2,374 stories by "Terry Teachout"
From 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 important …
"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 in…
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 voice f…
Glenn 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 earli…
"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 t…
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. Here's a…
"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." CzesÅ‚aw MiÅ‚osz, Nobel Prize acceptance speec…
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…
"Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms." Ross Macdonald, The Chill
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: (Th…
"I'd given up offering advice. Even when people asked for it, they resented getting it." Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case
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 befor…
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 shared the…
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…
Terry Teachout says the Broadway musical 'Big Fish' sends you home stunned by the efficiency with which its producers squandered every cent they spent.
"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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
"War Horse" achieves poetry and a powerful emotional punch on stage by dispensing with conventional theatrical illusion. So what's not to like?
If Ms. Foster weren't already a star, her current turn in Roundabout Theatre's "Anything Goes" would surely make her one.
The works of this British playwright born in 1911 had been among the most popular of the 20th century. Terry Teachout looks at why they dropped off the scope in America, and why he wishes th…
