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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, closes Apr. 9, reviewed here)

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

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

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 20, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Mar. 27, reviewed here)

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

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:

• Twelve Angry Men (drama, G, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CHICAGO:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 13, transfers to Washington, D.C., Feb. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.:

• Freud’s Last Session (drama, G, unsuitable for children, reviewed here)

“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Right now I’m too blissfully tired to do much more than post the news that last night’s premiere of Satchmo at the Waldorf (actually, the first forty-five minutes of Satchmo at the Waldorf, but who’s counting?) was a howling success. As if that weren’t enough to report, my publisher informed me via e-mail this morning that the first three chapters of my Duke Ellington biography, which I sent in a couple of weeks ago, “read like a freight train.” Whee!
I’m (A) very, very happy and (B) taking the rest of the day off. See you tomorrow. Or whenever.
UPDATE: A friend writes: “Shouldn’t they read like the A train?”

This week’s video: Joseph Szigeti plays the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”
C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Earlier today I posted about the foreword that I’m writing for the University of Chicago Press’ upcoming uniform-edition versions of Flashfire and Firebreak, two novels about Parker, the professional criminal, that were written by Donald E. Westlake under the pseudonym of Richard Stark. I sent the finished foreword off to Chicago this morning. Here are the last two paragraphs.
* * *
When I first started reading about Parker, I thought of the words of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov: “If you were to destroy in humanity the belief in its immortality, not only love but every vital force for the continuation of earthly life would at once dry up. Moreover, then nothing would be immoral any more, everything would be permitted, even cannibalism.” Up to a point, that applies to Parker, a man to whom nothing but amateurishness is immoral. Even more to the point, though, is Liliana Cavani’s 2002 film version of Ripley’s Game, in which these words are put into the mouth of Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero: “I lack your conscience and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching.”
Like Ripley, who is a real sociopath, Parker has no conscience. Somehow, though, I doubt that has ever troubled him. I think he got up one morning, decided for reasons known only to himself that no one was watching except for the cops, and decided to act accordingly. Nor do I think there was anything dramatic about his decision, no Farewell remorse…evil be thou my good moment to stun the groundlings. And that’s what makes Parker so interesting, so seductive, and so wholly unlike most of the rest of us: he just doesn’t care, and never did.

In addition to presenting my first play tonight at Rollins College in Florida, I have to write and file two Wall Street Journal columns before flying up to New York on Saturday morning to see a press preview of Pete Gurney’s new play. I’m also working on the fourth chapter of Black Beauty: A Life of Duke Ellington, which is about two thousand words away from being done. I just started writing a description of the Cotton Club, the mob-owned Harlem nightspot where Ellington and his band took up residency in 1927, and the kitchen table of our borrowed Florida condo is piled high with all sorts of relevant books.
That is, needless to say, plenty to do, but I also want to knock out yet another piece this week. The University of Chicago Press has asked me to write a preface for Flashfire and Firebreak, two of the upcoming volumes in its uniform edition of the Parker novels. Regular readers of this blog will know what and whom I’m talking about, but for those of you just joining us, Parker is the professional thief about whom Donald E. Westlake published twenty-four novels under the pseudonym of “Richard Stark” between 1962 and his death in 2008. Several of them were turned into films of widely varying quality, the best remembered of which is John Boorman’s Point Blank, in which Lee Marvin played Parker.
The books themselves were long known only to the most assiduous of mystery buffs, in part because many of them were originally published as paperback originals, and it took years for them to find a wider following. Today, though, the Parker novels are now regarded as classics of their genre, and the University of Chicago Press is currently in the process of reprinting them all in batches of two or three. Each batch features a preface written by a longtime admirer of Westlake’s work, and I’ve been tapped to supply one for Flashfire and Firebreak.
The piece is due next Tuesday, but I want to try to get it into the can before going to New York. I have a birthday coming up on Sunday and Mrs. T follows suit next Thursday, and we’d really like to kick back and relax, so I started drafting my essay yesterday morning and hope to wrap it up and send it off some time tomorrow.
And why am I telling you all this? Because I’m bragging. My admiration for Westlake is extravagant–it was one of the not-so-minor disappointments of my life that I never got to meet him–and I consider it a great honor to have been asked to write about his Parker novels for the uniform edition. I’ve only written two such retrospective prefaces in the past, for new editions of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado and Paul Taylor’s Private Domain: An Autobiography. I think this assignment ranks right up there, don’t you?