2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
I'm relieved to announce that I'm back on line again after a four-day absence, freshly equipped with a MacBook Air after spending the better part of a decade using a laptop that was teeterin…
From 2005: Of course it's desirable to be right, and I don’t see how it's possible to take seriously a critic who's wrong about most things. Nevertheless, I'm uneasy with the notion th…
"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful then the truths of little men." Friedrich Nietzsche, "Fragment of a Critique of Schopenhauer" (trans. Walter Kaufmann)
I drove into Manhattan three Saturdays ago to see a pair of Broadway matinees. When I got to our apartment and checked my e-mail, I found a message from the Metropolitan Museum reminding me …
Audie Murphy appears as the mystery guest on What's My Line? on July 3, 1955. John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Q. Lewis…
"The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven’s Chancery itself; and, slowl…
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway transfer of Eclipsed, a new Broadway revival of The Gin Game, and the New York premiere of Unseamly. Here's an excerpt. * * * "Eclips…
Benedict Cumberbatch and Kobna Holdbrook-Smit perform an excerpt from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This performance, which took place at London's Olivier Theatre, wa…
"We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can pos…
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…
"Resentment isn’t a magnetic personal style." Peggy Noonan, "Confessions of a White House Speechwriter"
I've been putting it off for the past couple of years, but the time has finally come for me to buy a new laptop"a MacBook Air, to be exact. In order to make the Big Switch, I'll have to drop…
An excerpt from BBC2's 1982 TV production of Noël Coward's A Song at Twilight, directed by Cedric Messina and featuring Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield. The role played by Scofield is a fi…
"Noah, you're so full of what's right you can't see what's good!" N. Richard Nash, The Rainmaker
Dawn Powell and I go back a long way. I wrote about her in the New York Times Book Review in 1995, asking the same question that everybody asks: why isn't so deliciously witty a writer more …
From 2005: I haven't had anything to say in print about August Wilson’s death, and won't, because it happens that I haven't seen all that much of his work. I rarely sought it out befor…
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we …
Mrs. T and I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Florida this past February, an experience that I described in this space shortly thereafter: When it was all over, I talked nonstop …
The Jimmy Giuffre 3 performs Giuffre's "Four Brothers" in Rome in 1959. Jim Hall is the guitarist, Buddy Clark the bassist: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear…
"The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave pa…
The Wall Street Journal has given me extra space today to review two Broadway revivals, Fool for Love and Old Times, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater's Diary of Anne Frank. Here's an excerp…
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I write about surviving sound recordings of the speaking voices of men and women born in the nineteenth century. Here's an excerpt. * * * In…
Little Richard sings "Long Tall Sally" in Don't Knock the Rock, a 1956 film directed by Fred F. Sears: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each M…
"Show me somethin' dat caution ever made!" Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (courtesy of Laila Lalami)
"God! It costs you something to do good! You learn that by experience, too. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse an…
