to my surprise and delight, has actually realized itself, more or less, now that I’m on the brink of late mid…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom a 1964 performance of Beyond the Fringe, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore perform their “One Leg Too Few” sketch: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.” Evelyn Waugh (quoted in the London Observer, Apr. 15, 1962)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, April 7, 2015
I watched both parts of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, Alex Gibney’s four-hour-long documentary about the life and art of Frank Sinatra, last night. Entirely aside from the fact that I fi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005: Art isn’t religion, but it has something important in common with religion: it’s a form of soulcraft. Souls can only be changed one by one, and each one is as supremely import…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“For his sake, who did not reject your curious gifts, pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, April 6, 2015
An old friend of mine who sings jazz for a living just sent me a freshly recorded sound file on which she performs a song that I love, Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You.” I’ve known her…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMGlenn Gould plays the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto on the CBC in 1954, accompanied by Paul Scherman and the CBC Symphony. The cadenza is by Gould. This is Gould’s e…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, April 3, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Bedlam Theatre Company’s off-off-Broadway productions (there are two) of Twelfth Night and the new Broadway revival of David Hare’s Skylight. He…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality.” Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Prize acceptance speech …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, April 2, 2015
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wal…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.” Ross Macdonald, The Chill
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, April 1, 2015
Benny Goodman, Aaron Copland, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic perform the first movement of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, originally commissioned by Goodman and premiered by him in 1950: (…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I’d given up offering advice. Even when people asked for it, they resented getting it.” Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, March 31, 2015
Mrs. T and I are thinking about adding another piece to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph by Romare Bearden, an artist whose work we both love, enough so that I’m surprised we’ve never b…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMThursday, July 3, 2014
Ten new musicals opened on Broadway in the 2013–14 season. Four of them—Aladdin, Big Fish, Bullets Over Broadway, and Rocky—were directly adapted from familiar American movies and shar…
SOURCE: Commentary Magazine at 10:43AMThursday, May 15, 2014
William Inge's half-remembered plays are finally making a slow but sure comeback. Witness the Peccadillo Theater Company's new off-Broadway revival of "A Loss of Roses," which broke his four…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 05:55PMFriday, October 11, 2013
Terry Teachout says the Broadway musical 'Big Fish' sends you home stunned by the efficiency with which its producers squandered every cent they spent.
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal at 11:35AMFriday, June 28, 2013
"A Picture of Autumn" is impressive in every way, and the Mint's staging, directed with quiet intelligence by Gus Kaikkonen and acted by a top-drawer ensemble cast, is so strong that in a pe…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 09:18AMThursday, March 29, 2012
Nina Raine's "Tribes," which opened off-Broadway earlier this month, is a superb new play about a dysfunctional family whose youngest member is deaf. Beautifully staged by David Cromer, it w…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 08:40PMMonday, August 8, 2011
Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout traveled to East Haddam, CT recently to attend Goodspeed Musicals new version of SHOW BOAT, running now through September 18.
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 12:11PMThursday, July 7, 2011
What do opera singers do when they outlive their voices? Often they teach, and if they're famous enough, they may be invited to give "master classes" in which they work with promising studen…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 10:41PMThursday, June 2, 2011
Of all the major postwar musicals, "Follies" may be the hardest to revive successfully. Not only was it one of the largest-scaled Broadway shows to come along prior to the Era of Falling Cha…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 10:22PMTuesday, April 26, 2011
It's dauntingly difficult to bring off John Guare's "The House of Blue Leaves," which may explain why this modern masterpiece, first performed in 1966, hasn't been seen on Broadway since 198…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal Subscription at 07:00AM 
