Interview: Terry Teachout on Armstrong, Mencken, and Middlebrow

If Terry Teachout, the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal who also blogs at About Last Night, sounds particularly refreshed in our latest podcast, it isn’t because he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Shortly before our interview, he and his wife had recently spent two nights at Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Seth Peterson Cottage, one of the last residences that Wright designed, in Lake Delton, Wisconsin.

Beyond that experience, Terry and I discuss:

The life and death of America’s mid-century middlebrow culture.
Louis Armstrong’s place in middlebrow culture.
Satchmo at the Waldorf, the play that Terry wrote about Armstrong, which recently debuted.
The interaction between a counterculture and the dominant culture.
What would Mencken, an earlier biographic subject, think of the Blogosphere?
The dangerous challenge of revising a Broadway play for contemporary audiences: “Is the Text of a Classic Ever Sacred?”
The sequel to Teachout’s book on Armstrong, Pops.