Archives for December 2006

New York City can be a vexing and unnerving place to live. Helicopters woke me at six-fifteen this morning, a bit earlier than my usual rise-shine-and-write time, and yesterday afternoon I shared a subway with a fellow who kept shouting “Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all!” as he walked briskly from one end of the car to the other and back again.

Be all this as it may, I’m in a thoroughly benign mood, for I just returned from a visit to my cardiologist, one year to the week after my busy life was interrupted by an unexpected ambulance ride to Lenox Hill Hospital. He tells me that my heart is now completely normal, with no irregularities of any kind. So long as I keep taking my medicine, eating right, and going to the gym, it’ll stay that way.

It was snowing when I arrived at the doctor’s office–but by the time I got back home, the sun was out. No fooling.

I decided to see where “About Last Night” was being read before going to bed, and found these cities (among many others) glowing on our Site Meter map of the United States as of midnight:

– Allentown, Pennsylvania

– Alpharetta, Georgia

– Auburn, Maine

– Bend, Oregon

– Cherry Hill, New Jersey

– Cordova, Tennessee

– Hacienda Heights, California

– Hattiesburg, Mississippi

– Hines, Illinois

– San Marcos, Texas

Hello, everybody, and good night!

At last, a hat trick–I praise three new Broadway shows, John Doyle’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, Tom Stoppard’s Voyage, and David Hare’s The Vertical Hour, in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column:

In an act of recreative genius, Mr. Doyle has knocked the cobwebs off “Company” and turned it into an utterly contemporary chronicle of marriage and its discontents, one whose implications have never been more immediate.

Like Mr. Doyle’s 2006 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” this is a small-scale production in which the 14 members of the cast double as their own onstage orchestra, playing everything from piccolo to double bass. It’s no stunt, either: By making their own music, the actors create an atmosphere at once intimate and intense, and Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s astringent new orchestrations strip away all the tired pop-music clich

“We must not dismiss a new poet because his poem is called