“I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.”
Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

I’m one of the panelists on this week’s episode of Working in the Theatre, a discussion called “Theatre Journalism: Online and Off” that will be telecast by CUNY-TV on Sunday at five p.m. ET. Joining me are Scott Heller, the theater editor of the New York Times, and stagebloggers Chris Caggiano, David Loehr, and Jan Simpson. The host is Howard Sherman. I really enjoyed taping this program, and I hope the results are as much fun to watch as they were to make.
For more information, or to download a podcast of the show, go here.
Here’s a snippet in which I talk about artblogging and the old media:

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, reviewed here)

• Born Yesterday (comedy, G/PG-13, closes July 31, reviewed here)

• The House of Blue Leaves (serious comedy, PG-13, closes July 23, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, reviewed here)

• The Importance of Being Earnest (high comedy, G, just possible for very smart children, closes July 3, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

• The Motherf**ker with the Hat (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, extended through July 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (comedy, PG-13, extended through June 12, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• The School for Lies (verse comedy, PG-13, impossible for children, closes May 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, closes May 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN LOS ANGELES:

• God of Carnage (serious comedy, PG-13, Los Angeles remounting of Broadway production with original cast, adult subject matter, Broadway run reviewed here)

A rare kinescope (in two parts) of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten performing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo on Japanese television in 1956:

“There is a natural connection between the teaching profession and a taste for totaliarian government; prolonged association with the immature–fanatical urchins competing for caps and blazers of distinguishing colours–the dangerous pleasure of over-simple exposition, the scars of the endless losing battle for order and uniformity which rages in every classroom, dispose even the most independent minds to shirt-dipping and saluting.”
Evelyn Waugh, “For Schoolboys Only”

Trumpeter Snooky Young sings and plays “Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It)” with Doc Severinsen and the Tonight Show Orchestra:

Today’s Google Doodle is an animated tribute to Martha Graham:

The Washington Post has a posting about Ryan Woodward, the animator, on its “Comic Riffs” blog. The author of the posting quotes from an essay that I wrote about Graham for Time in 1998. If you’d like to read the whole thing–which isn’t quite so laudatory as the quote suggests–go here.

Everybody’s having his or her say about Arthur Laurents, who wrote the books for Gypsy and West Side Story and who died the other day at the age of ninety-three. Much of what’s being said about him is a bit on the sanctimonious side, which is mildly amusing. The truth is that Laurents was one of the most detested people in the theater business, a genuinely nasty man about whom more than a few of his famous ex-friends had nothing good to say, just as he had nothing good to say about them. I suspect that his nastiness was rooted in the fact that he never succeeded in writing anything of lasting interest other than Gypsy and West Side Story, and resented his better-known collaborators for having made possible his own success, such as it was.
For my part, I wrote nothing about Laurents’ death because I’d already said my piece about him in a Wall Street Journal review of Original Story By, his 2000 autobiography. Laurents spewed venom all over a long list of people, Jerome Robbins in particular, in Original Story By, which explains the last paragraph of my review:

Jerome Robbins was one of the twentieth century’s greatest choreographers, while Arthur Laurents will in the not-so-long run be remembered solely for having collaborated with his artistic betters, Robbins very much included. Small wonder, then, that Original Story By leaves a rancid taste in the mouth. For all its irresistible readability, too much of it stinks of smugness and spite–and envy.

So it did, and does.