Archives for January 2014

“We live in a culture where everything is selling. I watch TV and I don’t see events, I see people selling me events. The newscasters are not reporting the news, they are dramatizing it, selling it, selling themselves as good reporters. They’re making the news ‘interesting.’ They pretend they’re looking at us when in fact they’re watching words on a teleprompter, acting as if they’re intimately involved with the stories they’re reporting, emoting like crazy, performing as though they were actually feeling what they were reading, trying to look as if they were anywhere but in the studio.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

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:

• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• No Man’s Land/Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory, closes Mar. 30, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Feb. 16, all performances sold out last week, 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)

• Hamlet/Saint Joan (drama, G/PG-13, remounting of off-Broadway production, playing in rotating repertory, closes Mar. 9, original production reviewed here)

IN GLENCOE, ILL.:

• Port Authority (drama, PG-13, closes Mar. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• King Lear (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Feb. 9, reviewed here)

• The Commons of Pensacola (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 9, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The Night Alive (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN FORT MYERS, FLA.:

• Arsenic and Old Lace (drama, G, closes Jan. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, reviewed here)

“We live in a culture where everything is selling. I watch TV and I don’t see events, I see people selling me events. The newscasters are not reporting the news, they are dramatizing it, selling it, selling themselves as good reporters. They’re making the news ‘interesting.’ They pretend they’re looking at us when in fact they’re watching words on a teleprompter, acting as if they’re intimately involved with the stories they’re reporting, emoting like crazy, performing as though they were actually feeling what they were reading, trying to look as if they were anywhere but in the studio.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

Books Do Furnish a Room and Temporary Kings, the tenth and eleventh novels in A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s great roman fleuve, portray the literary life in postwar England, and both volumes are accordingly full of non-existent novels and other books “written” or referred to by Powell’s fictional characters.

Two of these imaginary books, X. Trapnel’s Camel Ride to the Tomb and Profiles in String, are central to the plot, but the others are merely mentioned in passing, and Powell, who had an insufficiently appreciated knack for pastiche and parody, clearly had fun with the titles:

Athlete’s Footman

Bedsores

Bin Ends

Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?

The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday

Borage and Hellebore: A Study

Descartes, Gasendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus

Dogs Have No Uncles

Dust Thou Art

Fields of Amaranth

Garnered at Sunset: Leaves from an Edwardian Journal

Golden Grime

I Stopped at a Chemist

Kleist, Marx, Sartre, the Existentialist Equilibrium

Match Me Such Marvel

Miscellaneous Equities

Moss off a Rolling Stone

The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers

Paper Wine

Purged Not in Lethe

Sad Majors

Secretions

Slow on the Feather

A Stockbroker in Sandals

Sweetskin

Unburnt Boats

I’d gladly read some of those–wouldn’t you?

Buddy Rich and his big band perform Allyn Ferguson’s “Away We Go” in 1967:

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

“What I didn’t understand at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life

Buddy Rich and his big band perform Allyn Ferguson’s “Away We Go” in 1967:

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

“What I didn’t understand at the time was that there is nothing special whatsoever in the craft of acting. Acting can be anything one wants it to be, from the most crass, dead, ego-driven activity, used as a way of earning an easy living or finding women, on the one end, to something sublime, magical, and transforming on the other. And the difference, the only difference, is the investment made by the person who’s engaged in the process.”
Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life