Archives for October 2012

Jacques Barzun, author of Berlioz and the Romantic Century, The House of Intellect, From Dawn to Decadence, and many other books, died yesterday at the august age of 104. Edward Rothstein’s superb New York Times obituary is here.
In memory of Barzun and his work, here’s a 2007 performance by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the BBC Symphony of the love scene from Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette, one of the supreme masterpieces of Western art. Barzun, one of the composer’s foremost champions, did much to make it more widely known in the English-speaking world:

“Everything comes if a man will only wait.”
Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Bring It On (musical, G, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

• Evita (musical, PG-13, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, closes Jan. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:

• Misalliance (serious comedy, G/PG-13, far too talky for children, closes Saturday, reviewed here)

• Present Laughter (comedy, PG-13, closes Sunday, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Marry Me a Little (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

“We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Buster Keaton appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line?:

here

“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”
Benjamin Disraeli, Henrietta Temple

Now that I’m no longer shuttling between New York and New Haven for rehearsals of Satchmo at the Waldorf, I’ve got time to troll through cyberspace for interesting goodies. Here’s some of what I’ve found there:
• Courtesy of the Library of America, here’s a 1939 article from Theatre Arts in which Morton Eustis describes what it was like to watch George S. Kaufman, who directed the first productions of most of his own plays, stage the Broadway premiere of The Man Who Came to Dinner.
• From The Wall Street Journal, Paul Johnson supplies a list of his five favorite short biographies.
• John O’Hara reviewed Jazzmen for The New Republic in 1939, and he managed to say some interesting things in between the self-conscious, self-serving asides that were, here as always, a feature of his non-fiction writing.
• I blush to admit that I’d never read Paul Schrader’s Notes on Film Noir. Now I have.
• Speaking of film noir, my friend Sarah Weinman is very smart about Dorothy B. Hughes, who (among other things) wrote the novel on which Nicholas Ray’s film In a Lonely Place was based.
• Alec Wilkinson interviewed Neil Young for The New Yorker and was startled to discover that he doesn’t read books–and is proud not to do so.
Finally:
• Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, explains how to write a thriller. His apologia is unintentionally funny, but interesting withal.

From 2004:

Would I go to the library if there were a good one in my neighborhood? Probably–but I’m not so sure. When I was young I read in great shelf-emptying gulps, thereby accumulating the intellectual capital off which I’ve been living for the past quarter-century. Now I read far more selectively, concentrating on new titles, though I also re-read books habitually. I operate on the principle that any book worth reading more than twice is a book worth owning, and my shelves reflect that belief. I’m sure that the Web has cut down considerably on my library-related needs, but it may also be that libraries simply don’t have as much to offer me as they used to….

Read the whole thing here.