Archives for 2018

“Like the aerial bomber, the bureaucrat does not see his kill.”

Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945

From 2008:

My friend Rick Brookhiser recently posed this memeworthy notion: “It would make an exercise to say what are your least favorite works by artists you mostly, or sometimes, love.” So it would, and I’ve been thinking it over ever since. Here’s my Top (or Bottom) Five…

Read the whole thing here.

“You know growing old’s like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.”

Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings

Glenn Miller’s big band performs “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, in Sun Valley Serenade, written by Robert Ellis and Helen Logan, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, and released in 1941. Also featured are Tex Beneke, the Modernaires, Dorothy Dandridge, the Nicholas Brothers, and Milton Berle. The musical portions of this sequence were originally recorded in multi-track stereo but released in mono. Paul Gilgannon has synchronized the surviving stereo soundtrack with the film, and this version is seen and heard here for the first time:

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

“We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do.”

Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a rare revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth in Washington, D.C. Here’s an excerpt.

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Theatre for a New Audience’s 2017 revival of “The Skin of Our Teeth” was cause for rejoicing among a generation of New York playgoers who, like me, had never before had the opportunity to see a professional production of Thornton Wilder’s 1942 tragicomedy about the history of the world. “The Skin of Our Teeth” calls for a huge ensemble of actors—40, according to the program for the Broadway premiere—which puts it out of reach of virtually all of today’s cash-strapped drama companies. That Theatre for a New Audience still managed to bring a first-rate version to the stage was a not-so-minor miracle, one I didn’t expect to see repeated any time soon.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Constellation Theatre Company, a scrappy but well-regarded troupe whose specialty is “epic stories in an intimate space,” announced that it was reviving Wilder’s play with a cast of 13 at Source, a 100-seat black-box theater in Washington, D.C. I knew at once that I had to go, and to say I wasn’t disappointed is the happiest of understatements. Constellation’s production isn’t perfect—it couldn’t have been, since big, baggy plays like “The Skin of Our Teeth” don’t lend themselves to gem-like stagings—but Mary Hall Surface’s high-spirited version is festive, imaginative, and completely involving.

The Antrobuses, on whom the action is centered, appear to be Wilder’s version of a middle-class sitcom-type family (husband, housewife, two cute kids and a sexy maid). Within a few minutes, though, we learn that they’re all 5,000 years old and that the the play begins in the Ice Age, after which we move forward in time with vertiginous speed, first to the Great Flood and then to World War II. What we have here, in short, is a parable, a symbolic tale of how humankind copes with disaster. But “The Skin of Our Teeth” is also a screwball tragedy, one in which events of the gravest import are portrayed with a farce-flavored lightness of touch.

Moreover, Wilder’s tragic vision, here as in “Our Town,” is fundamentally optimistic, though never naïvely so….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Skin of Our Teeth:

Cary Grant presents Noël Coward with a special Tony Award in 1970:

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

“I do humor, not comedy. If I’m funny at all, I try to be slow funny. I tend to look at everything from the side, and I’m more interested in character than flash, because flash hits quick and leaves quick. It takes a little longer to know a character, but character builds and builds, and it’s funnier.”

James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files: A Memoir