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:

• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Sept. 9, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Godspell (musical, G, suitable for children, reviewed here)

• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren’t actively prudish, reviewed here)

• Other Desert Cities (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, most performances sold out last week, extended through June 17, reviewed here)

• Seminar (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, reviewed here)

• Stick Fly (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 26, reviewed here)

• Venus in Fur (serious comedy, R, adult subject matter, closes June 17, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs (monologue, PG-13, closes Mar. 4, 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)

• Look Back in Anger (drama, PG-13, closes Apr. 8, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SAN DIEGO:

• Dividing the Estate (drama, PG-13, remounting of Broadway production, adult subject matter, original run reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN SANTA MONICA:

• Our Town (drama, G, remounting of off-Broadway production, suitable for mature children, original run reviewed here)

“The music started off at Bach’s typical quick trot, a pace which, being uniform and neither fast nor slow, the pace of the mind rather than of the emotions, left Eustace respectful but unmoved. This was a case for understanding, not feeling, and he did not undestand.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

On Monday Mrs. T and I decided to take the long way from Sarasota to Winter Park. Shunning the interstate highways, we drove down two-lane roads that passed by countless orange groves and through tiny towns with names like Ona, Zolfo Springs, Avon Park, and–my favorite–Frostproof. Even the landmarks along the way bore picturesque names (first Troublesome Creek, then Peace River). Alas, we were only passing through, for I would have liked to spend a night at the Hotel Jacaranda, whose website recalls the long-ago days when Clark Gable and Babe Ruth graced its spacious rooms. But we had to return to Winter Park in time to meet a dinner guest, so we kept on driving.

As Mrs. T napped, I turned on the car radio and listened to Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto, whose brisk, jazz-flavored outer movements flank a seraphically tranquil evocation of the Larghetto of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. It flows with such seemingly uncomplicated grace that one marvels at Ravel’s confession that he found it all but impossible to write. “Flows so easily! Flows so easily!” he sputtered to a colleague who praised its apparent effortlessness. “I put it together bar by bar and I nearly died over it.” Midway through the movement, Mrs. T awoke, looked out the window at the orange trees, and said, “They look like treasure.” Then she fell asleep again.

I can never hear the slow movement of the Ravel Concerto in G without feeling that I’m being offered a momentary glimpse of a world beyond that which we see around us, one that is simple and serene and devoid of pain or sorrow or doubt. The glimpse comes toward the end of the movement, when the music modulates without warning into a new key. It sounds like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a slate-gray sky. My eyes always fill with tears when I hear that passage, and they did so yet again on Monday, right on cue.

What gives music such inexplicable power? I’ve spent the whole of my life immersed in that mysterious art, yet I haven’t a clue as to what it is that makes me weep when I hear such things. All I know is that no other art makes me more intensely aware of life’s cruel brevity, or of the brief moments of piercing beauty that make such knowledge supportable.

Samuel Beckett said it: “We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” To drive past an orange grove while listening to the Adagio assai of the Concerto in G is to be awakened, if only for a moment or two, to the beauty at the heart of things, to be fully alive for as long as we have it in us. Sooner or later habit will always lull us back into the terrible sleep of everyday life–but then a great work of art sounds reveille, and we sit bolt upright, see treasure, and weep.

* * *

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Sergiu Celibidache, and the London Symphony perform the slow movement of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall on April 8, 1982:

The novelist William Maxwell talks about his life and work and reads his favorite poem, “Diffugere Nives,” A.E. Housman’s translation of an ode by Horace. Maxwell was ninety years old when this film was made in 1999:

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

“Stephen was in the habit of putting inverted commas round a cliché; it was his way of discrediting those aspects of the commonplace, and they were many, which offended against whatever might be his pose of the moment.”
L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

My brother just found this curio in the house where we grew up. He writes:

Do you know anyone in your travels who might be able to identify this ashtray? The red- and blue-tipped sticks are matches. They’re on a solid roll that spins inside the disc. The words inscribed inside the ribbon underneat the unicorn are SEMPER EADEM.

Drop me a line if you can shed any light:

“Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.”
Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”

Today is my fifty-sixth birthday. So what?

