Friday, February 8, 2019
“If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.” Joseph Addi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, February 7, 2019
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wa…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“There is one rule that works in every calamity. Be it pestilence, war, or famine, the rich get richer and poor get poorer. The poor even help arrange it.” Will Rogers, Daily T…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, February 6, 2019
I turned sixty-three today. Tonight Mrs. T, her father, and I are going to see Moses Pendleton’s Momix, a modern dance troupe that’s new to her and which I haven’t seen for longer than…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AMPerry Como sings “Lucky to Be Me” (from On the Town), by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. This performance was originally broadcast on NBC’s Chesterfield Su…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Fortune turns all things to the advantage of those on whom she smiles.” François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, February 5, 2019
From 2009: Mr. Elegant Variation has posted a list by James Wood of what he regards as the best British and American writing since 1945. The list was drawn up in 1994 and consists in the mai…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, February 4, 2019
The original trailer for Corn’s-a-Poppin’, Robert Altman’s first film, released in 1956: To learn more about the history of this film, go here. (This is the latest in a serie…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, February 1, 2019
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review a small-scale off-off-Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! Here’s an excerpt. * * * Eugene…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:04AMIn my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I talk about They Shall Not Grow Old, Peter Jackson’s new World War II documentary, and the way in which it uses digital …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AMTitus Techera, who hosts a podcast for the American Cinema Foundation on which he and his guests discuss important films of the past and present, invited me back to talk about Jacques Tourne…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMHenri Matisse, filmed while working on “Young Woman in White, Red Background”: To view the finished painting, go here. (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Work, play—at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking—t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, January 31, 2019
“If I wasn’t an actor, I think I’d have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life—i…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, January 30, 2019
Frank Sinatra sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” (from A Little Night Music).This performance, taped in front of a live audience, was originally telecast by NBC on Nove…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“By the time an actor knows how to act any sort of part he is often too old to act any but a few.” W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, January 29, 2019
From 2009: A great man (or woman) is too big to cram into a book-sized box. The best that you can do is offer a summary of the current state of knowledge about him, written from your own poi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Movie actors are just ordinary mixed-up people—with agents.” Jean Kerr, Mary, Mary
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, January 28, 2019
George Raft and Carole Lombard dance a duet in Rumba, a 1935 film directed by Marion Gering. The song to which they are dancing is Ralph Rainger’s “The Magic of You”: (This is the…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“We look at the dance to impart the sensation of living in an affirmation of life, to energize the spectator into keener awareness of the vigor, the mystery, the humor, the variety, and th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, January 25, 2019
My latest monthly essay for Commentary, occasioned by Alan Walker’s important new primary-source biography of Fryderyk Chopin, is now on line: Chopin…was a publicity-shunning introvert w…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:32AMThe twenty-sixth episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:47AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review a new Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s True West. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Sooner or later, most serio…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMRonald Reagan appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?The host is John Daly and panelists are Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen. This segment was…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The awareness of the relationship between the self and the world is precisely what breaks down in anxiety.” Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, January 24, 2019
“Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.” Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, January 23, 2019
Bing Crosby is interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1972. This clip was originally telecast as part of an episode of Parkinson, which was aired by the BBC on December 23, 1972: (This is …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life.” George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, January 22, 2019
From 2009: I never succeeded in engaging with John Updike’s work, and I’ve always assumed that the fault is mine. Throughout my lifetime he was the very model of a modern man of letters,…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM 
