From 2005, ten years ago today: All changed, changed utterly, I told myself, knowing too well that it won’t be so easy as that. Every day I’ll get out of bed and do battle with t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AM“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMI attended my final rehearsal for the Court Theatre’s upcoming production of Satchmo at the Waldorf on Saturday. On Sunday morning I flew back to New York for the opening night of the new …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMDiana Adams and Nicholas Magallanes dance the grand pas de deux from George Balanchine’s 1954 version of The Nutcracker. The music is by Tchaikovsky. This studio performance was originally…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.” George Santayana, The Life of Reason
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMToday’s Wall Street Journal contains my best-theater-of-2015 column. Among those present: Best ensemble. I’ve yet to see a more consistently fine group of actors than the five women who …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review A Wilder Christmas, an important off-Broadway revival of two rarely seen one-act plays by Thornton Wilder. Here’s an excerpt. * * * For most of us…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMRichard Burton and Julie Andrews sing “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961. The song is from Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and the staging, by…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.” Stephen King, Christine
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMBlessings on the Peccadillo Theater Company for giving us “A Wilder Christmas,” a flawlessly staged double bill of rarely seen one-act plays by Wilder, “The Long Christmas Dinner” an…
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal at 12:12PMThe weather in Chicago, which has been unseasonably warmish since my arrival last week, is finally starting to get disagreeable, and it rained yesterday morning. So what? Well, it happens th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMO Death, all eloquent! you only prove What dust we dote on, when ’tis man we love. Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMEleanor Roosevelt appears as a guest on The Frank Sinatra Timex Show. This program was originally telecast on February 15, 1960: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that a…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” William Saroyan, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTen years and one week ago I was stricken with congestive heart failure during a Broadway preview that took place as a blizzard was getting underway. I managed to sit through the performance…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005, ten years ago today: My friend Nancy LaMott, the cabaret singer about whom I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, died ten years ago Tuesday. It wasn’t an anniversary I’d…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions, as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.” Vikt…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThe Court Theatre’s Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf continues to take shape. On Thursday Barry Shabaka Henley and I got our first look at John Culbert’s set, which is currentl…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMDaniel Harding and the London Symphony perform Sir Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.” Arthur Schopenhau…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMI am pleased—and surprised—to announce—that five drama companies, not four, will be producing Satchmo at the Waldorf this season. In addition to Chicago’s Court Theatre, San Francisc…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new Broadway musicals, School of Rock and The Color Purple. Here’s an excerpt. * * * The commodity musical, that parasitical genre in which Ho…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMSammy Davis, Jr., plays drums and vibraphone on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was originally telecast on January 6, 1963: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that app…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I have learned much about human relations through long experience. I give it to you in a nutshell: if you are in trouble, go for help and understanding to a person who is also in trouble!…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life.” Gore Vidal, Palimpsest
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMThe first rehearsal for the Chicago premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf went exhilaratingly well. Barry Shabaka Henley, whom I met for the first time yesterday morning, proved to be both a fi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMThe Paris Opera Ballet performs Jerome Robbins’ In G Major, a ballet set to Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in thi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“‘You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely.’ “‘A bit severe, isn’t i…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMA few minutes from now I’ll leave Our Girl’s apartment in Chicago and walk two blocks to the rehearsal hall where Barry Shabaka Henley, Charles Newell, and I start work later this mornin…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:14AMThe Wall Street Journal has given me an extra drama column this week in which I report on two off-Broadway premieres, Bedlam’s New York Animals and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Important…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005: Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate–as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before lon…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM
