195 stories from John Simon
We are having a bit of a Noel Coward revival. There are readings of some of his plays, a course or seminar at Marymount Manhattan College, a marvelous exhibition at Lincoln Center's Performi…
Yesterday I casually picked up a book that fell off a bookshelf. It turned out to be How I Lost 10 Pounds in 53 Years, and is the wonderful memoir of Kaye Ballard, which I acquired in 2006 w…
There should be a difference between a good performance and a great one. Sensibly, one applauds at the end of the former and rises to one's feet for the latter. About which is which, one kno…
I read the other day, evoking many memories, that the great publisher Barney Rosset had died aged 89, and reflected on what adventures and enterprises those years had yielded. With his admir…
The premature death at 69"though it would have been premature at any age"of Howard Kissel is a severe loss to everyone involved in the theater, interested in theater, and relative or friend …
Americans are too prone to nostalgia, a phenomenon comparable to gushing about babies, movie stars, and pets. That it was considered unhealthy is evident from its name, based on two Greek wo…
Memory plays strange tricks on us. There are not only (A) the losses of things we want to remember, but also (B) the things it annoyingly won't let us forget. And further (C), things we puzz…
I just finished a highly important and enjoyable book, two virtues that do not all that often appear in tandem. It is The Language Wars by Henry Hitchings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Subtit…
There is a great deal about critics that Americans do not understand. First of all, the difference between what a critic writes for public consumption and what he is in private life. The two…
Lovers of poetry may wonder what happened to meter and rhyme. If one looks at modern poetry, one finds little meter and even less rhyme. Which raises the troubling question "What is poetry?"…
I sometimes wonder about the phrase "too good to be true." Latterly because in a review of Bruce Jay Friedman's memoir, "Lucky Bruce," the reviewer cites a Long Island lunch group of writers…
In The New York Times Book Review of September 25, Maureen Dowd reviewed Roger Ebert's autobiographical "Life Itself." The highly favorable notice contained the following: "Ebert tries to av…
All schemes for improving humankind appear to be hopeless. The masses are definitely not kind and, I fear, barely human. Where even quite ordinary individuals manage to rise above ordinary c…
Obituaries should be read by everyone. We already know that life can be stranger than fiction"although contemporary fiction goes a long way toward strangeness"but what we should also know is…
One of the major monstrosities is rewriting a classic. That is what Suzan-Lori Parks (playwright), Diane Paulus (director) and Audra McDonald (star) are perpetrating with their forthcoming B…
This is an obituary for the art of letter writing. Of course, there are people who do not believe that e-mail and its electronic relatives have killed epistolary beauties, but they seem to m…
The other day I read about the Williamstown Theater Festival presenting Ibsen's A Doll's House, which title is used again and again even though it is wrong. I have waged a campaign, to no ap…
Although I am an atheist, I do not dismiss religion; in fact. I envy a bit those who have it. But I don't understand it; perhaps someone can provide me with a credible explanation.I can see …
I have now caught the Diana Paulus production of the musical Hair for the third time, having seen it in Central Park and again on Broadway before now. This is the National Company, which has…
Is there any doubt left that Leos Janacek (1854-1928), though born into the middle of the 19th century, was arguably the first truly modern composer, and a great one to boot. He composed sup…
This is a blog post about tennis. Please bear with me on the somewhat circuitous path leading to it.The aristocratic German nymphomaniac, Countess Franaziska von Reventlow, has in her charmi…
I read on the Internet that Anthony Weiner's (or Whiner's) troubles stem from a typo he committed on Tweeter: @ instead of D, turning a private misdemeanor into a public offense. Typos are p…
I just read about the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Serbian ethnic cleanser, and my thoughts went back to Yugoslavia, the lost country of my childhood. Of course, everyone's childhood is a sor…
I have often wondered about graffiti, the spray-painted writs on walls I perceive from the windows of my computer train. What person or persons can be responsible for them? How do their perp…
Almost as old as the debate about which comes first, the words or the music, is the question of what music means. Otherwise put, is the music saying something specific that the listener can …
