About Last Night

“A Recording Session With a Composer: Igor Stravinsky,” a Columbia Records promotional film in which Stravinsky is seen conducting a 1955 studio performance of his L’histoire du soldat:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Dock Boggs sings and plays “Country Blues” at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”

James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest

From 2008:

Louis Armstrong was not only a great artist but one of the brightest stars in the sky of America’s popular culture. One of the signs of his admittance to that pantheon was the frequency with which Al Hirschfeld drew him. For most of his long lifetime, Hirschfeld was America’s best-known and most successful caricaturist. To be drawn by him was like being the mystery guest on What’s My Line? It meant that you’d really, truly arrived….

Read the whole thing here.

“To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical.”

Eric Hoffer, undated notebook entry (quoted in Tom Bethell, “Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook,” Harper’s, July 2005)

Members of the original off-Brodway cast of Godspell sings “Day by Day,” by Stephen Schwartz, on The Mike Douglas Show. This episode originally aired on April 29, 1973:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“One wonders whether a generation that demands instant satisfaction of all its needs and instant solution of the world’s problems will produce anything of lasting value. Such a generation, even when equipped with the most modern technology, will be essentially primitive—it will stand in awe of nature, and submit to the tutelage of medicine men.”

Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Broadway openings of Network and The Cher Show. Here’s an excerpt.

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Broadway is a business—and a bad one. Not only does it cost a horrifying amount to open a show there, but most Broadway productions flop, losing their investors’ money with fearful efficiency. How, then, do you persuade anyone not obviously demented to pour cash into a new one? One possible answer is to make it as much like a past success as is possible. That’s more or less what the creators of “Network” and “The Cher Show” have done: They’ve rummaged through the recycling bin and come up with two “new” shows that look fresh but are, beneath the frosting, as familiar as a stump speech.

In the case of “Network,” Lee Hall’s stage version of the 1976 Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet film about a network anchorman (played in the film by Peter Finch and onstage by Bryan Cranston) who cracks up midway through the evening news and starts telling the truth, the frosting has been whipped up by Ivo van Hove, Europe’s most pretentious stage director. Working in close collaboration with Jan Versweyveld, the scenic and lighting designer, and Tal Yarden, the video designer, Mr. van Hove has given us a TV-screens-and-Plexiglas production that looks thoroughly postmodern. The catch is that Mr. Hall’s script, set in 1975, is a faithful adaptation of Chayefsky’s screenplay, a once-prescient satire of the dumbed-down future of broadcast news. All of Chayefsky’s predictions having long since come to pass, “Network” is thus a musty period piece: The bomb has already gone off….

As for “The Cher Show,” it’s a two-and-a-half-hour exercise in public self-love, a worshipful jukebox musical about the life and times of the woman whose program bio describes her as having been “a worldwide superstar and household name for more than 50 years.” Rick Elice, who wrote the book of “The Cher Show” after extensive consultation with its subject, has missed no opportunity to glorify her household name, or to suggest that Cher’s life should be viewed as the inspirational tale of a proto-feminist who overcame the lack of faith of the men in her life to become a “Goddess Warrior” (her phrase) by telling herself over and over again that “the song will make you strong” (her mother’s phrase).

The result may well be the glitziest, campiest musical ever to hit Broadway—the budget line for Bob Mackie’s costumes alone must surely have been big enough to send a second rocket to Mars—but one that is devoid of cleverness, much less wit….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Network:

The trailer for The Cher Show: