About Last Night

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Cabaret (musical, PG-13/R, most performances sold out last week, closes Mar. 29, reviewed here)
• A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (musical, PG-13, some performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• It’s Only a Play (comedy, PG-13/R, extended through June 7, reviewed here)
• Matilda (musical, G, reviewed here)
• Les Misérables (musical, G, too long and complicated for young children, reviewed here)
• On the Town (musical, G, contains double entendres that will not be intelligible to children, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• Both Your Houses (political satire, G/PG-13, closes Apr. 12, reviewed here)
• The Matchmaker (romantic farce, G, closes Apr. 11, reviewed here)

“The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due—she reminds us too much of a prima donna.”

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

American Ballet Theatre dances Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas. The performance was originally telecast in 1985. The score is Ernest Chausson’s Poème:

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

“The saying that beauty is but skin deep is but a skin-deep saying.”

Herbert Spencer, “Personal Beauty”

The so-called Proust Questionnaire circulates in a variety of more or less authentic versions. I filled it out years ago, but can’t recall my answers, so here are some new ones. I’ve tweaked the questions (and added some new ones) to suit my liking more precisely. As always, all answers are subject to revision at will and without warning.

Here goes:

• Your favorite virtue? Valor. All others pale beside it.

• Your favorite qualities in a man? Kindness.

• Your favorite qualities in a woman? Ditto.

• Your chief characteristic? Determination—and, I hope, fairness.

• What do you appreciate the most in your friends? Patience.

• Your main fault? Impatience.

• For what fault have you the most toleration? Loquaciousness (it being another one of my own).

• Your favorite occupation? Writing—but when I’m engaged in it, I’m not conscious of enjoying myself.

• Your idea of happiness? Rehearsing a show.

• Your idea of misery? Sitting through any opera by Philip Glass.

• If not yourself, whom would you be? But now that I’ve found you/I’ve changed my point of view/And now I wouldn’t give a dime to be/Anyone else but me.

• Where would you like to live? Florida’s Sanibel Island.

• Your favorite color and flower? Ochre and orchids.

• The artist of any kind whom you admire most? George Balanchine.

• Your favorite prose authors? Kingsley Amis, the Boswell of the Life of Johnson, Colette, Edwin Denby, M.F.K. Fisher, Justice Holmes, A.J. Liebling, John P. Marquand, Somerset Maugham, Flannery O’Connor, Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, I.B. Singer, Trollope, Evelyn Waugh. For entertainment: Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald Westlake, P.G. Wodehouse.

• Your favorite poets? Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats.

• Your favorite plays? Arcadia, The Cherry Orchard, Dancing at Lughnasa, Galileo, The Glass Menagerie, King Lear, Our Town, Private Fears in Public Places, Side Man, The Tempest, The Trip to Bountiful, Waiting for Godot.

• Your favorite operas? Carmen, Falstaff, The Marriage of Figaro, The Turn of the Screw, Wozzeck.

• Your favorite musicals? The Fantasticks, Guys and Dolls, On the Town, She Loves Me, Sweeney Todd.

• Your favorite films? Chinatown, Citizen Kane, Defending Your Life, Groundhog Day, His Girl Friday, The In-Laws, The Last Days of Disco, The Searchers, The Rules of the Game, You Can Count on Me.

• Your favorite male character in fiction? Hugh Moreland in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

• Your favorite female character? Vicky Haven in Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born.

• Your favorite painters and classical composers? Painters: Bonnard, Cézanne, Chardin, Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Jacob Lawrence, Manet, Matisse, John Marin, Giorgio Morandi, Fairfield Porter, Mark Rothko. Composers: Bartók, Britten, Chabrier, Copland, Fauré, Haydn, Paul Moravec (no fooling), Schubert, Shostakovich, Stravinsky.

• Your favorite popular songwriters? Harold Arlen, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Willie Dixon, Bob Dylan, Harlan Howard, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Carolyn Leigh, Erin McKeown, Johnny Mercer, Robbie Robertson, Stephen Sondheim, and whoever wrote “You so beautiful but you got to die someday.”

• Your heroes in real life? Louis Armstrong, Adolf Busch, Churchill, Dr. Johnson, Lincoln, Solzhenitsyn.

• What characters in history do you most dislike? Hitler, John Rankin, Stalin, Robespierre.

