Archives for July 4, 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Lydia R. Diamond’s Toni Stone. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

Lydia R. Diamond made a premature but promising Broadway debut in 2011 with “Stick Fly,” a serious comedy about an upper-class black family that didn’t quite work but whose best parts left no doubt of her formidable talent. Five years later, “Smart People,” a sharp-witted satire of the academic monoculture at Harvard in which everything worked to glistening perfection, opened off Broadway and marked her as an up-and-comer. Now Ms. Diamond is back with a second off-Broadway premiere, “Toni Stone,”whose title character was the first black woman ever to play pro baseball. 

Like its predecessors, “Toni Stone” introduces you to a world about most of us know precious little—the Negro Leagues, in which Satchel Paige played and Jackie Robinson got his start—and does so in a way that is both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining. Directed with terrific zest and potent physicality by Pam MacKinnon and featuring a star-making turn by April Matthis, it’s the show that should have introduced Ms. Diamond to Broadway…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Toni Stone:

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of William Goldman’s The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

What’s it like to put on a show, and what kinds of people do so? I can think of any number of theatrical memoirs and biographies that are as readable as good novels, starting with Moss Hart’s “Act One.” But if what you want to know is how Broadway works, and why it usually doesn’t, the best book to read was written 50 years ago by a man who never managed to write a successful play. It’s William Goldman’s “The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway,” still in print and as relevant as ever. Smart, catty and comprehensively well-informed, “The Season” tells truths that have withstood the cruel test of time, which is another way of saying that when it comes down to basics, nothing much changes on Broadway….

A half-century after the fact, it’s startling how contemporary “The Season” sounds….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

“American citizenship is a high estate. He who holds it is the peer of kings. It has been secured only by untold toil and effort. It will be maintained by no other method. It demands the best that men and women have to give, but it likewise awards to its partakers the best that there is on earth. To attempt to turn it into a thing of ease and inaction would be only to debase it. To cease to struggle and toil and sacrifice for it is not only to cease to be worthy of it but is to start a retreat toward barbarism. No matter what others may say, no matter what others may do, this is the stand that those must maintain who are worthy to be called Americans.”

Calvin Coolidge, “Freedom and Its Obligations” (speech, May 30, 1924)