Archives for 2016

The video for Donald Fagen’s “New Frontier,” directed by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, originally released to promote Fagen’s 1982 solo album The Nightfly:

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

“When everything’s working right, you become transfixed by the notes and chords and the beautiful spaces in between. In the center of it, with the drums, bass and guitar all around you, the earth falls away and it’s just you and your crew creating this forward motion, this undeniable, magical stuff that can move ten thousand people to snap free of life’s miseries and get up and dance and scream and feel just fine.”

Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters

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:
• An American in Paris (musical, G, too complex for small children, reviewed here)
• The Color Purple (musical, PG-13, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Fun Home (serious musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• The King and I (musical, G, perfect for children with well-developed attention spans, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)
• Noises Off (farce, PG-13, many performances sold out last week, closes March 6, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• The Flick (serious comedy, PG-13, too long for young people with limited attention spans, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Ah, Wilderness! (comedy, PG-13, closing April 10, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Sweat (drama, PG-13, remounting of Oregon Shakespeare Festival production, closing Feb. 21, original production reviewed here)

“How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!”

Eric Hoffer, “Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: ‘Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely’” (New York Times Magazine, April 25, 1971)

Bob Elliott, who died yesterday at the age of ninety-two, was the longer-lived member of Bob & Ray, a much-loved comedy team whose subtle, at times near-surrealistic routines were developed for radio and never sounded quite right anywhere else. Alas, they first won fame (of a sort) in the waning days of network radio, and so they spent the rest of their lives as fish out of water, never quite connecting with the public at large but attracting a small but intensely loyal cadre of passionate fans, myself very much among them, who loved their oddly tilted brand of humor.

In 1970 they cheated obscurity by putting together a warmly reviewed two-man show called The Two and Only that ran for five months on Broadway and was, thank God, recorded in its entirety. The time-and-place line in the program was utterly characteristic of their sense of humor: “The setting is quite cluttered. Time: the following Tuesday.”

Whitney Balliett wrote beautifully about them in The New Yorker three years later:

Bob & Ray invented, dreamed up the lines for, and then played, mainly on radio and television, a surrealistic Dickensian repertory company, which chastens the fools of the world with hyperbole, slapstick, parody, verbal nonsense, non sequitur, and sheer wit, all of it clean, subtle and gentle…Bob & Ray’s humor turns on their faultless timing and on their infinite sense of the ridiculous. It is also framed by that special sly, dry, wasteless vision of life perfected during the last couple of centuries by middle-class New Englanders.

Ray died in 1990, but Bob soldiered on, co-starring with Chris Elliott, his son, in the short-lived but fondly remembered sitcom Get a Life and doing, as was his wont, this and that. He was one of the last remaining ties to the long-gone golden age of network radio. I will miss him very much.

UPDATE: A friend writes to pass on his favorite Bob & Ray line. It, too, is wonderfully characteristic: “You’re not trying to slip the old rubber peach to a gullible kid, are you, Mr. Science?”

* * *

Bob & Ray perform two of their routines, “Most Beautiful Face Contest Winner” and “Four Leaf Clover Winner,” on TV:

Bob & Ray appear on Late Night with David Letterman

Dustin Hoffman talks about how he became an actor in a 1968 CBC interview:

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

All we are not stares back at what we are.

W.H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest

From 2006:

I do solemnly swear that I will never again review a new recording of the complete Brandenburg Concertos. If you want to get my attention, you’ll have to think of another way, preferably not involving plastic explosives. Furthermore, I have every intention of regularly adding other warhorses to my do-not-resuscitate list, so if you want to know what I think of your upcoming recording of Eine kleine Nachtmusik, you’d better get on the stick. I’m sure this decision will cause me to miss out on something good—probably even several hundred somethings—but I don’t expect to lose any sleep over it….

Read the whole thing here.