Friday, June 26, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review Eric Tucker’s Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and an off-Broadway staging of Doctor Faus…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMRobert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World, a 1963 film documentary directed by Shirley Clarke: To read more about the film, go here. (This is the latest in a series of arts-related vi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Shaw has always seemed a journalist and not really a literary man. It’s his tendentiousness, I think, that keeps him trivial. He’s always out to solve social problems—the sure sign …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, June 25, 2015
“I find that I now can read only the true fanatics with any feeling of affinity: those who in courage or desperation abandon any attempt to address an audience of cretins and speak exclusi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, June 24, 2015
Ever since I was old enough to understand what it meant, seeing the Confederate battle flag on display has made me squirm—and the fact that it continues to fly over state houses in the Dee…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMLeonard Bernstein leads the National Symphony in a 1980 concert performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait commemorating the composer’s eightieth birthday. The text is spoken by Cop…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Henry James. He is someone to contend with, but an awful lot is missing—how much can be seen by comparing him with Proust. His sexual sensibility is that of a Victorian maiden of the up…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, June 23, 2015
• Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time is full of seemingly random observations about life whose general applicability causes them to leap off the page. Here are two that come t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFrom 2005: Like everybody else in the world, I’ve become a compulsive shuffle-player. To date I’ve loaded 2,849 “songs” onto my iBook and iPod, and while I occasionally pick …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, June 22, 2015
• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important? • If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well. • You are personall…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 11:57AMHaving attained an age when I find it increasingly difficult to retrieve names with the effortless ease of my youth, I’m fascinated by the persistence, vividness, and exactitude of my earl…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMFats Waller sings and plays “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in Stormy Weather, directed by Andrew L. Stone and released in 1943. The band includes Benny Carter on trumpet, Slam Stewart on bass, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AMAt long last, here’s an online video of Theater Talk’s 2015 Broadway end-of-season critics’ panel, featuring Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, Joh…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:05AM“My feeling that not just America but the West is finished is based on a conviction that when a civilization becomes obsessed with its deficiencies, it is degenerating.” Thomas Berger, l…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, June 19, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two very different plays about the supernatural, the Public Theater’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park production of The Tempest and a Baltimore revival of…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:45AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I discuss Jonathan Pryce’s charge that Tom Stoppard is a snob—and put it in a wider cultural context. Here’s an excerpt. * * * T…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:30AMJohnny Mercer stumps the panel as a “special” mystery guest on an episode of What’s My Line? originally telecast on February 9, 1964. The regular mystery guest, who is seen at the end …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AMThe latest episode of Theater Talk, in which Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel discuss the Broadway season just past with Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Pos…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:05AM“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” George Bernard Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists”
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMThursday, June 18, 2015
“Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.” Lord Acton, The History of Freedom in Antiquity
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, June 17, 2015
Jascha Heifetz plays the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto on a 1949 episode of The Bell Telephone Hour, accompanied by Donald Voorhees and a studio orchestra: (This is the l…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:15AM“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell, discarded preface for Animal Farm (written in 1945, published in 1972)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMTuesday, June 16, 2015
From 2006: The phrase “guilty pleasure,” of course, is itself inherently problematic, because it implies that we ought to be hypocrites when it comes to our artistic responses. Kingsley …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“You know, the problem with my guilty pleasure films is that I don’t feel guilty about them. I don’t really experience that sensation.” Wes Anderson (quoted in Matt Zoller Seitz, Wes…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, June 15, 2015
I’ve been posting arts-related videos in this space each Monday and Wednesday since February of 2014. (So far as I know, I have yet to post the same video twice.) I get enormous pleasure f…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 10:18AMOne of the most striking things about Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 is the way in which Howard and the film’s designers sought to recreate on screen the lost world of America in 1969. Nowadays …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AMEdward G. Robinson’s “window cameo” from a 1966 episode of Batman. In real life Robinson was one of the most noted art collectors in Hollywood: (This is the latest in a series of arts-…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:15AM“Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.” Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, June 12, 2015
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two regional Stephen Sondheim revivals, a Passion in Philadelphia and a Company in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Here’s an excerpt. * * * The gold s…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:30AM“The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.” H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM 
