In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Shakespeare & Company’s new outdoor production of King Lear, with Christopher Lloyd in the title role. Here’s an excerpt.

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With live theater productions opening throughout America, I gave much thought to how I would break the 16-month fast from public performance that began for me after I saw Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King” off Broadway in March 2021, mere days before the Covid-19 lockdown. I wanted to review a show as special as the occasion itself, and I didn’t have to look long to find it: Shakespeare & Company, located in the Berkshires, Massachussetts’ center of summer theater, plus concerts, dance, and the visual arts, has opened its new 500-seat outdoor amphitheater with “King Lear.” In it, Christopher Lloyd, who is 82 and is best known, despite his extensive stage credits, for his appearances in such popular films as “Back to the Future,” plays for the first time the mad old king. Nor did I choose wrong: This “Lear,” directed by Nicole Ricciardi, is one of the strongest productions of Shakespeare’s all-encompassing super-drama of man’s fate that I’ve seen in my 18 years as a drama critic….

“Lear” asks so much of its star, especially in the storm scene, that the role is normally played by a much younger man. Mr. Lloyd, to be sure, is no longer able to shake the rafters, for which reason the storm has been dialed back in sonic intensity. But he is still a magnificent performer who effortlessly projects his lines all the way to the back row of the amphitheater…

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Read the whole thing here.

Peter and Rudolf Serkin play Schubert’s G Major Marche militaire for piano duet in a 1988 concert telecast. They are introduced by Van Cliburn:

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

“Great minds tend toward banality.”

André Gide, Pretexts

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about how Irving Stone—and Charlton Heston—introduced Michelangelo to a generation of American readers and filmgoers. Here’s an excerpt.

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Like Shakespeare and Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is one of those giants of Western culture who is known by only one name—and not just to highbrows but pretty much everybody. Even those whose awareness of the visual arts is restricted to the Mona Lisa and “The Last Supper” are more than likely to also know that Michelangelo was the sculptor of “David” and the painter of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. That double-barreled fact is the measure of his fame. But how do they know about Michelangelo? And how, for that matter, do they know Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy or the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth? It’s been a long time since you could count on our schools to teach such things, or even to introduce their students to the notion of artistic greatness itself.

For Americans over 50 years old, the answer is a phenomenon called “middlebrow culture” that was fostered by radio, TV, magazines and the movies. From the ’30s until well into the ’70s, high culture was generally portrayed by the media not dismissively but with unironic respect—and in such a way as to suggest that anyone with a public-school education could enjoy it.

In the case of Michelangelo, it was a novelist who made all the difference….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Carol Reed’s 1965 film version of Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy, starring Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison:

“Neurosis seems to be a human privilege.”

Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Buffalo Springfield plays a medley of “For What It’s Worth” and “Mr. Soul” on an episode of The Hollywood Palace originally telecast by ABC in 1967:

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

“He that has no one to love or confide in, has little to hope. He wants the radical principle of happiness.”

Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

From 2004:

Alas, I found even less to like about Annie Hall this time around. Such innovations as the subtextual subtitles, the animated sequence, even the cameo by Marshall McLuhan now strike me as cutesy. Far more exasperating, though, is Allen’s both-sides-of-the-street portrayal of his neuroses, which he pretends to mock while actually reveling in them, proving as they do that he is not as other men…

Read the whole thing here.