Archives for 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, virtually 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:
• Days to Come (drama, G, not suitable for children, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• Be More Chill (musical, PG-13, closes Sept. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING TOMORROW IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:
• The Lion in Winter (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 14, reviewed here)

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

“ That people should use their freedom of expression for this! It is enough to make one long for censorship: the censorship under which most of the world’s greatest art has always been produced.”

Theodore Dalrymple, Benefits of Non-Production: Part One (New English Review, December 2017)

Bruno Walter leads the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of the finale of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony, filmed in 1950. This sequence is an excerpt from Botschafter der Musik, a 1954 documentary about the orchestra:

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

“Strange! When I hear music—even when I am conducting—I hear quite specific answers to all my questions—and am completely clear and certain. Or, rather, I feel quite distinctly that they are not questions at all.”

Gustav Mahler, letter to Bruno Walter, 1909

Not long after 9/11, I wrote an essay about where I was and what I did that day:

“Get up, son,” my mother said, tapping softly on the door of the bedroom of my childhood home in Missouri. “An airplane hit the World Trade Center.” I came awake a split-second later, my head full of memories. For years, I had wondered when the long arm of terrorism would strike again at New York. I thought of a sunny Saturday morning back when I was living in an apartment house on a hill north of the city. A small earthquake shook the building as I lay sleeping, and the groaning of the old walls woke me. I heard a soft whir through the open window, the rustle of the leaves on the shaken trees. It’s a car bomb, I told myself, unable for one stunned moment to conceive of any other possibility.

All these thoughts flew through my mind in the time it took me to pull on my pants. Then I trotted to the living room, there to behold the coming of the new age….

Read the whole thing here.

* * *

Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 9/11 memorial concert on September 20, 2001. I was there:

“He had realized that many people were emotionally involved with the cause of the nominee, but he had not realized quite the fanaticism that seemed capable of flaring from it at an instant’s notice. He still, after seven years in office, retained some slight, idealistic belief that if you treated people in Washington and the great world of politics and the press fairly, they would accord you the same fairness; he was still shocked occasionally at the extremes of bitterness which often cropped out on what sometimes seemed the slightest of provocations. ‘You know,’ Stanley Danta had once remarked wryly, when his unexpected criticism of some proposal put forward by one of the more popular favorites had suddenly brought an avalanche of personal attack upon his own head, ‘I think I’ll introduce a resolution to change the motto of the Republic from “E pluribus unum” to “It all depends on whose ox is gored.” That would be more fitting, I think.’”

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent (published in 1959)

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, staged by the author, performed by Rick Cluchey, and directed for French TV in 1988 by Walter D. Asmus:

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

“The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”

Bernard Shaw, quoted in “Shaw’s Reply to Judge Neil,” Weekly Freeman’s Journal, Sept. 6 1919 (courtesy of Quote Investigator)