Hitting the double nickel last year inspired me to hold forth at length about this and that, not entirely without reason, seeing as how my first play and second opera were both premiered in 2011. Alas, 56 is a thoroughly uninteresting number, and 2012, while it holds a major event in store for me, promises to be routine in other respects. Assuming that nothing cataclysmic intervenes, I’ll write a hundred-odd pieces, see a hundred-odd plays, spend a lot of time waiting impatiently in departure lounges, and–I hope–finish the first draft of Mood Indlgo: A Life of Duke Ellington. For me that’s standard stuff, and I’m not sure I’d want it any other way, though I do have three never-to-be-acknowledged dreams that I hope will come true between now and year’s end. The first is probable, the second not altogether unlikely, while the third is a dismayingly long shot. (None has anything to do with Satchmo at the Waldorf, in case you’re wondering.)

Birthdays per se don’t mean much to me anymore, save as unwanted reminders of the inexorable approach of the Distinguished Thing. Six years after meeting Mrs. T and surviving a brush with death, I no longer need to be reminded to use well the interval: I’ve got that down pat, though I seize some days more firmly than others. In fact, I’m much more in need of regular reminders of the value of leisure, at which I’m not nearly good enough. If a philanthropist with money to spare were to offer me a smallish chunk of it, I’d ask my employers for a leave of absence and take Mrs. T on a nice long trip, in the course of which I’d endeavor to write as little as possible. But even the longest, loveliest vacation must end sooner or later, and no sooner would we return home than I’d sit down at my desk and go back to work…and do what?

It isn’t quite right to say that I feel the need for a change, since the past few years have been so full of changes. Perhaps a better way to put it is that I’m trying to decide how I want to spend the next part (which may, of course, be the last part) of my life. What shall I do once Satchmo at the Waldorf opens in Lenox and the manuscript of Mood Indigo is shipped off to Gotham Books? Should I embark on yet another biography? Ought I to continue working as a critic? Might I want to try my hand at teaching? Is my first venture into playwriting destined to be a one-shot affair? Above all, I long to know the answer to this question: are my energies best spent as a jack-of-all-trades, or has the time come at last for me to direct my fire at a single target?

The longer I live, the surer I am that the world was made for specialists, and I’ve always been reluctant to settle into a pigeonhole, however commodious. When I played music, I played many kinds of music on more than one instrument. When I became a critic, I wrote about whatever interested me rather than concentrating on a single medium. When I became a biographer, I jumped from subject to subject (first a journalist, then a choreographer, then a jazzman). No sooner was my first opera libretto produced than I started writing my first play. Yes, it’s been fun, but might I have been better served had I concentrated on one thing? While I don’t think it’s right to call me a dilettante–I’ve aspired to professional standards in everything to which I’ve set my hand–I sometimes wonder whether my reluctance to specialize has kept me from doing as well as I might have done in any of my varied lines of work.

Even at fifty-six, it’s not quite too late for me to change my ways, or at least modify them. It’s well within the realm of possibility that I have twenty-odd years of comparatively undiminished energy ahead of me, and I want to use those years in the best and most satisfying way that I can. Up to now I’ve operated on the assumption that life itself would tell me what to do next. Will it do so yet again? Or ought I to take courage in hand and place all my chips on a single number? And if so, should it be one of the numbers on which I’ve successfully bet in the past–or would I do better to try something really different?

Merely to write these words is to smile at their preposterous presumptuousness. I noted seven years ago that “nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I’m not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure.” You’d think, then, that I’d know better than to suppose that I could ever point myself in any conceivable direction with a reasonable expectation of getting where I thought I wanted to go. Yet here I am, trying once again to figure out what my next move should be.

The truth is that my next few moves are already set in stone. I’ve got a book to finish and a play to see onto the stage, The Wall Street Journal still expects to hear from me six times a month, and Paul Moravec and I are just getting started on our third opera. Nor do I have any particularly bright ideas about what to do after that: I have yet to receive an offer of steady employment from a college or think tank, and no matter how well Satchmo at the Waldorf does this summer, I have no illusions about being able to make anything remotely approaching a living by writing plays, much less opera libretti.

In short, nothing has changed–yet. Maybe it won’t, and maybe that’ll be just fine. Or maybe not. Edward Steichen said it: “Every ten years or so, a man should give himself a good swift kick in the pants!” Am I due?