Pablo Casals plays the G Major Cello Suite at the Prades Festival in 1954:

“I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.”
William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman

In an excerpt from Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore plays a parody of middle-period Beethoven, using F.J. Ricketts’ Colonel Bogey March as his theme:

I’m taking the week off from my Wall Street Journal drama column. I’ll be back next Friday.

“One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.”
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

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

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production 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)

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:

• The Circle (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN:

• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

“Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.”
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

An extremely rare black-and-white single-camera performance film of Mabel Mercer singing Burton Lane’s “Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” shot from the balcony of New York’s Town Hall during a 1974 concert:

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