Archives for 2015

Ravi Shankar performs on an episode of The Hollywood Palace, originally telecast on September 5, 1967. He is introduced by Bing Crosby:

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

“The imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value”

From 2005:

I’d somehow managed to make it to the age of thirty-nine without losing anyone to whom I was close. Then one day the bolts of lightning started falling all around me. First my best friend, then my father, and in the twinkling of an eye I was picking up the paper each morning and turning to the obituary page. I’d joined the club, the society of those who no longer need reminding that we all die sooner or later–and that some of us die too soon. Such knowledge changes a man permanently….

Read the whole thing here.

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

C.S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”

Today I drive from Spring Green, Wisconsin, to Milwaukee, board a plane, fly to LaGuardia Airport, and make my way from there to my apartment in upper Manhattan. On Tuesday I travel from there to rural Connecticut, where Mrs. T awaits me.

It’s not an especially long trip, all things considered, but it’s likely to be a bit hectic, especially at the Wisconsin end, in addition to which I’ve been up to my ears in deadlines for the past couple of days. As a result, it may be a couple of days before you hear from me again.

I’ll try to make it worth the wait—I have an unexpected adventure to report—but for now, try to content yourself with the routine daily postings.

See you soonish.

The New York City Ballet dances George Balanchine’s Agon in 1982. The score is by Igor Stravinsky:

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

“Criticism is powerless to reach art. Art proceeds itself in a region quite beyond the reach of other expression save itself.”

John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey revival of Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman and the Broadway premiere of Amazing Grace. Here’s an excerpt.

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To American audiences, Ferenc Molnár is one of the best-known unknown playwrights of the twentieth century. In addition to “Liliom,” which Rodgers and Hammerstein turned into “Carousel,” more than a dozen English-language versions of his other Hungarian comedies were produced on Broadway throughout the ‘20s and ‘30s. But Molnár, who fled to the U.S. in 1940 to escape Hitler’s wrath, was thereafter unable to rekindle his theatrical career other than fitfully prior to his death in 1952. Hence the importance of the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey revival of “The Guardsman,” freshly adapted and zestily staged by Bonnie Monte, the company’s artistic director. Not only is it great fun to watch, but you’ll come home wondering why Molnár’s plays are so rarely performed in this country. If they’re all as good as “The Guardsman,” we’ve been missing a bet.

Originally written in 1910, “The Guardsman” is a dizzy farce about a theatrical couple (Jon Barker and Victoria Mack) whose six-month-old marriage is in serious trouble. The problem: He thinks she has a wandering eye. The solution: He disguises himself as a dashing young guardsman and puts her faithfulness to the test by attempting to seduce her. The catch: How can he be absolutely sure that she doesn’t know it’s him? While the premise is Shakespearean, the treatment suggests a screwball comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with spasms of darkly neurotic obsession (“What is truth, old man, are the lies a woman tells”) and ornate roulades of self-reflexive modernism that are all Molnár’s own. Small wonder that Harold Pinter is said to have used “The Guardsman” as the basis for “The Lover”: It’s just his kind of did-she-or-didn’t-she puzzle….

Ms. Monte is as fine a director as she is a writer, and her ensemble cast is up to all of Molnár’s challenges, with Ms. Mack, a familiar face off Broadway, making the strongest impression as an elegant, startlingly tough-minded coquette…..

New musicals that open in the summer tend to be ill-fated, and “Amazing Grace,” which purports to tell the “awe-inspiring true story” (so says the news release, anyway) of John Newton (Josh Young), the British slave trader turned abolitionist who wrote the words to the 1779 hymn, is unlikely to break that rule. It’s not so much a musical as an anti-slavery pageant, with innocuous songs by Christopher Smith and a vertiginously high-minded book by Mr. Smith and Arthur Giron. This is the kind of musical in which the actors are required to say things like “It could be that you were given your gifts for just such a time as this” with straight faces….

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To read my review of The Guardsman, go here.

To read my review of Amazing Grace, go here.

The original theatrical trailer for the 1931 film version of The Guardsman, starring Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne: