Archives for August 2017

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)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 27, reviewed here)

IN PITTSFIELD, MASS.:
• Company (musical, PG-13, extended through Sept. 10, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)
• The Madness of George III (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:
• Groundhog Day (musical, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 17, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT MONDAY IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Pride and Prejudice (comedy, G, closes Sept. 4, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Sept. 3, reviewed here)

“Whenever we confront an unbridled desire we are surely in the presence of a tragedy-in-the-making.”

Quentin Crisp, Manners from Heaven

Glenn Gould plays Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations on an Original Theme in C Minor on the CBC in 1966:

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

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

I rarely write straight literary criticism nowadays, so I jumped at the chance to get back in the game when National Review invited me to review two new biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway:

The trouble with Hemingway, seen from the privileged vantage point of hindsight, is that he looks increasingly like a great influence but not a great author in his own right. No 20th-century writer would leave a deeper mark on his contemporaries, and as late as 1948, Evelyn Waugh, no respecter of reputations, unhesitatingly described him in print as “one of the most original and powerful of living writers.” Yet all but the very finest of his short stories now sound mannered and artificial, while the novels come off as little more than sustained exercises in mirror-gazing and pose-striking….

Fitzgerald, like so many moralists, knew that he was himself exemplary of the flaws of the culture whose frivolity he chronicled and indicted. This knowledge is the source of the gravity that heightens the force of his best work, whose lightness of touch cannot conceal its ultimate seriousness, a seriousness that makes the Hemingway of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms look like a mere merchant of self-pity by comparison….

Read the whole thing here.

From 2007:

As I’ve said before, we’re trying to write a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don’t want The Letter to sound old-fashioned—Paul’s musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini—but we do want it to move fast and hit hard….

Read the whole thing here.

“In love, happiness is an abnormal state.”

Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

Edward Villella and New York City Ballet dance Oberon’s solo from George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a 1966 film version of the complete ballet, directed by Dan Eriksen. The score, conducted by Robert Irving, is by Felix Mendelssohn:

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