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" If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America. "

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" The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics. "

Terry Teachout

You

Because

Bad

" Life usually tells the best stories - but sometimes it takes an artist to show us what they mean. "

Terry Teachout

Artist

Sometimes

" For the critic, the word 'best' is like a grenade without a pin: Toss it around too freely, and you're likely to get your hand blown off. "

" A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance. "

" Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music. "

" 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. "

" I can remember - barely - when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Terry Teachout

Wonderful

Art

" 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. "

" Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written. "

" I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. "

" Limitations, be they practical or arbitrary, force artists to dig more deeply instead of settling for easy answers. "

" Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood. "

" 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. "

" Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage. "

" 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. "

" In the early days of jazz, it was ensemble music: everybody playing all together. Nobody really stood out. "

" If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle. "

" I think that most of the best movies made in America in the 20th century were crime dramas, screwball comedies and westerns. "

" 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.' "

" The 'Podunk Times' is not going to have a good dance critic, I absolutely promise you that. There's just not enough dance there. "

" Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it. "

" Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them. "

" 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. "

" For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate. "

" 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. "

" Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher. "

" A critic is not a creative artist, is a commenter, a midwife of creativity, but not creative himself. "

" 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. "