“The particular charm of marriage is the duologue, the permanent conversation between two people who talk over everything and everyone till death breaks the record. It is this back-chat which, in the long run, makes a reciprocal equality more intoxicating than any form of servitude or domination.”

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave

From 2004:

I love parody and caricature, and it’s one of my medium-sized regrets that I have no gift for either (though I can do adequate impersonations of a few of my friends). Alas, I find it impossible to get inside another person’s prose style. I once tried to write a parody of a Jeeves novel in the style of Bright Lights, Big City. That was actually a pretty good idea, conceptually speaking, but I stalled out halfway through the fourth sentence, so it went unwritten, and the only thing I can remember about it now is that the very first word was, of course, “you.”…

Read the whole thing here.

“Only when one’s friends die and one accompanies them to the grave’s edge does one realise precisely what they have meant to one.”

James Lees-Milne, diary, March 25, 1977

A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the twice-monthly podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.

Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings: 

This week the critics begin with a discussion about how their personal lives affect their experiences in the theatre, and the ways that different people identify (or don’t) when certain topics appear shown onstage. They then answer some listener questions about stage violence, respond to reader comments on reviews, and recount how they found their way to criticism. The round-the-horn discussion this week touches on Mac Beth at Hunter Theater Project, Gun and Powder at Signature Theatre, and Medea at BAM.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Jascha Heifetz plays the “Chaconne” from Bach’s D Minor Partita for Unaccompanied Violin on TV in 1970:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Some say never meet your heroes, but I say if you’re really blessed, you get them as your parents.”

Laura Dern, Oscar acceptance speech, 2020

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the new Broadway revival of West Side Story. Here’s an excerpt.

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Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the Hit Parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity….

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’ finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage….

All this, Mr. van Hove has said, is to the end of giving us “a ‘West Side Story’ for the 21^st century.” On paper, that’s an obvious but not-unreasonable idea. I’m for changing the classics when it’s done with taste and imagination—I just reviewed an 85-minute high-concept all-female “Macbeth” that was thrilling from start to finish—and “West Side Story” is similarly overdue for a thoroughgoing spring cleaning. This is especially true of Robbins’ dances. While I love his vibrant, vaulting sketches of teenage passion, I’ve seen them too many times to feel the urgent need to see them again any time soon. Of the five previous “West Side Story” revivals that I’ve reviewed in this space, all either reproduced Robbins’ steps more or less literally or were strongly influenced by his style. The trouble with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography is not that it’s new but that it’s dull…

As for Mr. van Hove’s staging, it is, like everything else he’s done in New York, a medley of self-regarding minimalist clichés slathered with political sauce….

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Read the whole thing here.

A British Pathé newsreel story about the 1953 Covent Garden premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana, commissioned as part of the celebration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The premiere was a now-legendary disaster, largely because the opening-night audience consisted mainly of upper-class luminaries hostile to modern music, and the opera (which is only mentioned in passing in the clip) failed to establish itself in the repertory until more than a decade later:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)