“What happens is, your voice isn’t going to go anywhere. But if you try to possess it, by playing only the things you like, forever, you will then sound like all these other guys who became stylists, and everybody knows how good they are, and you don’t expect any surprises, certainly no big surprises. You don’t expect to be confronted with a new reality. Because you think you know who these guys are. So voice is like personality. And then after you have this personality, what you wanna do is get it out of there, in the sense of it being a conscious thing. Because you’re never gonna lose what you gained, but if you don’t take it further, you will just stagnate and you’ll be one of those guys that’s, well…‘Remember how he sounded?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, it was cool, it was good.’”

Keith Jarrett, (interviewed by Ethan Iverson, “Do the Math,” September 2009)

“One way or another, we all pay for our vices.”

Ben Maddow and John Huston, screenplay for The Asphalt Jungle

Mrs. T opened her eyes this morning for the first time since her double-lung transplant surgery. She appeared to respond when I asked her to blink if she could hear my voice and understand what I was saying. We’re not sure whether that might have been wishful thinking on my part, but the doctors continue to be satisfied with her progress to date, and I’m not complaining.

I sat by her ICU bed for a couple of hours, talking quietly about what had happened during the past couple of weeks and making reassuring noises. I also played a piece of music on my laptop, a beautiful little piano solo by Aaron Copland called “Down a Country Lane” which we both love and which was performed thirteen years ago at our wedding. It struck me that if you were gradually coming out of a protracted coma, that might be a nice thing to hear.

We still have a dauntingly long row to hoe before we get back home again, much less to Sanibel Island—but Mrs. T took a giant step in the right direction today.

UPDATE ON SATURDAY MORNING: I just got a completely unambiguous I-hear-you eyeblink response from Mrs. T when I asked if she could hear me and knew who I was. Yesterday I wasn’t sure—today I am.

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Aaron Copland’s “Down a Country Lane,” played by Leo Smit:

“All of us—the public, critics, and composers themselves—spend far too much time worrying about whether a work is a shattering masterpiece. Let us not be so self-conscious. Maybe in thirty years’ time very few works that are well known today will still be played, but does that matter so much? Surely out of the works that are written some good will come, even if it is not now; and these will lead on to people who are better than ourselves.”

Benjamin Britten (interviewed by Edmund Tracey, Sadler’s Wells Magazine, Autumn 1966)

I’ve written a special “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal in which I consider the potentially devastating effects of coronavirus on theater in New York—and suggest a remedy. Here’s an excerpt.

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The performing arts are facing a crisis of the highest seriousness—and theater in New York may be in the biggest trouble of all. Shortly after Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera announced that they would be closed in an attempt to slow the inexorable spread of the new coronavirus, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo put in place a ban on public gatherings of more than 500 people. That includes Broadway, whose smallest theater seats 597 and all of which went dark at five p.m. on  Thursday….

Yet there is a way for the show to go on without putting the public at risk. That way is online live-streaming.

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, a fast-growing number of performing-arts groups have been using digital technology to beam their shows into movie houses on both sides of the Atlantic, and many older performances can also be viewed online….

According to City A.M., a London-based financial and business newspaper, a dozen English theater troupes are hard at work on contingency plans to live-stream their shows should they be closed by the coronavirus.

Not so Broadway’s producers. “We have not really discussed [live streaming] as an option,” Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, told the New York Daily News. But why not seize the opportunity to leap forward into the 21^st century and make live-streaming an integral part of theater in New York, in the same way that some New York jazz clubs routinely webcast performances for free as a way of promoting the unique experience of hearing live jazz?…

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Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the PBS “Great Performances” telecast of the 2017 Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, starring Kevin Kline. I was in the theater when this performance was taped:

UPDATE: All Broadway shows have now been closed because of coronavirus, as have the two off-Broadway shows listed below. Watch this space for information about reopenings.

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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.

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ON BROADWAY:

• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, virtually all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Girl From the North Country (Bob Dylan jukebox musical, PG-13, reviewed here)

• Hadestown (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

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CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:

• The Hot Wing King (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Mar. 22, reviewed here)

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CLOSING SUNDAY ON BROADWAY:

• A Soldier’s Play (drama, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

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CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Blues for an Alabama Sky (drama, PG-13, reviewed here)