A scene from The Loved One, Tony Richardson’ 1965 screen version of Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novella about Forest Lawn, starring Robert Morse and Liberace. The screenplay is by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
The New York theater season is hurtling toward its annual climax. As of this morning, I have thirteen more shows to see between now and April 24, when Cabaret opens and the Tony Awards eligibility period comes to an end. Some I long to see, others I dread, but even if I had good reason to expect them all to be terrific, that would still be too damn much theater.
It is, however, my job to be as receptive as possible to each show, and I take that job quite seriously indeed….
Noël Coward appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? The panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Preston and the host is John Daly. This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on Jaunary 12, 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
I review the Broadway transfer of The Lehman Trilogy in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Lehman Trilogy” tells how the three original Lehman brothers emigrated from Bavaria to Alabama in the mid-19th century and started a general store that traded with slave-holding plantation owners (a fact that is discreetly underlined in the play’s newly revised version) and evolved into a New York-based cotton brokerage. In due course, the firm grew into a financial empire, surviving two world wars and the depression and thriving—or, latterly, seeming to thrive—until it imploded in 2008, nearly forty years after the last member of the Lehman family departed….
The impression “The Lehman Trilogy” gives is of a novel being read out loud by three actors, much of which is written in the third person and the present tense (“Emanuel sits up in his armchair all night”). To be sure, Sam Mendes, the director, working in close collaboration with his inspired design team, has gone a long way toward giving “The Lehman Trilogy” a simulacrum of dramatic momentum, but it is not the kind to be found in a conventionally dialogue-driven play….
If I sound a bit lukewarm about the results, it is because I did not immediately warm to “The Lehman Trilogy.” But Sam Mendes’ staging is gloriously imaginative, and Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the three English character actors who comprise his cast, are prodigiously gifted changelings who all play men, women and children at various points in the show. Without exception, they do so with a light and witty touch that draws the sting from the words they speak, which are too often portentous and never truly poetic…
“Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”
E.B. White, One Man’s Meat (originally published in 1938)
