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" Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying. "
Terry Teachout
Death
Care
Me
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" One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor. "
Terry Teachout
Why
Plays
Flavor
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Black And White
Age
America
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Age
Children
Culture
" 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.' "
Terry Teachout
Education
Experience
High
" No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing. "
Terry Teachout
Great
Clean
Spring
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Art
Balance
Best
" All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves. "
Terry Teachout
Women
End
History
" Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special. "
Terry Teachout
Special
Art
Luxury
" Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet. "
Terry Teachout
Bad
Seeing
Long
" No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle. "
Terry Teachout
Listening
Battle
People
" The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. "
Terry Teachout
Strike
American
Average
" You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.' "
Terry Teachout
Know
Appreciate
Spring
" There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri. "
Terry Teachout
Small Town
Live
Music
" Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed. "
Terry Teachout
Less
Reference
Much
" Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement. "
Terry Teachout
Character
Movement
Film
" In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it 'Grand Illusion' or 'Duck Dynasty.' "
Terry Teachout
Illusion
Want
Duck
" The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions. "
Terry Teachout
Finished
Product
Play
" Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. "
Terry Teachout
Loyalty
Without
Thought
" Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays. "
Terry Teachout
Thinks
World
British
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Believe
American
School
" Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original. "
Terry Teachout
Original
Translation
Yes
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Through
Worth
Say
" Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree. "
Terry Teachout
Falling
Feel
Autumn
" Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century. "
Terry Teachout
Art
World
Life
" Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can't save a bad film, and a bad score - so it's said - can't sink a good one. "
Terry Teachout
Bad
Good
Great
" I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people. "
Terry Teachout
Say
People
Music
" The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there. "
Terry Teachout
Good
You
Going
" I feel quite confident that audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are growing 'dumber,' if what you really mean to say is 'less culturally literate.' "
Terry Teachout
Say
Feel
Growing
" Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz. "
Terry Teachout
First
Jazz
American
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Know
American
Debt