“The musical score for Woody Allen’s unexpected 2011 hit, ‘Midnight in Paris,’ features songs intended, like the film itself, to evoke the spirit of the City of Lights in the 1920s. The musical performance that opens the movie is a jazz recording called ‘Si tu vois ma mère.’ It dates not from the interwar years but was instead cut in 1952 by a soprano saxophonist whose sound–huge, nasal, and piercing, with a startlingly wide vibrato–is as atypical of jazz as the French-flavored song itself. ‘Si tu vois ma mère’ (‘If you see my mother’) delights everyone who hears it, and the sublime mood in which it drenches ‘Midnight in Paris’ was partly responsible for the movie’s surprising success…”

“Alas for Simon, Lost in Yonkers was not a new beginning but an end. Never again would Simon write a full-fledged stage hit or a commercially viable screenplay, and none of his plays has been successfully revived on Broadway, save as a star vehicle (like the 2005 production of The Odd Couple with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick). The most recent attempt, a 2009 revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, whose original 1983 production had a 1,299-performance run, closed in a week…”

“The one-person play is now so familiar a genre for theatergoers that many would be surprised to learn it is among the youngest of all theatrical forms–little more than a half-century old. Because such shows are well liked by audiences and cost comparatively little to mount, many regional theater companies contrive to balance their books by putting on a new one every season. One (perhaps solipsistic) indication of the genre’s appeal is that my first play, a one-man show about Louis Armstrong, will be produced this season by two different New England theater companies. It is unlikely that either troupe would have agreed to collaborate on a production of a more ambitious script by a rookie…”

“Of the making of books about Lillian Hellman, there is no end. Since her death in 1984, she has been the subject of three full-scale biographies, a book-length memoir by one of her lovers, and a 350-page portrait of her long-term relationship with the mystery novelist and screenwriter Dashiell Hammett. An admiring PBS documentary and an adoring one-woman Broadway show have also been on offer. What is surprising about this posthumous réclame is that by 1984, Hellman had come to be widely viewed as an embarrassment to the republic of letters…”

“In February, the New York Philharmonic announced its 2012-13 season, the orchestra’s fourth under the leadership of Alan Gilbert, whose appointment as music director was the source of much favorable press when it was announced in 2007. No such reaction greeted the news that the Philharmonic would be offering its audiences, among other things, a four-concert Bach series, the symphonies and concertos of Brahms, and a concert version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel. Outside of the usual pro forma story in the New York Times, the silence was deafening…”

“One of a bare handful of hit Broadway musicals to have been written in its entirety by a single person, The Music Man opened to rave reviews in 1957, beat out West Side Story at the Tony Awards, and ran for 1,375 performances. Then it was turned into one of the most popular Hollywood musicals ever filmed. It was successfully revived on Broadway in 2000, filmed a second time for TV in 2003, and continues to be performed regularly by regional and amateur theater companies throughout America. Why, then, is Meredith Willson–the author of its libretto and music and lyrics–so completely forgotten?…”

“In 1973, Ebony magazine ran a story titled ‘Whatever Happened to Louis Jordan?’ Two decades earlier, the genial singer-saxophonist was one of America’s biggest pop stars. Not only did 18 of his 78s reach the top of the black pop charts between 1942 and 1950, but several of them, including ‘Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,’ ‘Caldonia,’ and ‘Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby,’ ‘crossed over’ and became hits with white listeners as well. In addition, Jordan was widely admired by his colleagues. In his heyday, he made duet recordings with Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Ella Fitzgerald. His later fans included James Brown, Ray Charles, and B.B. King–as well as Sonny Rollins…”

“John Houseman, who died at 86 in 1988, was amused and gratified by the well-compensated celebrity that he attained in old age, but he knew perfectly well that his career as a supporting actor was a fluke and that it was for his other, astonishingly varied achievements that he ought to be known…”