Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Itzhak Perlman plays a movement from Wieniawski’s Second Violin Concerto on The Ed Sullivan Show. This episode was broadcast on May 10, 1964, when Perlman was nineteen years old:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.”
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
From 2006:
Read the whole thing here.I went to the new Snapple Theater Center Fiftieth and Broadway to see a press preview of the new revival of The Fantasticks. As anyone who knows anything about theater can tell you, the original production of The Fantasticks opened in 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a 153-seat off-off-Broadway theater down in Greenwich Village, where it ran until 2002, racking up 17,162 performances before it finally posted its closing notice. (The building has since been sold and is about to be converted into a luxury apartment house.)
As I walked into the theater, I realized that it had been thirty-four years to the day since I’d last seen a performance of The Fantasticks. I always meant to catch it at the Sullivan Street Playhouse but never got around to doing so, just as I’ve never been to Radio City Music Hall or the Central Park Zoo. Like most New Yorkers, I figured it would run forever, and so took its existence for granted until it was too late….
“One of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that history must avoid.”
Steven Spielberg, speech on the 149th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address