Tuesday, 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“Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, January 21, 2019
Ricardo Montalban “plays” “Fantasia Mexicana,” Johnny Green’s arrangement for piano and orchestra of Aaron Copland’s El Salón Mexico, in Fiesta, a 1947 film directed b…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Suffering is admittedly one of the central problems of human existence; but this is because we have a suspicion that it is all for nothing. If we had a certainty about meaning, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, January 18, 2019
My Wall Street Journal review of the Broadway transfer of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy is now on line. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Careerwise, Tarell Alvin McCran…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMFred Astaire is interviewed by Michael Parkinson in 1976. This clip is an excerpt from an episode of Parkinson, originally telecast by the BBC on February 14, 1976: (This is the latest …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.” Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, January 17, 2019
In my new Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which I resume this week after a hiatus caused by Mrs. T’s recent illness, I write about the reissue of The Kindness of Strangers…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.” Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, January 16, 2019
John Hartford is interviewed by Hugh Hefner, then performs “California Earthquake.” This clip was taped on November 10, 1968, for an episode of Playboy After Dark, Hefner’s syndic…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:01AM“Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artifact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMTuesday, January 15, 2019
From 2009: I went to Kansas City to spend a day communing with myself when young, wondering whether I’d know where to look for him. I drove toward what sounded like a familiar address, too…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMThose wearing Tolerance for a labelCall other views intolerable. Phyllis McGinley, “In Praise of Diversity”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, January 14, 2019
Most of the time I can’t quite grasp the undeniable fact that I’m sixty-two, going on sixty-three. Rarely if ever do I feel that old, and I know I don’t look anything like my age …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMBenno Moiseiwitsch, Constant Lambert, and the London Philharmonic play an excerpt from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto in Battle for Music, a British wartime propaganda film rele…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMSo might two climbers lost in mountain weather On a high slope and taken by the storm, Desperate in the darkness, cling together Under one cloak and breathe each other warm. Stay near me…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, January 11, 2019
Malcolm Muggeridge interviews Edward R. Murrow on Panorama, a BBC series first seen in 1953 that is the world’s longest-running television program about current affairs. The two men discus…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable dist…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, January 10, 2019
“With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Notebook L
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, January 9, 2019
“Their one idea was to get in with people who didn’t want them and to take snubs as if they were honorable scars.” Henry James, “The Pupil”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, January 8, 2019
“History is irony on the move, the Mind’s jeer down through men and events. Today this belief triumphs; tomorrow, vanquished, it will be dismissed and replaced: those who accepted i…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, January 7, 2019
“Why is it when we get older, we think it’s the weather that’s changing?” Robert W. Lenski, teleplay for Decoration Day (adapted from a novella by John William Corrington)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, January 4, 2019
Two episodes of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, became available on line for listening or…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM“There is one thing that 99 percent of all critics share with one another: they are failures. I don’t mean failures as critics—my God, that’s understood. I don’t even mean they are…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, January 3, 2019
In addition to my regular drama columns, I published three other pieces in <I>The Wall Street Journal</I> during my recent semi-hiatus from this blog. The first one, which ra…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AM“Examine any work of art down to its bone and you find cliché.” William Goldman, <I>The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway</I> (courtesy of Jason Zinoman)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, January 2, 2019
My Wall Street Journal best-theater-of-2018 list appeared in the paper two weeks ago. Here are some excerpts. You can read the whole thing by going here. * * * • …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AMOne of the finest new plays of the year just past, Heather Raffo’s Noura, opened off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons a couple of days after I had to send in my Wall Street Journal best-t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM“‘Do you know any happy music?’ asked Stephen. ‘I do not.’” Patrick O’Brien, The Hundred Days
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, January 1, 2019
I parted company with most of my colleagues in my Wall Street Journal review of Aaron Sorkin’s new stage version of To Kill a Mockingbird, whose Broadway premiere I loathed. In the sa…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM“The sea, if it teaches nothing else, does at least compel a submission to the inevitable which resembles patience.” Patrick O’Brien, Blue at the Mizzen
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM 
