Archives for September 2020

From 2005:

I’m left-handed, with an ink-smudging overhand hook so exaggerated that my first-grade teacher, who in 1962 was already a thoroughly cranky old woman, tried briefly and vainly to get me to write with my right hand. I’ve found penmanship awkward ever since, which is why I learned to type as a boy and why I took so readily to e-mail as a grownup. Yet my correspondent was right: convenient though e-mail is, there’s something uncanny about receiving a handwritten letter, and no less uncanny about sending one….

Read the whole thing here.

“In jealousy there is more self-love than love.”

François de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims, #334

The Everly Brothers sing “Wake Up, Little Susie” and “Should We Tell Him” on an episode of The Big Record, hosted by Patti Page, which aired on CBS in 1958:

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

Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it,
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.

Lord Byron, Don Juan

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review American Shakespeare Center’s webcast of Othello. Here’s an excerpt.

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Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center was one of the first theater companies in America to grapple with the pandemic lockdown by streaming webcasts taped in its 300-seat Blackfriars Playhouse, a modern historical recreation of the wood-and-plaster interior of an Elizabethan-style theater built in London in 1596. Now ASC has become one of the first American companies to resume live performances, mounting indoor and outdoor stagings of “Othello” and “Twelfth Night” that can also be viewed online….

Having just written about Florida Repertory Theater’s “Twelfth Night” and longing to see a show of a seriousness befitting the gravity of the present moment, I chose to view “Othello” from the comfort of my apartment in Manhattan. I’ve been impressed by all of ASC’s webcasts to date, but this one, directed by Ethan McSweeny, the company’s artistic director, stands out boldly from its predecessors. Taped with a four-camera setup, it conveys with satisfying clarity the experience of seeing a show in ASC’s Blackfriars Playhouse, and it approaches “Othello” in a way that puts across its immediacy without imposing an anachronistic high-concept overlay on a masterpiece that needs no help to make its ever-relevant points about the viciously corrosive power of racism.

At first glance, this looks like a traditional “Othello,” played without scene breaks on an open stage. The Elizabethan-style costumes are colorful but conventional and the stage is decorated mainly by candles (which are put to show-stopping use). But Mr. McSweeny pulls one jaw-dropping surprise: Othello is played by a woman, Jessika D. Williams, who is more than up to the challenge posed by one of Shakespeare’s most demanding parts and puts her bold stamp on every line….

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Read the whole thing nere.

The trailer for Othello:

Rudolf and Peter Serkin play Schubert’s G Major March, Op. 52/2, live in 1988:

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

“Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray.”

Camille Saint-Säens, “The Wagnerian Illusion”

“Memory is, perhaps, selective and authors, even autobiographers, write for effect.”

Piers Paul Read, Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography