Sunday, March 1, 2020
“Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Stephen King, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” (from Different Seasons)
Con…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 03:37PMFriday, February 28, 2020
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premieres of new stage versions of Dracula and Frankenstein. Here’s an excerpt.
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Ever since Hollywood put Bram Stoker�…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMDavid Frost interviews Paul McCartney on the BBC on May 18, 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and F…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“If there’s one major cause for the spread of mass illiteracy, it’s the fact that everybody can read and write.”
Peter de Vries, The Tents of Wickedness
Continue reading Almanac: Pe…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, February 27, 2020
“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.”
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
Continue reading Almanac: Chesterton on the artistic temperament at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMWednesday, February 26, 2020
Howard Keel sings Cole Porter’s “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?” in the 1953 film version of Kiss Me, Kate:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The particular charm of marriage is the duologue, the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone till death breaks the record. It is this back-chat wh…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, February 25, 2020
From 2004:
I love parody and caricature, and it’s one of my medium-sized regrets that I have no gift for either (though I can do adequate impersonations of a few of my friends). Alas, I fi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:01AM“Only when one’s friends die and one accompanies them to the grave’s edge does one realise precisely what they have meant to one.”
James Lees-Milne, diary, March 25, 1977
Continue re…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMMonday, February 24, 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 04:03AMJascha Heifetz plays the “Chaconne” from Bach’s D Minor Partita for Unaccompanied Violin on TV in 1970:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:01AM“Some say never meet your heroes, but I say if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents.”
Laura Dern, Oscar acceptance speech, 2020
Continue reading Almanac: Laura Dern on p…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:00AMFriday, February 21, 2020
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. Here’s an excerpt.
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Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:04AMA British Pathé newsreel story about the 1953 Covent Garden premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, commissioned as part of the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:01AM“But I think he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind. Whereas I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 04:00AMThursday, February 20, 2020
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the New York premiere of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky. Here’s an excerpt.
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It’s February—or, as it’s kn…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:49PMIn this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about one of music’s most mysterious powers. Here’s an excerpt.
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Music is the most mysterious of all the …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 01:26PMI’m picking up a Zipcar and hitting the road later today for a three-night caregiver’s holiday on Long Island Sound. During my absence, Mrs. T will be looked after around the clock by th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 09:13AM“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Continue reading Almanac: Dickens on …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, February 19, 2020
In an excerpt from “Take 30,” originally telecast by the CBC in 1967, Leonard Cohen talks about why he writes poetry:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Is it not miraculous that tears are given only to humans? Surely there is something divine in them, expressing as they do compassion, sorrow, love, anxiety and all feelings that associate…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, February 18, 2020
This is the third February in a row that Mrs. T and I have spent not in Florida, where we used to go every winter to see shows and travel around the state, but up north. Mrs. T’s doctors o…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:02AMFrom 2017:
It’s as “normal” for the two of us to stroll up and down the beaches of Sanibel island in January as it is for us to turn up the heat in Connecticut, nestle on the couch, an…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:01AM“Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 06:00AMMonday, February 17, 2020
De Ford Bailey plays “Fox Chase” on a 1967 telecast of National Life Grand Ole Opry:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each M…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”
Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve Seasons
Continue reading Almanac: Joseph Wood Krutch on…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, February 14, 2020
In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of a new musical version of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Here’s an excerpt.
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Once upon a fast-reced…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMPeggy Lee sings “Them There Eyes” and “But Beautiful” on The Andy Williams Show, after which she, Williams, and George Gobel do a trio version of “You Are My Sunshine.” This epi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“I used to be surprised and shocked because old people accepted the calamities and deaths of their old friends with seeming equanimity. Now I realise that, had they not done so, they would…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, February 13, 2020
“He was late for every engagement, which denotes utter selfishness.”
James Lees-Milne, diary, October 31, 1975
Continue reading Almanac: James Lees-Milne on chronic lateness at About Las…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, February 12, 2020
“It is audacity to write about anyone from the past. One can never know what their jokes were, their sophisticated nuances. One will take seriously what they laughed at and laugh at what t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM 
