Terry Teachout (1956-2022) was a playwright, director, biographer, librettist, and cultural and drama critic for The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, and other publications. He wrote about all manner of art from ballet to bluegrass. According to The New York Times, Teachout was comfortable writing about Haydn and Mencken, Ellington and Eakins, and “was someone who loved beauty in all its forms and believed it was his job to find it and explain it.”
Satchmo at the Waldorf, his first play, was premiered in 2011 in Orlando, Florida, and has since been produced off Broadway and by Chicago’s Court Theatre, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, the Mosaic Theater of Washington, D.C., and other companies throughout America. He made his directing debut in 2016 with Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo. Billy and Me, his second play, was premiered by Palm Beach Dramaworks in December of 2017.
He was prolific: Teachout’s books include All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (six chapters of which were written at MacDowell), Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and A Terry Teachout Reader. He has also written the libretti for Paul Moravec’s The Letter (premiered by the Santa Fe Opera in 2009 and revised at MacDowell in 2012), Danse Russe (premiered by Philadelphia’s Center City Opera Theater in 2011), and The King’s Man (premiered by Kentucky Opera in 2013). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 to support the writing of Duke and Satchmo at the Waldorf.
Terry spent a semester at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD, before transferring to William Jewell College where he earned a degree in music journalism. After graduating in 1979, he started writing music reviews for The Kansas City Star and played bass in a jazz band. After selling essays a few years apart to National Review and Commentary. In 1985, he moved to New York and got a job as an editor at Harper’s magazine, and in 1987 he moved to the editorial board of The Daily News. He also began writing for The Wall Street Journal, a relationship that would last the rest of his life.
