“Even in its present, somewhat dilapidated state, the TV version of Reginald Rose’s courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men, which aired on Studio One in 1954, shows with stunning clarity what the finest live-drama series had to offer…”

“When the curtain goes up, I don’t care whether the author of the show I’m about to see is a Republican, a Democrat, an anarchist or a drunkard, so long as he’s taken the advice of Anton Chekhov: ‘Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing….It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference.’ That’s what great playwrights do: They put a piece of the world on stage, then step out of the way and leave the rest to you…”

“The much-derided but nonetheless hugely influential historical narrative that the Museum of Modern Art has been promulgating ever since its opening in 1929 is full of holes–and if you peer carefully through them, you’ll see some of the best art of the 20th century, even though it’s nowhere to be found on MoMA’s bright white walls. Consider the case of Richard Diebenkorn…”

“Now that I’ve read John Philip Sousa’s autobiography, I’m surprised that it isn’t better known to historians of American music. Like Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s Notes of a Pianist before it, Marching Along provides a priceless glimpse of the lost world of music making in Victorian America…”

“What can we learn from the voices of famous writers? Sometimes they inadvertently tell us things that we suspected but never knew for sure. Hearing Raymond Chandler’s mousy voice left me certain that he created the stalwart yet sensitive Marlowe as an act of wish fulfillment, allowing him to ‘do’ on paper what he would never have dared do in real life…”

“Jerome Robbins is still so much with us ten years after his death that it’s possible to take his achievements for granted–and easy to forget how startling they looked when they were new…”

“Watching a well-directed high-definition digital telecast of an opera on a movie-house screen puts you within arm’s length of the singers. (One of the cameras is actually mounted on a remote-controlled dolly placed on the lip of the stage.) In a large house like the Met, all but a few seats are far from the stage, meaning that you have to use opera glasses to see the singers’ faces. Not so on screen…”

“Asked whether the Philharmonic would be handing North Korea a propaganda victory by playing in Pyongyang, Mr. Mehta replied, ‘We’re not going to do any propaganda. We’re going there to create some joy.’ Somehow I doubt that playing Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Dvorak’s New World Symphony for 1,500 hand-picked servants of the regime will bring joy to the inmates of the North Korean Gulag…”