Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Stephen Sondheim and Lee Remick appear as a celebrity guest team on an episode of Password, originally telecast by CBS on December 11, 1966. They are playing opposite Peter Lawford and Audrey Meadows:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.”
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
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Chicago’s Writers Theatre, America’s foremost regional drama company, which webcast a solo reading of “A Christmas Carol” in December, is now presenting its first full-scale streamed play, a far more ambitious undertaking whose exceptional technical finish raises the bar of quality yet another notch for theatrical webcasts by top-tier troupes.
Anna Ziegler’s “The Last Match,” a four-hander about two tennis pros, one American and the other Russian, who are competing in the U.S. Open semifinals, has been taken up all over America since its premiere production by San Diego’s Old Globe in 2016. It’s not hard to see why it’s been so successful: Not only is Ms. Ziegler’s subject matter inherently accessible, but the play calls for only a small cast and the most basic of sets (William Boles’s set for this production consists of a near-abstract tennis court and scoreboard). More important, “The Last Match,” staged by Keira Fromm, a Chicago-based director whose work is new to me, is a highly engaging play that infuses its staple themes, ambition and the coming of middle age, with a deeply satisfying freshness of approach. For all the seeming predictability of Ms. Ziegler’s plot, you’ll be drawn into the action so fully that you may not even notice how striking the production is….
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Read the whole thing here.A scene from The Last Match:
John Guare talks about the genesis of The House of Blue Leaves in a 1999 interview:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!”
Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
“All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.”
W.H. Auden, A Certain World
Charles Laughton delivers the Gettysburg Address on an episode of The Colgate Comedy Hour. He is “introduced” by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. This episode was originally telecast live by NBC on April 6, 1952:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to Alice Richardson (July 29, 1940)