Thursday, September 3, 2015
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 Wal…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:05AM“As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.” Edward Abbey, A Vo…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMWednesday, September 2, 2015
MONDAY, AUGUST 10 I’m not afraid to fly anymore, but I still hate it with a passion. I sometimes say that The Wall Street Journal pays me to sit in airports and on airplanes, not to write …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMRay Price and the Cherokee Cowboys perform “Invitation to the Blues” on a 1959 episode of Country Style, USA, a TV series produced by the U.S. Army. The song was written by Roger Miller,…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.” Wyndham Lewis, “Inferior Religions”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, September 1, 2015
From 2005: I wrote what I thought was a pretty funny theater review this morning. It took me two and a half hours to finish the first draft and an hour to polish it. I spent most of that las…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:15AM“No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad.” Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:00AMMonday, August 31, 2015
SUNDAY, AUGUST 9 I review a hundred shows a year, more or less, for The Wall Street Journal. This means that I rarely have time to see anything I’m not reviewing, and that I also have to f…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMLeonard Bernstein introduces Leopold Stokowski, who conducts the New York Philharmonic in his arrangement of Bach’s “Little” Fugue in G Minor. An excerpt from “Bach Transmogrified,�…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“A stylist is usually a very diffident person who tries to compensate for his sense of inadequacy by careful attention to every word. A diffident man cannot allow himself to work badly, in…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, August 28, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal I file the second of three reports on my recent visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where I saw Mary Zimmerman’s revival of Guys and Dolls. I also re…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I talk about a new government program designed to support works of serious scholarship that are aimed at a popular audience—and show…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMA 1926 film of Wassily Kandinsky making an abstract drawing: For more information about the film, go here. (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space ea…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Philistinism implies not only a collection of stock ideas but also the use of set phrases, clichés, banalities expressed in faded words. A true philistine has nothing but these trivial i…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, August 27, 2015
Four years ago next month, Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, was premiered in Orlando, Florida. Since then it’s been produced in Lenox, Los Angeles, New Haven, Philadelphia, and off B…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:34PM“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the ro…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, August 26, 2015
Bette Davis and Bert Lahr perform “Jealousy,” a sketch by Billy Friedberg from the 1952 Broadway revue Two’s Company. (Lahr’s role was played on Broadway by David Burns.) This perfor…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, August 25, 2015
From 2005: You have to live in Manhattan to know how hot it gets here in the middle of August. The only film I can think of that conveys the sheer awfulness of the kind of heat wave that now…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“I try not to pay attention to notices, reviews. I try not to read them. But I have no discipline. I try to be cool about the good ones; the bad ones kill me.” Edward G. Robinson (with L…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, August 24, 2015
Liberace plays an excerpt from Liszt’s A Major Piano Concerto on an undated episode of The Liberace Show filmed in the Fifties. He had previously performed the entire concerto with Hans La…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Cut any sentence in the play that needs a comma. A semi-colon is disastrous. In fact, the best play has no punctuation whatsoever.” Wolcott Gibbs (quoted in Marjory Adams, “Principals…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, August 21, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two new plays, Lynn Nottage’s Sweat at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Annie Baker’s John off Broadway. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Reading, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM“Henri Matisse,” the German-language version of a 1946 documentary directed by François Campaux in which Matisse is shown at work in his studio: To read about the film and its contents,…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“‘Every day,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to get hold of something by the throat and strangle it. And that keeps me young.’” Henri Matisse, in conversation with Edward G. Robinson (quot…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, August 20, 2015
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 Wal…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages.” Marcel Prou…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, August 19, 2015
From The North Star, released in 1943, Dana Andrews sings “The Younger Generation,” with music by Aaron Copland and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. The film, written by Lillian Hellman, portrays…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The more slavishly and dogmatically a person falls for a ready-made ideological system or ‘worldview,’ the more certainly he will bury all chances of thinking, of freedom, of being cl…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, August 18, 2015
From 2005: The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don’t like his art. It’s dicey merely to say that you don’t understand a particular work, much less that…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM 
