Archives for August 2018

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:
• The Band’s Visit (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• 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)
• My Fair Lady (musical, G, nearly all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (musical, G, too complex for children, closes Sept. 6, reviewed here)

IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Oliver! (musical, PG-13, closes Sept. 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Symphonie Fantastique (abstract underwater puppet show, G, closes Sept. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN GARRISON, N.Y.:
• Richard II (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 26, reviewed here)
• The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Aug. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Carmen Jones (musical, PG-13, closes Aug. 19, reviewed here)
• Mary Page Marlowe (drama, PG-13, closes Aug. 19, reviewed here)
• Twelfth Night (Shakespeare, G, closes Aug. 19, reviewed here)

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

Galina Vishnevskaya sings the “Serenade” from Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death on French TV in 1970. Mstislav Rostropovich, her husband, is at the piano:

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

“If my anarchic friends will not have rules—they will have rulers.”

G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World

From 2008:

I tried to take Stuff White People Like’s Facebook test yesterday, but gave it up after running into three consecutive questions for which my answer was None of the above, which was not an option. My impression, however, was that I’m not very “white,” a fact which amuses me, albeit only mildly. Speaking as an arty Upper West Side drama critic who works for The Wall Street Journal, likes both sushi and hot dogs, is currently writing an opera, and can sit down at the piano and play Nat Cole’s “Easy Listening Blues” on request, I’m not at all sure what color I am.

In the interests of chromatic clarification, here is the personal information that appeared on my Facebook page last week….

Read the whole thing here.

“Come to me in some grievous difficulty: I will talk to you like a father, even like a lawyer. I’ll be hanged if I haven’t a certain mellow wisdom. But if you are by way of weaving theories on some one who will luminously confirm or powerfully rend them, I must, with a hang-dog air, warn you that I am not your man. I suffer from a strong suspicion that things in general cannot be accounted for through any formula or set of formulae, and that any one philosophy, howsoever new, is no better than any other. This is in itself a sort of philosophy, and I suspect it accordingly; but it has for me the merit of being the only one that I can make head or tail of.”

Max Beerbohm, “Laughter”

The Band performs “Slippin’ and Slidin” on stage in July of 1970. This clip comes from Festival Express, a 2003 documentary about the Canadian tour during which this peformance was filmed:

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

“The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness—the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.”

Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy