2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
In today's Wall Street Journal I file the second of three reports on my recent visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I saw Mary Zimmerman's revival of Guys and Dolls. I also review…
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I talk about a new government program designed to support works of serious scholarship that are aimed at a popular audience"and show how suc…
A 1926 film of Wassily Kandinsky making an abstract drawing: For more information about the film, go here. (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space ea…
"Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ide…
Four years ago next month, Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, was premiered in Orlando, Florida. Since then it's been produced in Lenox, Los Angeles, New Haven, Philadelphia, and off Bro…
"A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room…
Bette Davis and Bert Lahr perform "Jealousy," a sketch by Billy Friedberg from the 1952 Broadway revue Two's Company. (Lahr's role was played on Broadway by David Burns.) This performance wa…
"It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light." G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
From 2005: You have to live in Manhattan to know how hot it gets here in the middle of August. The only film I can think of that conveys the sheer awfulness of the kind of heat wave that now…
"I try not to pay attention to notices, reviews. I try not to read them. But I have no discipline. I try to be cool about the good ones; the bad ones kill me." Edward G. Robinson (with Leona…
Liberace plays an excerpt from Liszt's A Major Piano Concerto on an undated episode of The Liberace Show filmed in the Fifties. He had previously performed the entire concerto with Hans Lang…
"Cut any sentence in the play that needs a comma. A semi-colon is disastrous. In fact, the best play has no punctuation whatsoever." Wolcott Gibbs (quoted in Marjory Adams, "Principals of 'S…
In today's Wall Street Journal I review two new plays, Lynn Nottage's Sweat at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Annie Baker's John off Broadway. Here's an excerpt. * * * Reading, the Penn…
"Henri Matisse," the German-language version of a 1946 documentary directed by François Campaux in which Matisse is shown at work in his studio: To read about the film and its contents, g…
"'Every day,' he said, 'I've got to get hold of something by the throat and strangle it. And that keeps me young.'" Henri Matisse, in conversation with Edward G. Robinson (quoted in All My Y…
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…
"Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages." Marcel Proust, …
From The North Star, released in 1943, Dana Andrews sings "The Younger Generation," with music by Aaron Copland and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The film, written by Lillian Hellman, portrays a g…
"The more slavishly and dogmatically a person falls for a ready-made ideological system or 'worldview,' the more certainly he will bury all chances of thinking, of freedom, of being clear ab…
From 2005: The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don't like his art. It's dicey merely to say that you don't understand a particular work, much less that it do…
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full." Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue
Salvador Dali talks about himself, his critics, and his work in a 1966 interview originally telecast on the CBC: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this sp…
"I repeat"how can the artist justify himself? The answer is that he cannot, and should stop boring himself with his egocentric need to try. The artist is a lucky dog. That is all there is to…
In today's Wall Street Journal I review the premiere of Jane Anderson's Mother of the Maid in Lenox, Massachusetts, and the Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline in New York's Cent…
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I report on the night I recently spent in Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright's Wisconsin home. Here's an excerpt. * * * "No man," said Dr. Johnson…
