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 Wall St…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AM“Kay came to realize that she preferred her books to other people’s company. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.” Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMAnnie Ross sings “Twisted,” accompanied by Count Basie on piano, Freddie Green on guitar, Ed Jones on bass, and Sonny Payne on drums. The song is a transcription of a jazz instrumental b…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“For although she had been, and still was, very much admired, she had got into the way of preferring unsatisfactory love affairs to any others, so that it was becoming almost a bad habit.�…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMBy the time most of you read these words, I’ll be somewhere between New York and Lubbock, Texas, where I’m lecturing on “The Future of Theater” at Texas Tech University and paying a …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:30AMFrom 2005: I’ve become Mr. Bernstein in Citizen Kane, a middle-aged man with a head full of fireflies, perfectly remembered pinpoints of laughter and sorrow, ecstasy and humiliation, t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:15AM“Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:00AMOn December 5 I’ll be giving the keynote address at the annual Black Orchid Banquet of the Wolfe Pack, the New York-based society whose members are jointly and severally devoted to the mys…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMSince last Tuesday I’ve seen three shows, one in Boston and two on Broadway, and written the following: • Two 800-word Wall Street Journal piece that will run on Friday, one of them a re…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFiona Apple sings “I Walk a Little Faster,” by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh. This performance was taped at a Coleman tribute concert given in Los Angeles in 2009: (This is the latest in …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“From tragedy it is seldom but a step to memorabilia.” Larry McMurtry, “A Return to Waco” (The New Republic, June 7, 1993)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the belated Broadway premiere of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia and the U.S. premiere of a new stage version of Thérèse Raquin. Here’s an e…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMAn excerpt from an interview with Arthur Miller originally telecast by the CBC in 1971: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesda…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.” Flannery O’Connor, letter to Cecil Dawkins, Dec. 9, 1958
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“Only, well…There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMSviatoslav Richter plays excerpts from Prokofiev’s Visions fugitives, Op. 22, in an undated film of a concert performance. He plays Nos. 14, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 15, and 18: (This is the …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of Mongolian cruelty and bigotry. When I put a question to him about social…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFrom 2005: Borge’s act resembled a straight piano recital gone wrong. He’d start to play a familiar piece like Clair de lune or the “Moonlight” Sonata, then swerve off in some im…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent.” Christopher Isherwood (interviewed in the Paris Review, Spr…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMA week after bringing home my new MacBook Air, I’m more or less used to it. To be sure, I have yet to explore any of its more recherché capabilities, but now that I’ve written two Wall …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMThe Byrds perform Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” on a 1968 episode of Playboy After Dark. Roger McGuinn is the lead singer, accompanied by Clarence White on lead guitar, Joh…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.” Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:01AMI continue to adjust more or less smoothly to life with my new MacBook Air. Alas, nobody’s perfect, and I hit a pothole yesterday with my e-mail program, which proceeded to swallow a half-…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:36PMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review two musicals that couldn’t be more different, the New York premiere of First Daughter Suite and the Broadway premiere of Dames at Sea. Here’s an…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss adaptations of well-known works of art that are better than (or as good as) the originals. Here’s an excerpt. * * * If you…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMThe assassination scene from the original 1934 version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, written by Charles Bennett and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis. The piece performed at the Royal …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“We are not in politics to ignore peoples’ worries: we are in politics to deal with them.” Margaret Thatcher, interview, World in Action (January 27, 1978)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.” Albert Einstein (freely rendered by Arthur Koestler in The Yogi and the Commissar)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMArturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony Orchestra in the overture from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino. This performance was filmed in 1943 for inclusion in Hymn of the Nations, a World War I…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.” Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee (May 15, 1826)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMI’m relieved to announce that I’m back on line again after a four-day absence, freshly equipped with a MacBook Air after spending the better part of a decade using a laptop that was teet…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM
