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:

• Annie (musical, G, closing Jan. 5, reviewed here)

• Matilda (musical, G, nearly all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Once (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• 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)

• Fun Home (musical, PG-13, unsuitable for children, extended through Dec. 15, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• Good Person of Szechwan (play, PG-13, extended through Dec. 8, reviewed here)

• Juno and the Paycock (drama, G/PG-13, far too dark for children, closes Dec. 8, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• The Winslow Boy (drama, G, too complicated for children, closes Dec. 2, reviewed here)

“She was never ironic or sarcastic or cynical or nihilistic or contemptuous or any of those things, which are all the signs of the tarantula in smart people, the resentful small deadly creature that never fights…that only waits to bite fiercely and maybe kill you that way.”
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood

In April I was reunited with an old friend from Kansas City whom I hadn’t seen in the flesh for a couple of decades. She recently sent me a half-dozen snapshots that she took some thirty-five years ago, of which this one is the funniest and, I think, the most characteristic.
We were at an outdoor jazz concert that I was reviewing for the Kansas City Star. I can’t remember who was playing in Brush Creek Plaza that sunny summer afternoon, or why I chose to strike the preposterous pose that my friend captured on film, but I still thought it might amuse you to see what I looked like in my long-gone youth.
Because I’ve hung onto no more than a handful of old photos, none of them dating back more than a decade or so, it always takes me by surprise to see the older ones that my friends and family have preserved. The “me” in my mind’s eye is the person whom I see in the bathroom mirror every morning, a pleasant-looking gent on whom middle age crept up so stealthily that he never saw it coming.
Most people tell me that I look younger than my fifty-seven years, which I suppose should be heartening, but when I look at the youngster pictured above, all I can see is the countless changes wrought by time’s cruel hand. Yes, he and I are recognizably the same person, but my hair is unequivocally gray now, while my eyes are rimmed with crow’s feet and shadowed with the unsought knowledge to which Philip Larkin alluded in the great poem that gave me the title of this posting. In it I describe the effect of seeing a class photo from 1962 that was sent to me four years ago by another friend of my youth:

What do I have in common with the boy on the front row? I’m still left-handed, brown-eyed, and clumsy. I still love to read–and I’m still shy, though I’ve learned to behave otherwise. But I moved away from Smalltown well over half a lifetime ago, and I left behind much of what I thought I was. First I wanted to be a fireman, then a concert violinist, then a schoolteacher. Never did I imagine myself living in New York, writing books, or becoming a drama critic. Nor would the boy in the picture have been able to grasp what it would mean to do any of those things.

“It’s a good thing we don’t know what it’s like to be grown up when we’re small,” I told a colleague of mine the other day. “If we did, we’d kill ourselves.” He laughed, as I meant for him to do–but I was kidding on the square. I love my life, my job, my after-hours pursuits, my adored Mrs. T. At the same time, though, I also know, unlike the cheery fellow with the pencil who is pictured above, that even at its smoothest, the road of life is full of potholes, some of them deep enough to bend the axle of the best-built car.
I’m glad that he didn’t know about some of the bigger ones that were waiting for him up around the bend, that he was content that day to enjoy the company of the lively young woman who took the snapshot at which he would marvel half a lifetime later. Sufficient unto the summer is the happiness thereof.
* * *
Melissa Errico sings “Once Upon a Summertime.” The music and orchestral arrangement are by Michel Legrand and the words are by Johnny Mercer:

A production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera The Medium, originally telecast on Studio One in 1948 and featuring Marie Powers and other members of the original Broadway cast:

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

“A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.”
Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century

I’m departing for Washington, D.C., very early this morning and will be more or less inaccessible for the next forty-eight hours. Not only does Gotham Books, the publishers of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, have me booked as tight as an apple skin throughout my stay in the nation’s capital, but I’ll be on the jump as soon as I get off the train in New York on Wednesday.
Needless to say, the blog will continue as usual, but I won’t. See you on Thursday!

From 2003:

Wild Strawberries is a beautiful movie–one that knows how beautiful it is, and wants you to know, too. The older I get, the less readily I warm to that kind of art, be it film, painting, music, the novel, or what have you. This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy revisiting Wild Strawberries after a quarter-century. I did, very much. But I don’t know whether I’ll ever feel the need to see it again, whereas I rarely let a year go by without watching The Rules of the Game. Which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me, aesthetically speaking….

Read the whole thing here.

“A film is–or should be–more like music than like fiction.”
Stanley Kubrick (quoted in Norman Kagan, The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick)