Archives for 2013

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:

• Annie (musical, G, many performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• All in the Timing (comedy, PG-13, closes Apr. 14, reviewed here)

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

• Donnybrook! (musical, G/PG-13, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, extended through Apr. 28, reviewed here)

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

• The Madrid (drama, PG-13, extended through May 5, reviewed here)

• Passion (musical, PG-13, extended through Apr. 14, reviewed here)

IN LOS ANGELES:

• Tribes (drama, PG-13, remounting of original off-Broadway production, closes Apr. 14, original production reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• You Can’t Take It With You (comedy, G, closes Apr. 20, original production reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN ORLANDO, FLA.:

• Othello (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Mar. 16, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• The Mystery of Edwin Drood (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

“If you don’t think about the future, you cannot have one.”
John Galsworthy, Swan Song

Andrés Segovia plays the first movement of Torroba’s Sonatina:

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

“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.”
Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value”

Van Cliburn plays Scriabin’s Etude in D-Sharp Minor, Op. 8, No. 12, in Moscow in 1962:

TEDxBroadway recently posted a video of the motivational speech that I gave in January at its latest New York conclave. The title is “Why Do You Want to Be on Broadway?” What I said there was, or seemed to be, quite well received, and I thought that some of you might possibly want to see what the fuss was about:

From 2003:

I got a call yesterday from a fact checker at The New Yorker. He was working on a piece that made reference to H.L. Mencken, and very apologetically asked me if I could perhaps help him by answering two questions (one was simple, the other subtle). I told him that Mencken would have approved of his labors, which is true. Mencken did quite a bit of writing for The New Yorker in the Thirties and Forties, and referred admiringly to its fact-checking department as “Ross’ goons” (Harold Ross being, of course, the magazine’s founding editor and resident tutelary spirit).
That call filled me with nostalgia. As anyone knows who’s been in journalism for more than the past 20 minutes or so, fact checking is an increasingly lost art….

Read the whole thing here.

“Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
C.S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”