“Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, ‘it is the quality which guarantees all others.’”

Winston Churchill, “Alfonso XIII” (in Great Contemporaries)

From 2005, a month before I nearly died of congestive heart failure:

I was thinking about the haircut I’d gotten in New York earlier in the week. The barber tied a dark blue apron around my neck, and it seemed as if all the freshly trimmed hair falling on it was either gray or white. So here it is at last, the distinguished thing, I told myself with an invisible shrug of pretended indifference to the all too visible evidence of the downward slope. Of course there are worse things than being on the verge of your fiftieth birthday—starting, needless to say, with the alternative—but that doesn’t make it any cheerier to contemplate, or easier to explain to younger friends still full of great expectations and innocent of grim foreknowledge. In middle age you find yourself saying goodbye to all that, a dream at a time, until one day the winds grow colder/And suddenly you’re older….

Read the whole thing here.

“The milk of the sacred cows has a way of turning sour.”

Henry Mancini, Sounds and Scores: A Practical Guide to Professional Orchestration

I’m back from Lubbock, Texas, where I gave a speech at Texas Tech that by all accounts went over well, ate really excellent Mexican food, and paid an afternoon visit to the Buddy Holly Center, a charming and classy little museum that reminded me of how much I like Holly’s music. On top of all this, I received an e-mail from Paul Moravec, my operatic collaborator, that made my day.

As I announced back in April, Paul and I have been spending the past few months hard at work on a brand-new piece—but it’s not an opera. Here’s the scoop:

My old friend John Sinclair is celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary as artistic director of the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park, about whose activities I’ve previously written in this space. John is a conductor of real quality who has turned the Bach Festival Society’s choir and orchestra into ensembles of distinction and consequence, and so the festival has decided to honor him by commissioning a work for soloists, chorus and orchestra. Paul and I, to our delight, will be writing it together….

The piece will be a setting by Paul of a poem called “Music, Awake!” that I started writing when I went to Baylor University last October to give a pair of lectures about Louis Armstrong and Whit Stillman. It’s a six-stanza choric ode to the universal power of music that was inspired by the transformation scene from The Winter’s Tale, a Shakespearean moment that Paul and I both love: Music, awake her; strike!/’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;/Strike all that look upon with marvel.

Well, it was time for me to marvel on Wednesday afternoon, for Paul sent me an e-mail containing the piano score of the first six minutes of our new piece, accompanied by a sound file containing a synthesized version of the music. I downloaded the sound file at once and started listening to it, and seconds later I was covered with goosebumps.

To hear your words newly set to music by a composer of the first rank is an unrivaled and incomparable thrill. It is, however, a thrill whose nature is surprisingly hard to explain to anyone who isn’t a musician. I did my best to describe the sensation when, two years ago, Paul and I were working on our third opera, The King’s Man:

Even if, like me, you’re a trained musician who has dabbled in composition, you simply can’t imagine how it feels when music—especially the music of a major composer like Paul—is added to something that you’ve written. It’s more than just a matter of superimposing a layer of color, in the way that a black-and-white film can be electronically “colorized” after the fact. What is added is meaning.

That’s how I felt when I listened for the first time to the opening section of Paul’s setting of Music, Awake! Right from the initiating musical gesture, it has a propulsive sweep that made me sit bolt upright and catch my breath. Most exciting of all was his brilliantly apposite setting of my favorite couplet from the poem, Magnify the world of all we hear and see/With the perfect truth of harmony. As we say in the music business, he nailed it. (And yes, I was thinking of Milton—as well as Mark Morris—when I wrote that couplet.)

Life can be difficult beyond belief, but moments like this one redeem every frustration and make the rough places plain.

A footnote: Music, Awake! will be premiered in Winter Park, Florida, on April 16. Two days later I drive from there to West Palm Beach to start rehearsing my Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Satchmo at the Waldorf. That promises to be quite a weekend.

Mike Nichols and Elaine May perform on the 1959 Emmy Awards telecast. They are introduced by Richard Nixon:

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

“You always aim high in something low.”

Mike Nichols, in conversation with Steve Martin (quoted in Vanity Fair, October 2015)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the Boston premiere of Katori Hall’s Saturday Night/Sunday Morning and two New York premieres, On Your Feet! and King Charles III. Here’s an excerpt.

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After seeing “Our Lady of Kibeho” off Broadway last November and “The Blood Quilt” in Washington, D.C., this past May, I knew that Katori Hall was a potentially major talent. That’s why I drove up to Boston to check out the Lyric Stage Company’s revival of one of her earlier plays, “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” and I’m thrilled to report that the 34-year-old Ms. Hall is now three for three in a row.

