Archives for February 2017

“Age is not all decay: it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”

George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie

Hermione Gingold is the guest on This Is Your Life. The host is Ralph Edwards. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on April 23, 1961. Gingold was “surprised” by Edwards’ TV crew immediately after spending the day shooting the film version of The Music Man:

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

“When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves.”

Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living: Diaries 1935-1950

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:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• On Your Feet! (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

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

CLOSING SOON IN CORAL GABLES, FLA.:
• Between Riverside and Crazy (serious comedy, PG-13, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SARASOTA, FLA.:
• The Piano Lesson (drama, PG-13, closes Feb. 18, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN PRINCETON, N.J.:
• Hamlet/Saint Joan (Shakespeare and Shaw, PG-13, remounting in rotating repertory of 2012 and 2013 off-Broadway productions, closes Feb. 12, original productions reviewed here and here)

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Ray Bradbury, quoted in Misha Berson, “Bradbury Still Believes in Heat of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’” Seattle Times, March 12, 1993

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review a Florida production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Between Riverside and Crazy. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Pulitzer Prize for drama is not infrequently given for reasons other than pure excellence, but on occasion it hits the right target with admirable exactitude. Such was the case when the 2015 prize went to Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “Between Riverside and Crazy,” an uncommonly fine serious comedy about a widowed cop who got shot off duty eight years ago and, now unhappily retired, is stewing in his own acidic juices. By all rights, “Between Riverside and Crazy” should have transferred to Broadway after its highly successful Atlantic Theater Company run, but new plays, funny or not, no longer tend to do well on the Great White Way. Instead it has been enthusiastically taken up by regional theaters. The latest of these companies, Coral Gables’ GableStage, produced Mr. Guirgis’ “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” in 2012 and did it at least as well as the play had been done on Broadway the preceding season. GableStage’s production of “Between Riverside and Crazy” is yet another coup, a bases-loaded four-bagger that will remind anyone who’s still wondering that you don’t have to go to New York to see great theater.

Like “Motherf**ker,” “Between Riverside and Crazy” is a tough-minded domestic comedy about urban life that never settles for been-there-seen-that predictability. Pops (Leo Finnie), the cop who got shot, longs to exact revenge on the New York Police Department for having cynically given him what he believes to be the run-around. Beneath his boiling rage, he’s also a decent guy who wants to do the right thing by Junior (Marckenson Charles), his troubled son, and Oswaldo and Lulu (Arturo Rossi and Gladys Ramirez), two of Junior’s friends who have also taken up residence in his apartment.

This situation could have been be played out in all sorts of creakily obvious, politically correct ways, but “Between Riverside and Crazy” never lets that happen. Nobody is idealized, least of all Pops, nor are there any black-hatted villains. In Mr. Guirgis’ Manhattan, all motives are mixed…

Stephen McKinley Henderson, who created the role of Pops in the play’s original off-Broadway production, is one of America’s top character actors. I can say no better about Mr. Finnie than that he makes a wholly individual impression in the same part…

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Read the whole thing here.

Joe Venuti plays “How High the Moon” on The Dick Cavett Show, accompanied by Rio Clemente on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, and Bobby Rosengarden on drums. This performance was originally telecast by ABC on May 4, 1978:

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

“The more one reads the more one sees we have to read.”

John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, December 28, 1794