Archives for 2010

In an excerpt from Beyond the Fringe, Dudley Moore plays a parody of middle-period Beethoven, using F.J. Ricketts’ Colonel Bogey March as his theme:

I’m taking the week off from my Wall Street Journal drama column. I’ll be back next Friday.

“One cannot hire a hand; the whole man always comes with it.”
Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

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

IN ASHLAND, ORE.:

• Hamlet (Shakespeare, PG-13, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, violence and adult subject matter, closes Oct. 31, reviewed here)

• She Loves Me (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, closes Oct. 30, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:

• Major Barbara (serious comedy, G, too complicated for children, closes Oct. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SAN DIEGO:

• King Lear/The Madness of George III (drama, PG-13, playing in rotating repertory through Sept. 24, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN:

• The Circle (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 25, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN:

• Another Part of the Forest (drama, PG-13, closes Sept. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

“Whenever anything is being accomplished, it is being done, I have learned, by a monomaniac with a mission.”
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander

An extremely rare black-and-white single-camera performance film of Mabel Mercer singing Burton Lane’s “Wait Till We’re Sixty-Five” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns,” shot from the balcony of New York’s Town Hall during a 1974 concert:

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

“To slave, to devote oneself, to have the highest imaginable sense of duty–these were excellent things, things of great merit. Merit–solid worth: it was unavailing against the sudden flash and bang, the inexplicable manifestation of talent. People did not easily forgive it that to you, not to them, had the gift been given.”
William Haggard, Slow Burner

Mrs. T asked me last night if Harcourt had published a large-print edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I explained that such editions were published by specialty houses and that I wasn’t aware that Pops had gotten the large-print treatment.
This morning I recalled our conversation, booted up my MacBook, and learned, much to my surprise, that a large-print paperback edition of Pops was published by Thorndike Press in May. You can order it for yourself or a partially sighted friend by going here.