Friday, March 27, 2020
Lotte Lenya sings “Pirate Jenny” (from The Three-Penny Opera) on “The World of Kurt Weill,” an episode of NET Playhouse originally telecast in 1967. Bertolt Brecht’s lyrics are s…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:01AM“Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.”
Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind
Continue reading Almanac: Marvin Minsky on what it means to be smart at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMThursday, March 26, 2020
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or d…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMIn order to divert those of you who, like me, are staying home these days, I’ve been posting images of some of the prints and paintings that hang on the walls of our Manhattan apartment—…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.”
Marvin Minsky, “Music, Mind, and Meaning”
Continue reading Almanac: Marvin Minsky on uncertainty at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, March 25, 2020
I am overjoyed—hell, ecstatic—to report that I just got off the phone with Mrs. T. It was, of course, a one-way conversation, since she’s intubated with a ventilator and a tracheostomy…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 05:14PMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review a live-streamed version of American Conservatory Theater’s production of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Slowly …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:04AMI wrote the Wall Street Journal’s obituary of Terrence McNally on a two-hour deadline Tuesday afternoon. Even though it was written in great haste, I hope it does him justice. Here’s an…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:03AMIn order to divert those of you who, like me, are staying home these days, I’ve been posting images of some of the prints and paintings that hang on the walls of our Manhattan apartment—…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:02AMGene Krupa performs and is interviewed on an episode of The Mike Douglas Show originally taped for telecast on March 8, 1965. Krupa’s quartet includes Carmen Leggio on tenor saxophone, Di…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:01AM“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
Joan Didion, “On Keeping a Notebook”
Continue re…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMTuesday, March 24, 2020
From 2010:
This meme, started by Tyler Cowen and picked up by, among others, Jenny Davidson and Ross Douthat, has piqued my interest. Here goes:
• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson. It…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.”
Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, March 23, 2020
Thanks to a kind-hearted, quick-witted nurse in New York-Presbyterian’s cardio-thoracic ICU, I was able to see and speak to Mrs. T via Skype on Sunday night. That sentence really ought by …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMLeopold Stokowski leads the Chicago Symphony in a performance of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, originally telecast in 1962. The orchestral soloists inclde Sidney Harth on …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”
Logan Pearsall Smith, Afterthoughts
Continue reading Almanac: Logan Pearsall Smith on professionalism at About Last Nig…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMSaturday, March 21, 2020
I spoke to Mrs. T’s nurses by phone at midday Saturday, and they had nothing but good news to give me. In addition to nodding her head when spoken to, she is now able to squeeze her nurses…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 12:43PMFriday, March 20, 2020
With America’s theaters shuttered, I plan to devote some of my upcoming Wall Street Journal drama columns to screen versions of important stage plays of the past. I’m starting off with …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AMMrs. T’s recovery from her double-lung transplant surgery has been agonizingly slow. For me, the agony was compounded when New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where her surgery took place and …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMThe opening sequence of This Is Cinerama, the original 1952 demonstration film for Cinerama, the multiple-projector widescreen film process. The narrator is Lowell Thomas:
(This is the late…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their c…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, March 19, 2020
What are New Yorkers missing now that Broadway is closed? In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I consider what great art—theatrical and otherwise—does for us in t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM“For the present, and so long as there are living witnesses of the great war of sections, there will be people who will not be consoled for the loss of a cause which they believed to be ho…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, March 18, 2020
Frederick Ashton dances the mime role of Carabosse in Ninette De Valois’s production of Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty, performed by London’s Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Roya…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“In public life it is sometimes necessary to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”
Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge
Continue reading Almanac: Calvin Coolidge on a secret of…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, March 17, 2020
I doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that I’d been growing increasingly worried about the inability of Mrs. T’s doctors to rouse her from the medically induced coma into which sh…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:35PMFrom 2010:
Unlike most middle-aged bloggers, I’ve been hearing from the public for the whole of my adult life–I started writing newspaper criticism while I was still an undergraduate–a…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“What happens is, your voice isn’t going to go anywhere. But if you try to possess it, by playing only the things you like, forever, you will then sound like all these other guys who bec…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, March 16, 2020
“A Visit With Carl Sandburg,” a TV interview with the poet and biographer conducted by Edward Stanley. This program was originally telecast in 1958 as part of NBC’s Wisdom series of in…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“One way or another, we all pay for our vices.”
Ben Maddow and John Huston, screenplay for The Asphalt Jungle
Continue reading Almanac: Ben Maddow and John Huston on human weakness at A…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, March 13, 2020
Mrs. T opened her eyes this morning for the first time since her double-lung transplant surgery. She appeared to respond when I asked her to blink if she could hear my voice and understand w…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:40PM 
