I’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 07:30AMFrom 2005: Of course it’s desirable to be right, and I don’t see how it’s possible to take seriously a critic who’s wrong about most things. Nevertheless, I’m uneasy with the n…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful then the truths of little men.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Fragment of a Critique of Schopenhauer” (trans. Walter Kau…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMI drove into Manhattan three Saturdays ago to see a pair of Broadway matinees. When I got to our apartment and checked my e-mail, I found a message from the Metropolitan Museum reminding me …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMAudie Murphy appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? on July 3, 1955. John Daly is the host and the panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Q. Lew…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven’s Chancery itself; and, slo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway transfer of Eclipsed, a new Broadway revival of The Gin Game, and the New York premiere of Unseamly. Here’s an excerpt. * * * “…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMBenedict Cumberbatch and Kobna Holdbrook-Smit perform an excerpt from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. This performance, which took place at London’s Olivier Theatre…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can p…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMHere’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 07:30AM“Resentment isn’t a magnetic personal style.” Peggy Noonan, “Confessions of a White House Speechwriter”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMI’ve been putting it off for the past couple of years, but the time has finally come for me to buy a new laptop—a MacBook Air, to be exact. In order to make the Big Switch, I’ll have t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:13PMAn excerpt from BBC2’s 1982 TV production of Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight, directed by Cedric Messina and featuring Deborah Kerr and Paul Scofield. The role played by Scofield is a …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Noah, you’re so full of what’s right you can’t see what’s good!” N. Richard Nash, The Rainmaker
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMDawn Powell and I go back a long way. I wrote about her in the New York Times Book Review in 1995, asking the same question that everybody asks: why isn’t so deliciously witty a writer mor…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005: I haven’t had anything to say in print about August Wilson’s death, and won’t, because it happens that I haven’t seen all that much of his work. I rarely sought it out…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, w…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMrs. T and I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in Florida this past February, an experience that I described in this space shortly thereafter: When it was all over, I talked nonstop …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMThe Jimmy Giuffre 3 performs Giuffre’s “Four Brothers” in Rome in 1959. Jim Hall is the guitarist, Buddy Clark the bassist: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThe Wall Street Journal has given me extra space today to review two Broadway revivals, Fool for Love and Old Times, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater’s Diary of Anne Frank. Here’s an ex…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about surviving sound recordings of the speaking voices of men and women born in the nineteenth century. Here’s an excerpt. …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMLittle Richard sings “Long Tall Sally” in Don’t Knock the Rock, a 1956 film directed by Fred F. Sears: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (courtesy of Laila Lalami)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“God! It costs you something to do good! You learn that by experience, too. If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMArturo Toscanini leads the NBC Symphony in Sibelius’ En Saga. This performance was originally telecast on March 15, 1952: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,—a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.”…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I pay tribute to Brian Friel, about whose recent death I blogged. Here’s an excerpt from the piece, which was posted on the Journal’s website last Friday…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005: I mentioned the other day that I’d bought an etching by Hans Hofmann, the great abstract-expressionist painter and teacher whose work I love. What’s especially striking ab…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” Raine…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMI have yet to see Best of Enemies, the film documentary on the William F. Buckley, Jr.-Gore Vidal TV debates, originally telecast by ABC in 1968, about which acres of windy prose have lately…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM
