Archives for July 2017

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, filmed in 1909 during a tour of his Wild West Show:

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

“Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, ‘It was a good show,’ when the curtain falls.”

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, closes August 20, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• The Traveling Lady (drama, PG-13, extended through July 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN LENOX, MASS.:
• 4000 Miles (drama, PG-13/R, closes July 16, reviewed here)

“A man who has to be punctually at a certain place at five o’clock has the whole afternoon from one to five ruined for him already.”

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

A complete performance of the original Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures, directed by Harold Prince and designed by Boris Aronson. The book is by John Weidman. This performance was taped at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre on June 9, 1976, and was telecast on Japanese TV:

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

“All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind.”

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. Charles Scott Moncrieff)

Arcadi Volodos plays Vladimir Horowitz’s transcription of John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on Polish television:

From 2007:

Perhaps more than any other American classical musician of her generation, she did her best to communicate to ordinary Americans the idea that the making of high art is a normal human activity, one whose fruits are accessible to all who make a good-faith effort to understand them. That’s not quite true, of course, but it’s a noble and ennobling lie, and I wouldn’t be greatly surprised if Beverly Sills is remembered for telling it long after the particulars of her performing career are forgotten….

Read the whole thing here.