Archives for January 7, 2022

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Irish Rep’s revival of The Streets of New York. Here’s an excerpt.

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Theater lovers throughout America owe a huge debt to the Irish Repertory Theatre for having kept us sane and entertained by streaming exemplary, standard-setting video productions throughout the Covid-19 lockdown. Now the Irish Rep, for me New York’s finest off-Broadway theater, is reopening its doors with a revival of Charlotte Moore’s 2002 musical version of Dion Boucicault’s “The Streets of New York.” In his play, the celebrated 19th-century theatrical ne’er-do-well, who died in New York in 1890 after spending his career shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic, told a succulent tale of melodramatic woe. It is greatly enhanced by Ms. Moore’s songs and is performed to the hilt by her new cast…

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Read the whole thing here.

Alan Pryce-Jones interviews Somerset Maugham at his villa on the Mediterranean in 1965:

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

“Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.”

Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook