Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“At Wilber’s age, it was possible to believe that argument served some purpose, persuaded people, obliged those in error to turn to the truth. But soon enough you would have to wonder if an argument ever did anything beyond giving pleasure to those who already agreed with its contentions.”
James Gould Cozzens, Men and Brethren
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, the creators of Tom and Jerry, talk about the process of creating animated cartoons on the CBC in 1961:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“She was, in fact, fond of being ill, as only a person who never really is ill can be.”
James Gould Cozzens, Men and Brethren
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“Cabaret,” for all its deceptive air of festivity, is in fact savagely serious, a tough-minded snapshot of Weimar Germany on the eve of Hitler’s ascent to power, and Mr. Mendes’ sleazed-up staging, which put the emphasis on the show’s pitch-black side, was—to put it very, very mildly—not the sort of thing you’d expect a resort-town theater to present.
So it is fine news that this “Cabaret,” directed by BT McNicholl and choreographed by Andrea Leigh in the distinctive manner of the Mendes-Marshall staging, has neither been censored nor watered down. Ogunquit has even taken the trouble to reproduce the original sets, designed by Robert Brill, and rent the down-and-dirty costumes created by William Ivey Long in 1998. If you saw “Cabaret” at the Roundabout, you’ll know what you’re getting—and you’ll know not to take the kids, either…
I was writing review when word came of the death of Harold Prince. Our paths never crossed during his lifetime, and I wish I had gone out of my way to tell him how much I admired him. Alas, he had long since ceased to be a major force in American theater by the time I became the Journal’s drama critic—his last hit, “Show Boat,” opened in 1994, nine years before I filed my first review—and neither of the two shows of his that I covered in this space, “LoveMusik” and “Prince of Broadway,” merited a rave. By then he had lost his uncanny feel for the moment, one of the things that had helped to make him so significant an artist.
Yet a giant he still was, one in whose long shadow we all work today….
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for Cabaret:
Nathan Milstein plays the prelude to Bach’s E Major Partita for Solo Violin in an undated telecast:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.”
Winston Churchill, “My New York Misadventure” (Daily Mail, January 4 and 5, 1932)
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Somewhere along the way, Mr. Frishberg discovered that he had a knack for writing songs. Unlike most people who make that discovery, though, he then put himself through a rigorous course of self-training and turned into something so improbable as to boggle the minds of those who know what it takes: He is now the last of the old-time professional songwriters. He was influenced not by James Taylor or Ani DiFranco but by Frank Loesser, who wrote the scores for “Guys and Dolls” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” “There was dignity in everything Loesser wrote—no cheap lines, no cheap rhymes,” Mr. Frishberg has said. “He made the vernacular classy.” The fact that he embraced the fine art of golden-age songwriting long after the golden age of songwriting was over and done with didn’t faze him: Mr. Frishberg, who calls himself a “retromaniac,” is not only content to live in the past but prefers to do so. For him, nostalgia is not merely a state of mind but a way of life.
I know plenty of aging jazz musicians who don’t much care for the directions in which American popular music has traveled during the past half-century. Some are grumpy about it, others downright choleric. Mr. Frishberg runs more to the former than the latter, but his longing for days gone by is productive, not angry. Instead of cursing the darkness, he prefers to write superlatively well-crafted songs that sound as though he’d sat down in a time machine, set the controls to 1950 or 1961, and come back with a song…
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Read the whole thing here.Dave Frishberg sings and plays his “Do You Miss New York?”:
“The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.”
Winston Churchill, “Mankind Is Confronted by One Supreme Task” (News of the World, November 14, 1937)