“Don’t get me wrong: I like musicals, the same way I like ice-cream sundaes. But man cannot live by dessert alone, and now that most of Broadway is shuttered, it has become clearer than ever before that there are better and cheaper places to get a steak…”

“In the Soviet Union under Stalin and Khrushchev, classical music was generally accessible and composers like Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich managed to write major works in spite of the rigid censorship to which they were subjected. North Korea, by contrast, does not have anything remotely resembling a serious musical culture–and what it does have is not available to ordinary citizens…”

“‘We’re the last generation of newspaper critics, you know,’ a New York drama critic told me the other day. ‘After us, everybody will be online.’ Forecasts of Apocalypse Tomorrow usually turn out to have been exaggerated, but this one is looking more plausible than most…”

“Orion Books, one of England’s top publishing houses, has just brought out the first six titles in a series of abridged versions of such classic novels as Anna Karenina, Moby-Dick, and Vanity Fair. I’m not inclined to be snippy about them…”

“I found it hard to shake off the disquieting sensation that Ms. Didion, for all the obvious sincerity of her grief, was nonetheless functioning partly as a grieving widow and partly as a celebrity journalist who had chosen to treat the death of John Gregory Dunne as yet another piece of grist for her literary mill…”

“If film music is the invisible art form, then Ennio Morricone is one of its least visible giants. To be sure, no one familiar with his work is in the slightest doubt of his immense stature. But Morricone, like most film composers, is not nearly so well known in America as is his music…”

“These five biographies of theater luminaries outshine the rest…”

“Historically, a director’s staging of a play has had the same legal status as a singer’s interpretation of a song, but John Rando, the director of Urinetown, thinks it should be protected by copyright and subject to royalty. Whether or not the directors of the Akron and Chicago productions of Urinetown stole his ideas, this claim is clearly defensible…”