From 2011:

For the most part I’ve only talked about it in passing on this blog, but a year ago I started writing a one-man play about Louis Armstrong and Joe Glaser, his longtime manager. (The same actor plays both parts.) The play, which grew out of the research I did for my recent biographyof Armstrong, is called Satchmo at the Waldorf, and a couple of weeks from now it will become more than just a furtive gleam in the author’s eye.

As part of my current residency at Rollins College’s Winter Park Institute,  where I wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last year, I’m going to be taking part in a public presentation of the play’s opening section, the first time that any part of the script has been performed, either in public or in private. I’m staging the scenes that we’re doing–it’ll be my directing debut–and Dennis Neal, a seasoned actor who lives in Orlando, not far from Winter Park, will be playing the double role of Armstrong and Glaser….

Read the whole thing here

“It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.”

Anton Chekhov, “On the Road” (trans. Constance Garnett)

In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about the appeal of widescreen films. Here’s an excerpt.

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We’ve all heard about the perilous state to which movie theaters have been reduced by the pandemic and how in-home streaming is the wave of the future. But is that necessarily so bad? Yes and no. Many popular films, especially smaller-scaled romantic comedies, do not profit decisively, artistically speaking, from being viewed on a 50-by-30-foot screen, the standard size of a large multiplex screen. What is mainly lost by home viewing is something else: the exciting and festive communal experience of seeing any film as part of an audience, which for many grownups is significantly diminished (notwithstanding the great popcorn) by the prospect of sitting in the midst of a noisy, inattentive, cellphone-wielding crowd. Anyone who, like me, has seen a hit film at a suburban multiplex knows that such has long been the aggravating reality of contemporary moviegoing.

On the other hand, some films—including many of the greatest ones—lose immeasurably from home viewing. I discovered this in 2017 when TCM Big Screen Classics started showing older studio-system films in theaters on a limited-run basis. The Big Screen Classic that opened my eyes to the incomparable pleasures of large-screen viewing was Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959), a thriller shot in VistaVision, one of several widescreen, higher-resolution filming processes introduced in the ’50s in order to help studios compete with TV….

Part of what makes the original VistaVision version of “North by Northwest” so compulsively watchable is that many of its most memorable scenes, in particular the ones shot in a deserted Illinois cornfield and on a studio mockup of Mount Rushmore, made use of the wider screen of VistaVision by being filmed on an exceptionally large scale. No matter how big a home TV screen you have, it cannot come remotely close to offering the all-enveloping experience of watching scenes such as these unfold on a wide screen in a darkened theater.

This is equally true of widescreen westerns like John Ford’s “The Searchers” (1956, shot in VistaVision) and Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968, shot in CinemaScope, an anamorphic widescreen process with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1). The immense wilderness spaces in which these movies are set are, in a sense, another onscreen character…

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Read the whole thing here.

Artie Shaw plays his “Concerto for Clarinet” with his big band in the 1940 film Second Chorus, directed by H.C. Potter:

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

“Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.”

Anton Chekhov, “On the Road” (trans. Constance Garnett)

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal I review the Mint Theater’s webcast of Lillian Hellman’s Days to Come. Here’s an excerpt.

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One of the few welcome surprises of 2020 was the announcement by New York’s Mint Theater that it had spent the preceding seven years taping broadcast-ready three-camera archival videos of its off-Broadway productions, and that in lieu of live performances during the pandemic, it would stream these videos for free. As regular readers of this column know, the Mint specializes in small-house revivals of unjustly forgotten 20th-century plays. I have been reviewing one or two of its shows most seasons for the past decade and a half, and each one I’ve seen has been well chosen and flawlessly acted and staged. No other theater company in America has a more consistently high record of artistic quality.

“Days to Come,” the second of 10 plays by Lillian Hellman to open on Broadway in her lifetime, is one of the most significant of the Mint’s recent revivals, for the original production closed in 1936 after just seven performances and disappeared almost without a trace (prior to the Mint’s 2018 staging, which I saw and reviewed, it appears to have had only one revival anywhere). Most flops close for self-evident reasons, but there is no obvious reason why “Days to Come” did so: It is an extremely strong piece of work….

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Read the whole thing here.

In solitude
What happiness? who can enjoy alone?
Or, all enjoying, what contentment find?

John Milton, Paradise Lost

“A Mob’s a Monster; Heads enough, but no Brains.”

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack