Archives for 2012

From 2005:

I love New York, but I couldn’t even begin to pass for a native, even when I don my All-Black Outfit and venture south of Theatre Row, or put on a suit for an opening night. People with backgrounds like mine have been known to retreat into snobbery in order to conceal their origins, but I’m homemade and proud to be. Oscar Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, which suggests that a snob might be someone who appreciates the prestige of everything and the beauty of nothing. That’s not me….

Read the whole thing here.

“His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.”
Thomas Macaulay, “On John Dryden”

On Sunday I boxed up all of the Duke Ellington books in my studio at the MacDowell Colony, inscribed my name at the bottom of the newest “tombstone” on the wall, and packed my bags. Today I leave. Tomorrow I’ll have something more considered to say about it, but right now my heart is too full to say more than that I’ll never forget a day of my five weeks here, or any of the wonderful people whom I met.
I miss you already.

The Raymond Scott Quintette plays Scott’s “Powerhouse” on Your Hit Parade in 1955:

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

“Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than in any other form of writing.”

Lillian Hellman, Paris Review interview

No Wall Street Journal drama column today–I’m still up at the MacDowell Colony, hacking away at Mood Indigo. I’ll be back at the old stand next Friday, though, with a review filed from Minneapolis.
See you then.