2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
Memory is the great blessing of a happy life. I have nothing but pleasant memories of my mother's family's Fourth of July cookouts, which rank among the highlights of my small-town youth. Th…
Ry Cooder sings and plays "Tamp 'Em Up Solid" at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1979: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday,…
"To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race." Calvin Coolidge (quoted in the New York Times, September 17, 1923)
In today's Wall Street Journal I review an important Chicago-area revival of Company. Here's an excerpt. * * * Sooner or later, every play becomes a history play, a time capsule whose carefu…
Mrs. T and I dined the other night at a "gastropub" (a neologism I dislike intensely, but we seem to be stuck with it). One of the dishes that I ordered was a salad whose constituent parts i…
John T. Scopes is the mystery guest on To Tell the Truth. Scopes was the Tennessee high-school teacher who was the defendant in the 1925 anti-evolution
"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to …
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I discuss the Metropolitan Opera's current travails at the box office, and speculate on whether they're soluble. Here's an excerpt. * * * Th…
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 Wall Stre…
"In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes." John Ruskin, Modern Painters
"Together Again," a 1976 CBC television special featuring Tony Bennett and Bill Evans: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday…
"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data." Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Scandal in Bohemia"
From 2006: I got up this morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal drama column in a setting different from the office-bedroom where I normally pass my working hours…. In Smalltown I sit at…
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain. (Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.) Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (trans. Anna Swanwick)
It's already been a wildly busy year, and I just covered a back-to-back pair of out-of-town shows at Chicago's Writers Theatre and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Not wanting to burn…
Max Beerbohm's The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, written in 1897, is an Oscar Wilde-like fable whose protagonist, Lord George Hell, is a "greedy, destructive, and disobedient"…
Montgomery Clift is interviewed by Hy Gardner on The Hy Gardner Show. This program was originally taped for broadcast on WOR-TV on January 13, 1963. It is believed to be the only television …
"No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation." Walter Bagehot, "Mr. Gladstone"
In today's Wall Street Journal I review a Massachusetts revival of Fiorello! Here's an excerpt. * * * What makes a musical revivable? The mere fact that it was a hit on Broadway once upon a …
"It was extraordinary how fond she had become of this man, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and she reflected upon how few persons there were with whom she felt an instinctive rapport. There was never…
"I suppose I could count Reading as my hobby, but I read so much, it is so central to my existence, that, were I to do so, I might as well add Breathing as another of my hobbies." Joseph Eps…
Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927, a 1955 film directed by Jean Painlevé, in which Alexander Calder demonstrates the workings of the miniature circus that he constructed in 1927. It is now part o…
" It's risky business to speak for the dead. In the terrible case of Dmitri Shostakovich, the temptation is strong, because history, in the form of Stalin, didn't allow the composer to speak…
From 2006: Nobody walks anywhere in a small town, except maybe next door or across the street. When I told my mother I was going to walk downtown to buy a belt, she boggled. It took me a goo…
"This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an exte…