Written in 2008, “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning” is a Chekhov-style mood piece set in a Memphis beauty parlor at the end of World War II. Imagine a cross between “Steel Magnolias” and “Barbershop” and you’ll start to get a sense of what Ms. Hall is up to—but “Saturday Night/Sunday Morning,” even though it’s full of raucous laughs, is no light comedy. Each scene trembles with tenderness and pain, and each character will lodge in your memory long after the lights go up at evening’s end.

Miss Mary’s Press ’n Curl isn’t just a beauty parlor: It’s also a ramshackle boarding house for young black women who have stopped in Memphis on their way to parts unknown, run by a disillusioned war widow (Jasmine Rush) who knows too well how hard the world can be. The absence of a strong plot doesn’t matter in the slightest: No sooner do you meet these women than you want to know all about them…

Broadway’s latest greatest-hits album, “On Your Feet!: The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan,” is what the subtitle promises, a bioshow about the co-leaders of the Miami Sound Machine, the Cuban-American dance-floor pop group that torched the charts in the ’80s with such catchy singles as “Conga” and “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You.” Alexander Dinelaris’ book is heavy on the Hollywoodian clichés, but it has its charming moments, too, and every other aspect of the production, directed by Jerry Mitchell, is slick and satisfying…

If you saw “The Audience” at least twice, you’ll probably already have bought a ticket for Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III,” a what-if fantasy in which Queen Elizabeth II finally kicks the bucket, followed by the ascension of her long-suffering son to the throne. But wait, there’s a catch! The former Prince Charles (Tim Pigott-Smith, who is sensationally good) proceeds to defy Parliament by refusing to sign a bill abridging freedom of speech, thus triggering a 10-alarm constitutional crisis. So what, you ask? So this: “King Charles III” is a Shakespearean pastiche written in blank verse—and that, alas, is where the gas runs out. If you’re going to write a two-and-a-half-hour-long Shakespearean pastiche, you’d better be a damned good poet, and Mr. Bartlett is a mere versifier…

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To read my review of Saturday Night/Sunday Morning, go here.

To read my review of On Your Feet!, go here.

To read my review of King Charles III, go here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about a historically important home-video release. Here’s an excerpt.

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Peter Pan is everywhere these days, and I, for one, am getting good and sick of him. Not only does the dreadful “Finding Neverland” seem likely to run on Broadway for several more decades, but “Peter and the Starcatcher,” which is only marginally less bad, has become a regional-theater staple. Now that “Pan” has gone belly-up in movie houses, though, I’m starting to wonder whether my growing exasperation with the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up might be more widely shared. Hence it’s valuable to be reminded of the powerful and permanent appeal of the play on which all these tedious prequels are based.

That reminder comes in the form of VAI’s home-video release of the original TV versions of Jerome Robbins’ celebrated musical-comedy adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” the show for which Mary Martin (who played Peter in drag) is still best remembered. These programs, originally telecast live and in color on NBC in 1955 and 1956, were landmarks in the history of television: Never before had so large a TV audience seen a Broadway show. The 1955 version was viewed by more than 65 million people, one out of every three Americans, and it made so deep an impression on those who saw it that NBC did the whole thing over again 10 months later.

In those days you couldn’t repeat a live telecast any other way—videotape had yet to be invented—but both performances were filmed in black-and-white for archival purposes. These “kinescopes,” as such films are known, have never before been issued on home video other than in blurry pirate versions. (The out-of-print color version of “Peter Pan” released 17 years ago was the 1960 telecast, which was videotaped.) VAI has remastered both kinescopes with scrupulous care, and the results, if not up to modern-day broadcast quality, are surprisingly sharp and perfectly watchable….

It’s not hard to understand the colossal fuss that was made at the time over the 1955 telecast. Then as now, the only way to see a new hit Broadway musical was to go to New York and pay for a ticket, and “Peter Pan,” which ran for 152 performances, closing just nine days before the TV version aired, was performed at the Winter Garden Theatre, which has 1,526 seats. You can do the math: The number of people who got to see the show onstage was a tiny sliver of the far greater number who saw it on TV for free. If you want to know how the common culture of postwar America helped to bring its citizens together, you can’t do much better than to consider “Peter Pan.”…

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Read the whole thing here.

From the 1956 telecast of Peter Pan, Mary Martin sings “I’m Flying,” by Moose Charlap and Carolyn Leigh: