“Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.”

C.S. Lewis, “Is Criticism Possible?”

Julie Andrews sings “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” (from My Fair Lady) on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961. Because she was replaced by Audrey Hepburn in the screen version, his is the only surviving contemporary filmed record of her performance in the show, or of Moss Hart’s original Broadway staging:

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

“I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”

C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, February 1932

From 2010:

To be gratuitously nasty in public discourse is like relieving yourself in a swimming pool. Even if nobody knows you did it, you still made the pool a dirtier place for everybody–yourself included….

Read the whole thing here.

“The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.”

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

Jim Hall and Larry Goldings play Hall’s “All Across the City”:

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

“Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (courtesy of Brenda Becker)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a PBS webcast of Kenny Leon’s 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of Much Ado About Nothing. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

PBS continues to present plays and musicals on TV and streaming video that were originally telecast on its “Great Performances” anthology series—wonderful and comforting news for American playgoers whom the coronavirus pandemic has cruelly deprived of the collective pleasure of seeing shows in the theater.

The latest offering is the Public Theater’s 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” which featured an all-black cast and was directed by Kenny Leon. Mr. Leon is well known to New York audiences for his work on such notable Broadway and off-Broadway revivals and premieres as August Wilson’s “Fences,” Katori Hall’s “The Mountaintop,” Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” Charles Fuller’s “A Soldier’s Play” and Lydia R. Diamond’s “Smart People” and “Stick Fly.” Not only is he the go-to guy for black writers’ plays on Broadway, but he is one of the best stage directors we have—period. A craftsman of something like genius, he specializes in stagings so transparent as to create the illusion that he’s doing nothing more than staying out of the way of the script. Part of the illusion arises from the fact that Mr. Leon never distracts you with self-consciously clever touches: All you seem to see is the play itself.

It happens that “Much Ado” is the first classical play I’ve seen Mr. Leon direct, and since I was unable to catch it onstage in Central Park last summer, I’d been looking forward eagerly to this TV version. Not at all surprisingly, it is a rip-snorting success, a modern-dress update that puts an up-to-the-second Black Lives Matter spin on Shakespeare’s text while remaining absolutely true to the play’s underlying substance….

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

Kenny Leon talks about Much Ado About Nothing: