Wednesday, May 18, 2016
The original Benny Goodman Quartet plays “Avalon” on Timex All-Star Swing Festival, taped at Lincoln Center and originally telecast by NBC in 1972. Goodman plays clarinet, Lionel Hampton…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, May 17, 2016
Every performance of my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf is prefaced by a special turn-off-your-cellphones announcement that I wrote myself. It’s based on the mod…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2006: People are forever telling me that a work of art should be “criticized on its own terms.” (Mr. Parabasis, one of my favorite bloggers, got after me a few weeks ago on …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.” W.H. Auden, “Reading” (from The Dyer’s Hand)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, May 16, 2016
I am now officially a professional stage director. My new production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, opened on Friday at Palm Beach Dramaworks, where it will run through June 12. M…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:30AMSir Thomas Beecham and the Chicago Symphony perform a suite from Love in Bath, a ballet score assembled and arranged by Beecham from music drawn from the operas of Handel. This performance w…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AM“All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: ‘I refuse to be what I am.’” W.H. Auden, “Interlude: West’s Disease” (from The Dyer’s H…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMFriday, May 13, 2016
Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, starring Barry Shabaka Henley and directed by me, opens tonight in West Palm Beach. With two successful public previews under o…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I file the second of two reports from Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, which is currently presenting Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in rotat…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:30AMLouis Armstrong and His All Stars record “I Ain’t Got Nobody” in 1959. This sound film, shot at the sessions for Satchmo Plays King Oliver, is the only known footage of Armstrong at wo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AM“Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in the a…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMThursday, May 12, 2016
The first public preview of Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, which took place last night, went so smoothly that I canceled today’s rehearsal. With one final p…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:30AM“The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in tha…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMWednesday, May 11, 2016
Louis Armstrong and His All Stars perform “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” in concert in 1962: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, W…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, May 10, 2016
Over the weekend I spent two consecutive twelve-hour working days in technical rehearsals for my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf. I say “my” because I wrote th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 08:00AMFrom 2006: On Monday morning I pulled on my sweats, hailed a cab, and made my way across town to the office of my cardiologist, unfed and insufficiently slept but on the whole optimistic. A …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short.…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, May 9, 2016
Leonard Bernstein plays and conducts Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1970: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“It is a defect of God’s humor that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.” Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, May 6, 2016
In today’s Wall Street Journal I file the first of two reports from Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, which is currently presenting Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire in rotati…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMGwen Verdon and Chita Rivera perform “Nowadays” and “Hot Honey Rag” on The Mike Douglas Show and are interviewed by Douglas. The songs were written by Fred Kander and John Ebb for th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“When a question is still undecided, a politician can have any opinion at all on the subject, but once the matter is settled, there’s only one place for a politician to be: with the …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, May 5, 2016
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I talk about the decline of the play-based film. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Fifty years ago, “A Man for All Seasons” and “Who’…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM“I love Latin quotations. I suspect that nobody ever said anything in Latin which was above the level of barber shop philosophy, but it has a wondrous sonority.” Robertson Davies, The Pa…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, May 4, 2016
Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra perform Sy Oliver’s “Well, Git It!” in Du Barry Was a Lady, directed by Roy Del Ruth and released in 1943. Buddy Rich is the drummer and the trumpet solo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:05AM“‘How do men get to be dictators, that’s what I want to know?’ Aunt Flora looked round disgruntledly but with an air as if soliciting approbation for her dissatisfaction. ‘Oh, the …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, May 3, 2016
• Taken a selfie • Worn flip-flops • Seen the Grand Canyon • Successfully learned a foreign language (though I tried three times) • Changed a diaper • Cooked a full-scale meal wi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2006: One of the travails of writing a biography of a great artist is that you find yourself returning repeatedly to certain words and phrases–especially superlatives. The nice th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of ‘luxury,’ the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM 
