Archives for 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)
• 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)

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

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• The Book of Will (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 28, reviewed here)

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

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

“A success that has outlived its usefulness may, in the end, be more damaging than failure.”

Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Berlin Philharmonic perform Richard Strauss’ Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks in concert in 1950:

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

“‘Loafing’ is easy, but ‘leisure’ is difficult.”

Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

From 2007:

We are never so funny to others as when we are least funny to ourselves. This seeming paradox is the piston that drives the engine of comedy. In the greatest of all comedies—the Shakespearean tales of romantic reconciliation and their operatic counterparts, Verdi’s Falstaff and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte—a pompous man’s thick carapace of earnestness is penetrated by humiliation. All at once, the unwitting butt of the joke realizes that he, too, partakes of the human condition, and is thereby made whole. It is in these transformative moments that the moral force of comedy is most evident…

Read the whole thing here.

“The moment people talk of ‘implementing’ instead of ‘doing,’ and of ‘finalizing’ instead of ‘finishing,’ the organization is already running a fever.”

Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-Modern” World

“Street Scene,” a wordless vignette created and directed by Ernie Kovacs. The soundtrack is an excerpt from Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. This clip comes from Kovacs on Music, which was originally telecast on NBC on May 22, 1959:

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

“Every one of the great charismatic leaders of this century ended up a maniac. He destroyed everything and finally himself—in Stalin’s purges; in Hitler’s ‘final solution’; in Mao’s ‘Revolution.’”

Peter F. Drucker, The New Realities