RIP Terry Teachout
Another person connected with the arts has died. This time it’s WSJ drama critic and playwright Terry Teachout, who died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-five. Teachout wasn’t just a drama critic and playwright, either; he was “an acclaimed author, a jazz connoisseur, [and] a dance scholar.” He wrote biographies of H.L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and George Balanchine:
Nate Chinen, who writes about jazz for NPR, says he was dazzled by Teachout’s breadth. “So many critics are specialists, and that’s where they get their authority,” he told NPR. “[Teachout] was able to write with authority, insight and perceptiveness about so many art styles, forms and disciplines. And he did so with a real clarity of opinion.”
“There was nobody around who also covered jazz, rock, pop, classical music, dance, ballet, film, books and any other medium that came along the way Terry did,” Washington Post music critic Tim Page added in an email to NPR. “His tastes tended conservative but he could often be convinced and nobody was more cheerful about changing his mind. Above all, he was the sort of friend with whom you could have an argument that remained always within the bounds of love.”
“His tastes tended conservative” – unusual in the circles in which he moved.
When I did a search of my blog for Teachout’s name I was surprised to discover that I’ve never written about him before. That doesn’t mean I never read anything he wrote, though; I did, although not all that often.
The piece of his I remember best was his review of the abominable 2012 “re-imagining” of the opera “Porgy and Bess.” I saw the production and detested it, and therefore I really appreciated his deft and witty panning of it (in contrast, I found that whenever I tried to write about that “Porgy and Bess” on this blog it turned into an incredibly lengthy and heated rant). Here’s how Teachout saw it:
It ought to be good news that “Porgy and Bess” is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers’ estates as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show’s essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you’ve never seen or heard “Porgy,” you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you’ll be appalled.
I am very familiar with the opera “Porgy and Bess” – I know almost every word – and I was so appalled I spent some of my audience time there with my face in my hands, unable to look although definitely listening with dread.
More from Teachout:
Among other ludicrously euphemistic touches, the grievously crippled Porgy, who in the opera must ride around on a goat-drawn cart, now walks on his own with what Ms. Parks calls “a modest cane,” suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with the poor fellow that couldn’t be fixed up by a visit to his friendly neighborhood chiropractor. Diedre L. Murray has done comparable damage to the score, tarting up some numbers, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin'” (pardon me, “I Got Plenty of Nothing”) in particular, almost beyond recognition. Her musical tampering is tasteless, condescending and, above all, unnecessary: Anyone who thinks that George Gershwin’s great score needs to be “modernized” in order to make it palatable to Broadway audiences is by definition unqualified to touch a note of it.
There’s more at the link, which wasn’t behind a paywall.
RIP Terry Teachout, who seems to have lived a rich, full life.
Terry Teaching made Commentary — and often The Weekly Standard — regular and rewarding newsstand buys for me.
I will miss him.
I love this blog partly for all the new people I learn about — having had a bizarre, scary childhood & post-decades.
This blog is eye opening. Thank you all!!
There was much to admire about Terry Teachout: enthusiastic, erudite, but not stuffily “high brow” either. His devotion to “Mrs. T” always seemed very touching: they found each other relatively late in life — she had a fatal lung disease, he, albeit a successful critic, was frankly (at least from photos, I never met him) an unusually unattractive man physically, so the romance had a hint of _The Enchanted Cottage_ about it. I stopped Twitter and reading the outlets he published in some time ago, so did not know that he had found love again after her death.
I can’t resist adding — because it’s always puzzled me — that although he seemed tailor-made to my wavelength, in fact, I found that I was almost always disappointed by his recommendations, whether music, movies, theater or books. His advocacy of Elaine Dundy’s _The Dud Avocado_ was a particularly dud.
That’s neither here nor there of course — just curious whether my reaction is just me or not. I guess it wasn’t for Neo & Porgy & Bess.
His death, however, reminds me of how completely betrayed I feel by every cultural institution in America (if not the Western World). In skimming the web about Teachout, I saw that he had recently been recommending the Irish Repertory Theater. Going to their website, it looked not too horrible, but of course, one of the tabs on their homepage took me to their DIE statements, and maunderings about how they recognized that the Irish were white, but how they were going to dismantle all their assumptions, after the tragic death of George Floyd, blah, blah, blah. A disgusting display of conformity and lack of artist integrity.
This led me to check up on what had happened to one of my formally favorite theater groups, the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.
This repertory company had built a reproduction (or close enough) of the Blackfriars Theater in London, and had a mission to perform Shakespeare in the original staging — i.e. with minimal sets, few scene or act breaks, and with “the lights on.” When I discovered them, it was pretty marvelous, and I went back fairly often in trying to complete me “all of Shakespeare” bucket list, and to feed my interest in non-Shakespeare Elizabethan/Jacobean plays, which they also made a point of staging.
But the rot was there. They commissioned a series of new plays that were to be Shakespeare updated. The few I saw, however, were predictable and mediocre “reimagined through a feminist lens.” The old artistic director retired, and a new guy well known in the subsidized theater circuit took over. As a rep company, they had long cast people in whatever roles somewhat regardless of age, sex, race. But under the new director, casting a fat unshaven guy as Mistress Anne Page became the point, breaking gender assumptions. Daring, don’t you see. We somehow knew we would not come back.
Then Covid hit, and when I checked up on them I saw that the outside director was out, and that the company would now be run by the actors themselves, particularly two long-time, crowd-pleasing actors.
But I cleared off to Florida, and didn’t check up again until my urge to express myself here. Naturally I found that the popular actors are out, and the first “Black man” is now the manager, a diversity consulting company has been hired, and the manager’s goal is to “illuminate the canon in novel ways for audiences, ‘decentering’ who they perceive to be in these stories, breaking the legacies of the action of the past.”
The popular actors who were to be the managers have left, board members have resigned, the budget and staff is now half and, as Jordan Peterson says, “Well, good luck with that.”
Anyhow, I feel definitely like there has been an earthquake, rubble is all around me, and few people say anything.
Thanks for indulging this rant!
Nancy B.: “His death, however, reminds me of how completely betrayed I feel by every cultural institution in America (if not the Western World).” You speak for me. It’s one of the reasons I found it difficult to comment on Teachout’s death. It’s not just the man who died. It’s the culture. Teachout was a champion of mid-century American middlebrow culture. He grew up in it; I grew up in it. It shaped us and the world we knew. His death is yet another sign that that world is gone. What has replaced it is stupid, shabby, and malevolent.
My parents and I saw a superb production of “Guys and Dolls” at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts on the strength of Teachout’s review. That outing was a high point for us and one of my warmest memories from the last years of their lives. That was in 2011. I just visited the Barrington Stage website. This is what I found:
https://barringtonstageco.org/about-the-company/
Politicized pabulum. (P.S. I too found “The Dud Avocado” a disappointment. Got about 30 pages in and gave it up.)
Nancy B. and Hubert:
You folks nailed it. “[American middlebrow culture] shaped us and the world we knew.” I think that speaks for very many Americans, particularly between the coasts. Thank you both for your comments.
I really identified with “the manager’s goal is to “illuminate the canon in novel ways for audiences, ‘decentering’ who they perceive to be in these stories, breaking the legacies of the action of the past.”’ What arrant nonsense. What egotistical stuff.
The world has clearly shifted on its axis.
These examples remind me all the “Jane Austen as she would have been if she hadn’t been Jane Austen” remakes. Yeccch.
C.S. Lewis perfectly skewered this style in “The Great Divorce” with the modernized cleric who’s working on an alt-history biography of Jesus Christ as He would have been if His career hadn’t been cut short by that unfortunate crucifixion business.
}}} Anyone who thinks that George Gershwin’s great score needs to be “modernized” in order to make it palatable to Broadway audiences is by definition unqualified to touch a note of it.
As I’ve no doubt commented before, I similarly loath My Fair Lady, which is a direct “musicallization” of G.B. Shaw’s “Pygmalion” (as opposed to the “reskinning” of “Romeo and Juliet” as “West Side Story”, which didn’t really “try” and BE Romeo and Juliet, it redid the story somewhat to make a modernized interpretation. More honest, though it had its problems — “Mariaaaa!?!?! Mariaaaaa!!” anyone? 😀 )
G.B. Shaw is arguably the second greatest playwright in the English language, behind, of course Shakespeare. To take his signature play, his personal best (his own belief) — Pygmalion — and shoehorn songs and musical numbers into its cadences and rhythms is like colorizing Hitchcock. It’s like painting underwear on classical nudes (yes, someone did this in olden days). It’s an abortion that ought to be recognized by a firing squad.
