Archives for February 2014

Leonard Bernstein conducts the premiere performance of his Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs on Omnibus in 1955:

For a partial list of the members of the studio band, go here.

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

“The artist who is one of a group writes for that group alone, whereas the artist who expresses personal experience may in the end reach universal experience.”
Constant Lambert, Music Ho!

From 2004:

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I’ve been doing it for years, and I can’t offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person’s life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth….

Read the whole thing here.

It’s no good escaping your doom

By taking a ticket to Spain;

The bulging portmanteaux of gloom

Will arrive by a later train.

Constant Lambert, undated quatrain

The first two preview performances of the off-Broadway transfer of Satchmo at the Waldorf took place on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the Westside Theatre, and they both went well–very well, if I do say so myself. John Douglas Thompson got well-deserved standing ovations both times, and I came home on Sunday feeling a lot better than I did on Friday, when I flew up to New York from Orlando with snow on my heels, a show coming into town, and (as if life hadn’t already been sufficiently complicated) a crippled laptop in my shoulder bag.
What next? I went to bed on Sunday and slept for twelve straight hours. Having done so, my plan for the rest of Monday is to listen to relaxing music, read an improving book, and think about nothing in particular. No deadline this afternoon, no show tonight. Life begins anew on Tuesday, but today I need a rest, and I plan to get one. See you tomorrow.
Oh, yes–if you haven’t already bought tickets to see Satchmo, what’s keeping you? Time’s a-wasting! Go here and do so forthwith. You’ll be glad you did.

Courtesy of Will Friedwald, Sid Caesar performs a scene from Little Me, the Neil Simon-Carolyn Leigh-Cy Coleman musical version of Patrick Dennis’ novel, on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963. The choreography is by Bob Fosse:

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

“Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution–these can lift at a colossal humbug,–push it a little–crowd it a little–weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.”
Mark Twain, “Chronicle of Young Satan” (courtesy of Tim Hulsey)

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a rare American revival by Orlando Shakespeare Theater of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Before “Angels in America,” there was “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” The Royal Shakespeare Company’s eight-and-a-half-hour-long stage version of Charles Dickens’ 1839 novel, directed by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, transferred to Broadway from London’s West End in 1981, snapped up a best-play Tony and created in a single stroke the modern vogue for the marathon multi-part shows that have come to be known as “event theater.”
Not surprisingly, revivals of “Nicholas Nickleby,” which calls for 39 actors, are rare. Accordingly, David Edgar, who wrote the script, prepared an abridged version in 2006 that has since been mounted three times on this side of the Atlantic. Now Orlando Shakespeare Theater has taken it on, with results that are both spectacular and satisfying. I didn’t see the original production, which by all accounts was a miracle of creative stagecraft, but it’s hard to imagine that it was more moving–or fun–than Orlando Shakespeare’s six-and-a-half-hour version, directed by Jim Helsinger and Christopher Niess, whose 27 actors (who play 150-odd characters) are deployed with infinite resourcefulness….
For Dickens, characterization was caricature: Nicholas is the Good Guy, Ralph the Bad Guy, and everybody else is an elaborately drawn cartoon. That’s what makes his novels so hard for many contemporary readers to get through–and what makes them so effective when adapted for the stage or the screen. Instead of wading through page-long thickets of broad-brush description, you watch talented actors portraying the characters, which frees you to focus on the plot and dialogue.
That’s where Orlando Shakespeare’s “Nicholas Nickleby” shines most brightly: The cast is consistently superior, starting with Greg Thornton, who plays Ralph as a hawk-faced, flint-hearted monster of self-will who, like Ebenezer Scrooge, has renounced human kindness. “All love is cant and vanity,” he rasps, and you know at once that the fires of hell await him. What is most impressive about Mr. Thornton’s performance, though, is that it isn’t a caricature: You believe in its reality, which makes Ralph’s decision to live without love even more horrifying….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.
The opening scene of the original Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby, telecast in 1983: