2,374 stories by "TERRY TEACHOUT"
From 2006: With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don't speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film"not ju…
"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." Will Rogers, The Autobiography of Will Rogers
This is something I wrote a quarter-century ago in a memoir of my childhood and youth: Memory is the key to a small town. A stranger driving through my home town would see nothing but school…
John Raitt sings "Soliloquy," from Carousel, on General Foods 25th Anniversary Show: A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, originally telecast on March 28, 1954, by ABC, CBS, NBC, and DuMont.…
"The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom." Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (trans. Natasha Randall)
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the Brooklyn transfer of David Hare's The Judas Kiss, starring Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde. Here's an excerpt. * * * David Hare would seem a near-id…
Skip James performs "Devil Got My Woman" at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Frida…
"Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mer…
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I sift through The Blue Touch Paper, David Hare's recently published memoir, for clues to his distinctive approach to political theater. Her…
"Real artists are not nice people; all their best feelings go into their work, and life has the residue." W.H. Auden, letter to his brother (1927, quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Dea…
The original Benny Goodman Quartet plays "Avalon" on Timex All-Star Swing Festival, taped at Lincoln Center and originally telecast by NBC in 1972. Goodman plays clarinet, Lionel Hampton pla…
"What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lo…
Every performance of my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf is prefaced by a special turn-off-your-cellphones announcement that I wrote myself. It's based on the model…
From 2006: People are forever telling me that a work of art should be “criticized on its own terms.” (Mr. Parabasis, one of my favorite bloggers, got after me a few weeks ago on …
"The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it." W.H. Auden, "Reading" (from The Dyer's Hand)
I am now officially a professional stage director. My new production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, opened on Friday at Palm Beach Dramaworks, where it will run through June 12. M…
Sir Thomas Beecham and the Chicago Symphony perform a suite from Love in Bath, a ballet score assembled and arranged by Beecham from music drawn from the operas of Handel. This performance w…
"All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'" W.H. Auden, "Interlude: West’s Disease" (from The Dyer's Hand)
Palm Beach Dramaworks' production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring Barry Shabaka Henley and directed by me, opens tonight in West Palm Beach. With two successful public previews under our…
In today's Wall Street Journal I file the second of two reports from Baltimore's Everyman Theatre, which is currently presenting Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in rotating …
Louis Armstrong and His All Stars record "I Ain't Got Nobody" in 1959. This sound film, shot at the sessions for Satchmo Plays King Oliver, is the only known footage of Armstrong at work in …
"Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in. That's why you can't believe in the afterlife, Va…
The first public preview of Palm Beach Dramaworks' production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which took place last night, went so smoothly that I canceled today's rehearsal. With one final previ…
"The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it's trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that pa…
Louis Armstrong and His All Stars perform "A Kiss to Build a Dream On" in concert in 1962: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wedne…
