Wednesday, July 6, 2016
Gérard Souzay sings Duparc’s “L’invitation du voyage,” accompanied by Dalton Baldwin, in an undated telecast dating from the early Sixties: (This is the latest in a series of arts-r…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, July 5, 2016
From 2006: I’m not one of those people who thinks everything was better when he was young, nor do I suffer from excessive respect for politicians, but I do have sharply mixed feelings …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I felt in that last glimpse of him that many of the ordinary ties of human relationship and of friendship were denied him. He could have enemies and faithful subordinates and obsequious b…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, July 4, 2016
Van Cliburn and the Fort Worth Symphony perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the ballpark in Arlington, Texas, on opening day of the 1994 baseball season: (This is the latest in a serie…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMMemory is the great blessing of a happy life. I have nothing but pleasant memories of my mother’s family’s Fourth of July cookouts, which rank among the highlights of my small-town youth…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMRy Cooder sings and plays “Tamp ’Em Up Solid” at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1979: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wedn…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race.” Calvin Coolidge (quoted in the New York Times, September 17, 1923)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, July 1, 2016
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important Chicago-area revival of Company. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Sooner or later, every play becomes a history play, a time capsule whose ca…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMMrs. T and I dined the other night at a “gastropub” (a neologism I dislike intensely, but we seem to be stuck with it). One of the dishes that I ordered was a salad whose constituent par…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMJohn T. Scopes is the mystery guest on To Tell the Truth. Scopes was the Tennessee high-school teacher who was the defendant in the 1925 anti-evolution
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, June 30, 2016
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss the Metropolitan Opera’s current travails at the box office, and speculate on whether they’re soluble. Here’s an excer…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMHere’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 Wall St…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.” John Ruskin, Modern Painters
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, June 29, 2016
“Together Again,” a 1976 CBC television special featuring Tony Bennett and Bill Evans: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wedne…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, June 28, 2016
From 2006: I got up this morning and wrote my Wall Street Journal drama column in a setting different from the office-bedroom where I normally pass my working hours…. In Smalltown I sit at…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AMAgainst stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain. (Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.) Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (trans. Anna Swanwick)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, June 27, 2016
It’s already been a wildly busy year, and I just covered a back-to-back pair of out-of-town shows at Chicago’s Writers Theatre and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Not wanting to …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMMax Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men, written in 1897, is an Oscar Wilde-like fable whose protagonist, Lord George Hell, is a “greedy, destructive, and disobedi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMMontgomery Clift is interviewed by Hy Gardner on The Hy Gardner Show. This program was originally taped for broadcast on WOR-TV on January 13, 1963. It is believed to be the only television …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.” Walter Bagehot, “Mr. Gladstone”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, June 24, 2016
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Massachusetts revival of Fiorello! Here’s an excerpt. * * * What makes a musical revivable? The mere fact that it was a hit on Broadway once upo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM“It was extraordinary how fond she had become of this man, thought Mrs. Pollifax, and she reflected upon how few persons there were with whom she felt an instinctive rapport. There was nev…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, June 23, 2016
“I suppose I could count Reading as my hobby, but I read so much, it is so central to my existence, that, were I to do so, I might as well add Breathing as another of my hobbies.” Joseph…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, June 22, 2016
Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927, a 1955 film directed by Jean Painlevé, in which Alexander Calder demonstrates the workings of the miniature circus that he constructed in 1927. It is now part o…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“ It’s risky business to speak for the dead. In the terrible case of Dmitri Shostakovich, the temptation is strong, because history, in the form of Stalin, didn’t allow the composer to…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, June 21, 2016
From 2006: Nobody walks anywhere in a small town, except maybe next door or across the street. When I told my mother I was going to walk downtown to buy a belt, she boggled. It took me a goo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an ex…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, June 20, 2016
Ivy Compton-Burnett admitted in old age that she could no longer read the novels of Jane Austen, which she loved, because she knew them so well that they could no longer hold her attention. …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:30AM 