• Your favorite food and drink? The Yucatan shrimp at Doc Ford’s on Sanibel Island, accompanied by iced tea with plenty of fresh mint and lime.

• Your favorite names? Emily, Julia, Laura.

• What do you hate the most? Any species of ideology, secular or religious, that issues in mass murder.

• The natural talent with which you’d most like to be gifted? I wish that I could play piano like Nat Cole and/or dance like Fred Astaire.

• How do you wish to die? With sufficient presence of mind to mutter “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”

• What is your present state of mind? Distracted and somewhat anxious.

• Your favorite motto? “If there’s no alternative, there’s no problem.”

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Nat King Cole and His Trio play “Route 66”:

From 2005:

Currently making the rounds of the blogosphere are lists of Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t. So here goes. In no particular order, I’ve:

• Watched an opera singer drop dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, run to the nearest pay phone, called the city desk of a newspaper, and shouted, “Get me rewrite!”….

Read the whole thing here.

“The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a greater temptation to the ego.”

Northrop Frye, “Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype”

Like everyone I know who works or has ever worked in the news business, I’ve been following the Brian Williams story with the closest possible attention. I don’t know, however, that I have anything to add to what we already know: Williams repeatedly lied about his wartime experiences in Iraq in 2003, and did so in a particularly shameful way. That’s about the size of it.

On the other hand, it does strike me that it might be worth drawing your attention to one of the most celebrated radio newscasts to come out of World War II. On December 3, 1943, Edward R. Murrow, broadcasting live from London on CBS, described for his American listeners how it felt to hitch a ride on D for Dog, a Royal Air Force bomber that had attacked Berlin the preceding night. It’s also worth pointing out something that may not be self-evident to many modern-day readers, which is that Murrow personally wrote every word of that broadcast.

This is part of what he said:

The clouds below us were white, and we were black. D-Dog seemed like a black bug on a white sheet. The flak began coming up, but none of it close. We were still a long way from Berlin. I didn’t realize just how far. Jock observed, “There’s a kite on fire dead ahead.” It was a great, golden, slow-moving meteor slanting toward the earth. By this time we were about thirty miles from our target area in Berlin. That thirty miles was the longest flight I have ever made.

Dead on time, Buzz the bomb-aimer reported, “Target indicators going down.” At the same moment, the sky ahead was lit up by bright yellow flares. Off to starboard another kite went down in flames. The flares were sprouting all over the sky, reds and greens and yellows, and we were flying straight for the center of the fireworks. D-Dog seemed to be standing still, the four propellers thrashing the air, but we didn’t seem to be closing in. The clouds had cleared, and off to the starboard a Lanc was caught by at least fourteen searchlight beams. We could see him twist and turn and finally break out. But still, the whole thing had a quality of unreality about it. No one seemed to be shooting at us, but it was getting lighter all the time. Suddenly, a tremendous big blob of yellow light appeared dead ahead; another to the right and another to the left. We were flying straight for them.

Jock pointed out to me the dummy fires and flares to right and left, but we kept going in. Dead ahead there was a whole chain of red flares looking like stoplights. Another Lanc was coned on our starboard beam. The lights seemed to be supporting it. Again we could see those little bubbles of colored lead driving at it from two sides. The German fighters were at him. And then, with no warning at all, D-Dog was filled with an unhealthy white light.

I was standing just behind Jock and could see all the seams on the wings. His quiet Scots voice beat into my ears, “Steady lads, we’ve been coned.” His slender body lifted half out of the seat as he jammed the control column forward and to the left. We were going down. Jock was wearing woolen gloves with the fingers cut off. I could see his fingernails turn white as he gripped the wheel. And then I was on my knees, flat on the deck, for he had whipped the Dog back into a climbing turn. The knees should have been strong enough to support me, but they weren’t, and the stomach seemed in some danger of letting me down too….

That’s what real journalism—and real courage—sound like.

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An aircheck of Murrow’s actual 1943 broadcast:

To read the complete text of the broadcast, go here.

To learn more about the broadcast and its historical context, go here.

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The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, William Wyler’s 1944 War Department documentary about an Army Air Force bomber and its crew. The combat footage seen in this film was shot by Wyler and other cameramen during actual air battles over enemy territory: