Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachoutis an American critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 February 1956
CountryUnited States of America
Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.
Needless to say, anybody who can stumble through a C-major scale knows that Art Tatum always gave his audiences 10 times their money's worth.
It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists.
Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.
The backstage play, in which the private lives of theater people are put onstage for the world to see, is one of the diciest of dramatic genres.
It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.
It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.
Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Were I to be appointed Secretary of Education, I'd issue a prospectus for a compulsory nationwide high school course called 'The American Experience in Art.'
If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle.
I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto.
I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns.
I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember.