Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in concert in 1978:

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

“If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., speech, October 26, 1967

From 2010:

I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night for the first time since its original release, and was pleased to see that it holds up exceptionally well….

Read the whole thing here.

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.”

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Fred Allen and Oscar Levant star in “The Ransom of Red Chief,” a 1952 dramatization of O. Henry’s short story that was released as part of an anthology film called O. Henry’s Full House. The segment was directed by Howard Hawks and is introduced by John Steinbeck:

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

“Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?’ And that voice has generally entered the brain at the moment the actor loses contact, however momentarily, with the character in the situation, and, looking back to examine this or that line, turns, like Lot’s wife, into salt.”

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline. Here’s an excerpt.

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If you’re looking for streaming theater webcasts and are prepared to pay the tab, BroadwayHD, a subscription-based digital platform launched five years ago, has more than 300 shows to offer. Many are British productions, but a fair number of the plays and musicals are of American origin (though some are West End transfers of Broadway shows). Several of BroadwayHD’s most noteworthy offerings were taped by PBS and telecast as episodes of its “Great Performances” and “Live at Lincoln Center” series, and one of the latter, Lincoln Center Theater’s premiere production of Dominique Morriseau’s “Pipeline,” is a major event.

Performed by LCT in 2017, “Pipeline” has since been taken up by regional theaters from coast to coast. Part of the reason for its ubiquity is its preternaturally timely subject matter: “Pipeline” is the story of Nya and Xavier (Karen Pittman and Morocco Omari), a divorced middle-class black couple whose teenage son, Omari (Namir Smallwood), attacks one of his schoolteachers and is at risk of going to jail as the curtain goes up. But Ms. Morriseau is no mere headline-grabber, and “Pipeline” is an exceptionally well-crafted play that pulls you in by working the miracle of theater, which has the power to take you to places you’ve never been, showing you how other people live—and how they feel about their lives….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Pipeline:

The Art Farmer Quartet, with Farmer on flugelhorn, Jim Hall on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, and Walter Perkins on drums, plays “My Kinda Love” on a 1964 episode of Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual:

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