Worse still, It’s just horribly miscast. Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle? Seriously? Hepburn could be tarred, feathered, and then dropped into a septic tank, and when you fished her out, you’d wipe off some of the shit with a wet towel, and go, “My God, you’re beautiful!”. 😀
Eliza Doolittle is not a woman who IS gorgeous — she’s a woman who can transform into gorgeous. Give her a serious wipe with a wet rag, use some spit to mat down the cowlick – (with surprise in your tone:) “Hey, you ARE really beautiful!” She ain’t someone like Audrey, she’s more like Katherine. Neither is unattractive, but the latter takes a bit of nudging to get there.
Contrast with Wendy Hiller, who played Eliza in Shaw’s own 1930s production. You can see her transforming from a “guttersnipe” into a lady, and that is the very point of the character — she transforms in Higgins’ hands from a guttersnipe into a high class lady.
Similarly with the Higgins’ role — Rex Harrison clearly does not grasp the character, at all. He plays him as a cold fish.
Contrast, once again, with Leslie Howard, who plays Higgins properly — he is a very very passionate man, who has sublimated his passion into his love of language. And, via the process of teaching Eliza to be a lady for a bet, falls for the beauty he has created, and transfers that passion to her.
The rest are equally horrid, from Eliza’s father to Freddy, her young “suitor”. Compare to Shaw’s version to see what the character — according to Shaw, due to his close supervision as producer — is really supposed to look and act like.
NOW — I’m posdef NOT telling you you cannot enjoy My Fair Lady. I’m just saying you should see Pygmalion, and, like it or not, realize that it IS the definitive version, because it is, except for the very ending (demanded by the studio), exactly the way SHAW felt it should be done, within the limits of film techniques at the time. And in time, you may come around to my point of view, as you realize how much better the casting is in the 30s version, how much the songs change the pacing of the play, and so on.
I will also concur — West Side Story is also a bad version, but at least it is “based on”, and not “XXX, the musical”.
From that era, I far prefer The Music Man, for musicals, not the least of which is it has a number of excellent songs, one of which (‘Til There Was You) Paul McCartney wanted to record for his own purposes (never officially released, of course, because They did not, after 1964, ever release covers) but it IS available through a bootleg…. He’s also seen fit to do covers during live performances, and here IS one of the Beatles performing it BEFORE 1964. He clearly loves the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUjFpdxFWHU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJaap5XwiPA
Not looking to hijack the thread, but… some people should be lined up against a wall and shot, for their “creative efforts”. They repeatedly show a total, abject failure to understand the nature of the source material, in all too many cases. Colorizing Hitchcock is another example, mentioned earlier.
😉
There was once is rather sinister toy…it consisted of a box with a switch on the side of it. When you turned it on, the box would open, a hand would come out…and turn itself off.
That is basically what much of the American academic and arts ‘communities’ have done over recent decades.
OBloody:
You might not have been quite as incensed by the original Broadway production of “My Fair Lady,” which I saw as a young child, although from what you write I guess you wouldn’t have actually liked it. But Julie Andrews (the original Eliza in the musical on the stage) was not as initially “beautiful” as Hepburn. I’m not a fan of the movie version, and I very much like the film of the straight play of Shaw’s. I wrote about all of this in this post.
And by the way – as you’ll see if you read that link – the ending of the movie “Pygmalion” was quite different than that in Shaw’s original play “Pygmalion.”
He wrote biographies of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, which are in my library. Highly recommended. I never met Terry Teachout, but some years after I started reading his articles, several of his articles pointed out he was close to some people with names that sounded as if they were from my hometown. Upon further inquiry, I found out that yes, they were from my hometown.
Anyone read or seen a production of Shaw’s, “Man and Superman?” It explores a lot of similar themes, but from the woman’s side. It’s been a long time since I saw it but I thought it was brilliant.
I really like the movie, “Pygmalion.” I don’t think I’ve read the play.
I agree that it’s impossible for Hepburn to appear as anything even close to ordinary, let alone beneath ordinary. Just watched a nice documentary of her on Netflix. It used ballet (Hepburn’s first artistic love) as a central theme.
“Get me to the Church on Time” is a great song.
Gringo,
I believe Teachout was from Sikeston, Missouri, home of the throwed rolls. 🙂
Somewhere, sometime, I read an article about the production of “My Fair Lady,” which was a trial for the music conductor because Rex Harrison was not, to put it charitably, much of a singer.
After going through one number in rehearsal several times in different keys, tempos, etc. to aid the actor in producing an acceptable solo, the conductor finally asked in exasperation, “Well, then, Mr. Harrison, how would YOU like to do it?”
To which Rex replied, “I should LIKE to do it as a straight play!”