When I was a boy, I lived in an old-fashioned small-town neighborhood, the kind where your house is close enough to the school you attend that you can see the playground from your front door. From then on, though, I was forced to make do with an ever-changing string of dorm rooms and anonymous apartments. Only once did I stay in the same place long enough to feel that I had a neighborhood again. That was in Manhattan, where I spent two decades on the Upper West Side. I’d never expected to feel at home in an urban environment, and it took me by surprise when I realized that I’d come to feel much the same way about my part of New York City that I had about my part of Smalltown, U.S.A.
Throughout most of that time, I lived a block and a half away from Good Enough to Eat, the Upper West Side’s best-loved comfort-food emporium, where you could always be sure of getting a tasty, unpretentious, and wholly satisfying meal. In due course it evolved willy-nilly into my hangout, the only one I’ve ever had. Never before–or since–has there been a restaurant where I was recognized by the staff whenever I walked through the door….
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)
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Writers Theatre’s webcast of Anna Ziegler’s The Last Match. Here’s an excerpt.
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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….
