Archives for December 2011

The New York Times obituary is here.
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“Grey Fireworks,” 1982:

UPDATE: I agree with everything that this piece by Eric Gibson says about Helen Frankenthaler’s work and significance.

“As teachers, towering individualities usually are vampires who suck out their pupils’ personality.”
Carl Flesch, Memoirs (trans. Hans Keller)

Robert Preston sings Meredith Willson’s “Trouble” (from The Music Man) on the 1971 Tony Awards telecast:

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

“Now, an ingrained habit of the defensive is a prime condition of defeat.”
Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic Layman in England

In today’s Wall Street Journal I talk about the shows, directors, performers, and theater companies that made the strongest and most favorable impressions on me in the year just past.
Among those mentioned:
• Best new play: Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherf**ker with the Hat
• Best revival: Classic Stage Company’s The Cherry Orchard
• Best musical revivals: Porgy and Bess at Chicago’s Court Theatre and Show Boat at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Musicals
• Best Shakespeare revival: Amanda Dehnert’s Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
• Performer of the year: Chicago’s Carrie Coon
To find out what and who else delighted me in 2011, go here.
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Carrie Coon talks about the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in which she appeared earlier this year. The production, directed by Pam MacKinnon and also starring Tracy Letts, is scheduled to transfer to Broadway in the fall of 2012:

Laura Newell plays the solo harp interlude from Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols:

Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory, starring Geraldine Page, directed by Frank Perry, and originally telecast on ABC Stage 67 in 1966. Capote is the narrator and wrote the teleplay:

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