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" At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. "
Terry Teachout
Down
Best
Cold
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" Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music. "
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" Fred Astaire never let you see him sweat, but he sweetened his deceptively casual virtuosity with just enough charm to make it irresistible. "
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" I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. "
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" If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle. "
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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. "
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" Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own. "
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" I loved music from earliest childhood - from as long as I can remember. "
Terry Teachout
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Remember
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" The first play I ever saw - I was in junior high school - was a high school production of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit,' which seemed to me absolutely magical. "
Terry Teachout
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Play
High School
" The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood. "
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" 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
" 'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours. "
Terry Teachout
Man
Today
First
" 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. "
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Jazz
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" Most 'Monty Python' fans are, of course, baby boomers, who have long been a nostalgic lot and are growing more so as they totter toward old age. "
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Baby
Age
Growing
" Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way. "
Terry Teachout
Though
Music
Analysis
" What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns. "
Terry Teachout
Painting
See
Look
" 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
" 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
" I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz. "
Terry Teachout
Years
Jazz
Professional
" What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone. "
Terry Teachout
Watch
Performance
Change
" There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative. "
Terry Teachout
Who
Still
Social
" 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
" 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
" The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall. "
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Wonderful
Art
" As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it. "
Terry Teachout
Early
Late
Dance
" I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so. "
Terry Teachout
Judge
Meaning
Changes
" 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. "
Terry Teachout
Us
Fact
Trumpet
" David Cromer, from Chicago, I think is the most gifted young director in America. "
Terry Teachout
Young
Think
Director
" Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it. "
Terry Teachout
Knew
Music
Nobody
" The good news is that 'High School Musical' seems to be getting a lot of youngsters excited about theater. "
Terry Teachout
High School
News
School
" Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. "
Terry Teachout
Easy
Force
Limitations