Noël Coward appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? The panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Preston and the host is John Daly. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on Jaunary 12, 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
I review the Broadway transfer of The Lehman Trilogy in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Lehman Trilogy” tells how the three original Lehman brothers emigrated from Bavaria to Alabama in the mid-19th century and started a general store that traded with slave-holding plantation owners (a fact that is discreetly underlined in the play’s newly revised version) and evolved into a New York-based cotton brokerage. In due course, the firm grew into a financial empire, surviving two world wars and the depression and thriving—or, latterly, seeming to thrive—until it imploded in 2008, nearly forty years after the last member of the Lehman family departed….
The impression “The Lehman Trilogy” gives is of a novel being read out loud by three actors, much of which is written in the third person and the present tense (“Emanuel sits up in his armchair all night”). To be sure, Sam Mendes, the director, working in close collaboration with his inspired design team, has gone a long way toward giving “The Lehman Trilogy” a simulacrum of dramatic momentum, but it is not the kind to be found in a conventionally dialogue-driven play….
If I sound a bit lukewarm about the results, it is because I did not immediately warm to “The Lehman Trilogy.” But Sam Mendes’ staging is gloriously imaginative, and Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the three English character actors who comprise his cast, are prodigiously gifted changelings who all play men, women and children at various points in the show. Without exception, they do so with a light and witty touch that draws the sting from the words they speak, which are too often portentous and never truly poetic…
“Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”
E.B. White, One Man’s Meat (originally published in 1938)
I mentioned in this space the other day that “personal distractions” were among the things that had kept me from posting for three weeks. The main one is the fact that I have fallen in love.
The woman in question is Cheril Mulligan, a theater-and-film buff from and lifelong resident of Long Island. We became acquainted through Twitter, on which she tweets under a pseudonym, and “Three on the Aisle,” the theatrical podcast that I do with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli. We got to know one another during the lockdown by exchanging direct messages on Twitter, and resolved to meet in person once we were both fully vaccinated. We both realized during her first visit to my apartment in upper Manhattan in June that we were in love, and we’ve had no reason to change our minds since then. Indeed, we now visit each other every weekend.
What’s she like? Smart, funny, kind, caring, and beautiful, for openers. (Yes, she looks like Liv Tyler.) In addition to appreciating good food, Cheril loves music—she’s deeply into Stephen Sondheim—and has a keen ear. Our tastes overlap, but not completely, in part because she’s a good deal younger than I am. As a result, we have the continuing pleasure of sharing all sorts of new things with one another. It was thanks to Cheril, for instance, that I first heard the music of John Hiatt and saw The Visitor, Paddington 2, and (no kidding) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while I in turn have had the privilege of showing her It Happened One Night and Rio Bravo and introducing her to Bill Evans and João Gilberto. I rejoice to report that she is now a full-fledged bossa nova fan.
My late wife Hilary, to whom I was wholly devoted, wanted me to find a new partner as soon as possible after she died, so much so that she brought up the subject more than once in her last months. “You’ll make a shitty singleton,” she warned me. I knew she was right, but I didn’t think it possible that I would get so lucky twice in a lifetime, especially in the midst of a pandemic, and four months later, I’m still stunned by my good fortune. Like the song says, I am once again “aware/Of being alive,” and it is my beloved Cheril who has made me so. Having her in my life is an unmixed blessing.
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Adam Driver sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” (from Company) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story:
