“No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean fingernails.”
John Mortimer, A Voyage Round My Father

Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza sing “Some Enchanted Evening” (from South Pacific) on General Foods 25th Anniversary Show: A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein, originally simulcast on ABC, CBS, NBC, and the DuMont Network in 1954. This is believed to be the only surviving film clip of Martin and Pinza performing a song from South Pacific, in whose original 1949 Broadway production they starred:

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

“A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.”
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

From 2005:

Taking a chance on new art is the price we pay for a healthy culture, one in which talented artists don’t have to wait on tables. Those who decline to pay it are the cultural equivalent of rentiers, aesthetic remittance men who live off the accumulated capital of the past without contributing anything of their own….

Read the whole thing here.

“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
George Bernard Shaw, preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet

If you go on a stage and say that you personally saw something, and the show in which you make this claim is not clearly identified in some meaningful way as “fiction” or “fictionalized,” then you’d better have seen it–especially if you tell your audiences that they need to take action based on what you claim to have seen.
Otherwise, you’re a liar.

Things have been more than a little bit crazy around here, as you’ll have guessed if you’ve read my latest blog entries (and you don’t know the half of it!). Hence I find myself with nothing to say this morning, a condition that may persist throughout the week.
I will, as always, dish up all the regular postings: daily almanac entries, art-related videos on Monday and Wednesday, the usual theater-related stuff, and our new weekly feature, “Lookback,” which will henceforth appear on Tuesdays. You won’t want for reasons to keep coming back.
Till whenever.

Gary Burton plays an unaccompanied solo version of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Chega de Saudade” in Copenhagen in 1968:

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