Quotes from Terry Teachout

'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.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

Even if I could, I wouldn't want to undo the transformation of jazz into a sophisticated art music.

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.

Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.

One of the advantages of no longer being young is that you're expected to start making up your mind about certain things.

BE KIND EVERY ONE HAVE A FIGHT.

A friend dropped in on him after a gig and asked what was new. "Nothin' new," he said. "White folks still ahead.

but John Voelker, who met him when 'Anatomy of a Murder' was being shot in Michigan, viewed him through the clear eyes of a novelist and a judge and was struck by what he saw: 'I gradually felt drawn to him, not because I savor disillusion, but rather because I sensed that, in his case at least, '[his disillusion] masked great sensitivity and pride and even, however finely veiled, a vein of melancholy and loneliness.

It was on the 1958 tour that Ellington met Queen Elizabeth II in London. 'Struck speechless' by her grace, he responded with one of his most elegant gestures, writing with Strayhorn a piece called 'The Queen's Suite', then recording it and having a single copy of the album pressed for her alone.

Theory is meaningless to a genius.

What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure.

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.

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.

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.

Unlike film, live theater is an anti-naturalistic medium in which character is mainly illuminated through speech and movement.

One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.

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

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.

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.

The setting of 'Billy Elliot' is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing.

Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.

Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and present them as soberly - and unstylishly - as possible.

A critic should always strive to recapture the sense of wonder and surprise with which he first beheld a now-familiar work of art.