Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Charles Coburn appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on August 2, 1953:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Journalists are plentiful everywhere and entertaining too, full of jokes and stories. Only their jokes are not very funny and their stories not quite true. Their information is always incomplete, because nobody tells them the truth about anything.”
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music
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PBS has telecast dozens of plays and musicals on its “Great Performances” anthology series since the long-running program made its debut in 1972. Now the network is endeavoring to lift spirits crushed by the coronavirus pandemic by pulling some of those fondly remembered performances off the shelf and rebroadcasting them on Fridays on TV, and for a limited time via free streaming video. This week’s offering is a bedazzling gem, a live performance of the 2016 Broadway revival of “Present Laughter,” Noël Coward’s best play, starring Kevin Kline. Rarely have I laughed so hard as I did when I saw it on stage four years ago, and I am very happy to report that it comes across on the small screen with near-identical comic vitality….
“Present Laughter” cannot be made to take flight without an actor oozing with star quality sufficient to take on the showy leading role that Coward originally wrote for himself and which has since been essayed on Broadway by Clifton Webb, George C. Scott and Frank Langella, a list that gives you a pretty clear idea of what an actor needs to come up to scratch as Garry Essendine, Coward’s barely fictionalized alter ego. The brilliance of Mr. Kline’s performance lies in the fact that he plays Essendine not as a grossly inflated caricature but for truth, which—of course—makes him even funnier…..
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for Present Laughter:
The “overture” to Mark Morris’ staging of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts, featuring the Mark Morris Dance Group and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Dancers are auto-erotic and have no conversation.”
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music
“Taste is knowing what you don’t like.”
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music
A 1965 BBC interview with the British painter Francis Bacon. This was the pilot for a TV series that did not go into production, and the interview was never broadcast. The interviewer is Julian Jebb:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“The test of whether a picture is any good—that is to say any good for you, which is the only thing that counts—is not whether it thrills you but whether you can remember it.”
Maurice Grosser, Critic’s Eye