Archives for June 26, 2020

I’ve written an essay for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the history of summer movies in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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Summer is here—but there are no movies to mark its coming. With Hollywood in deep-seated disarray and America’s movie theaters still trying to figure out whether they can reopen safely, it’ll likely be at least another year before the next summer movie comes along. But how will we know it when we see it? Exactly what is a summer movie? Can it be something other than a romcom? Must it take place on or near a beach? These questions are harder to answer than you might suppose.

The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote something that came to mind when I first started thinking about summer movies: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” That’s a great definition, one that emphasizes the proliferating eclecticism of American classical music. Is it possible, then, to take a similar tack in defining summer movies? Not unless you believe that “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters” and “Speed” qualify simply because they all came out in June. No matter when it’s released, a film must be unequivocally summer-themed to qualify as a summer movie—and even that alone isn’t enough. Does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” make the cut solely because it takes place during a big-city heat wave? Not really.

It’s more obviously tempting to say that summer movies are always comedies of one kind or another. This comes closer to the truth, though there is no shortage of exceptions….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws:

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Original Theater Company/59E59 Theaters webcast of Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art. Here’s an excerpt.

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Except for “The History Boys,” which had a solid run on Broadway in 2006 followed by several regional stagings, Alan Bennett’s plays aren’t widely performed in the U.S. He’s best known over here for “The Madness of George III,” the 1991 play whose 1994 film version, “The Madness of King George,” was a box-office hit. The play, however, never made it to Broadway, and neither did “The Habit of Art,” a dual theatrical portrait of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten that was first produced in 2009 by London’s National Theatre, then received its U.S. premiere at Washington’s Studio Theatre. I saw it there in 2011 and was surprised that it had no further success in this country: While not without flaw, “The Habit of Art” is both challenging and entertaining, and I assumed that someone in New York would get around to staging it sooner or later.

Hence my excitement when 59E59 Theaters announced that Original Theatre Company, a highly regarded English touring troupe, would be performing “The Habit of Art” as part of “Brits Off Broadway,” a summer festival of new plays that always has fine things to offer (in recent years, most of Alan Ayckbourn’s U.S. premieres have taken place there). No such luck—the pandemic put paid to this year’s festival—but the good news is that Original Theatre Company and 59E59 Theatres are streaming a previously taped version of “The Habit of Art” that is outstanding in every way….

Lovely though it would have been to see a live performance, I’m struck by how fully this webcast version of “The Habit of Art” conveys the total effect of a play that deserves to be staged in New York when such things become possible again….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for The Habit of Art:

Richard Burton talks about Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood in a BBC interview originally telecast on February 15, 1971:

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

“Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Rollo May, Love and Will