Forgive my three-week absence from this space. I haven’t been sick, fortunately: I was completely crushed beneath the weight of work and work-related travel, in addition to some technical problems which temporarily stopped me from blogging. (I’ve also fallen in love, which distracted me very happily and about which much more later.)
The good news is that all is well again, and starting today, I’ll spend the week ramping up to my pre-hiatus five-a-week schedule. I have to spend the rest of today clearing the rest of the mess off my desk, but I did want to let you know that all was well.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Shakespeare & Company’s new outdoor production of King Lear, with Christopher Lloyd in the title role. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
With live theater productions opening throughout America, I gave much thought to how I would break the 16-month fast from public performance that began for me after I saw Katori Hall’s “The Hot Wing King” off Broadway in March 2021, mere days before the Covid-19 lockdown. I wanted to review a show as special as the occasion itself, and I didn’t have to look long to find it: Shakespeare & Company, located in the Berkshires, Massachussetts’ center of summer theater, plus concerts, dance, and the visual arts, has opened its new 500-seat outdoor amphitheater with “King Lear.” In it, Christopher Lloyd, who is 82 and is best known, despite his extensive stage credits, for his appearances in such popular films as “Back to the Future,” plays for the first time the mad old king. Nor did I choose wrong: This “Lear,” directed by Nicole Ricciardi, is one of the strongest productions of Shakespeare’s all-encompassing super-drama of man’s fate that I’ve seen in my 18 years as a drama critic….
“Lear” asks so much of its star, especially in the storm scene, that the role is normally played by a much younger man. Mr. Lloyd, to be sure, is no longer able to shake the rafters, for which reason the storm has been dialed back in sonic intensity. But he is still a magnificent performer who effortlessly projects his lines all the way to the back row of the amphitheater…
In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I write about how Irving Stone—and Charlton Heston—introduced Michelangelo to a generation of American readers and filmgoers. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
Like Shakespeare and Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is one of those giants of Western culture who is known by only one name—and not just to highbrows but pretty much everybody. Even those whose awareness of the visual arts is restricted to the Mona Lisa and “The Last Supper” are more than likely to also know that Michelangelo was the sculptor of “David” and the painter of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. That double-barreled fact is the measure of his fame. But how do they know about Michelangelo? And how, for that matter, do they know Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy or the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth? It’s been a long time since you could count on our schools to teach such things, or even to introduce their students to the notion of artistic greatness itself.
For Americans over 50 years old, the answer is a phenomenon called “middlebrow culture” that was fostered by radio, TV, magazines and the movies. From the ’30s until well into the ’70s, high culture was generally portrayed by the media not dismissively but with unironic respect—and in such a way as to suggest that anyone with a public-school education could enjoy it.
In the case of Michelangelo, it was a novelist who made all the difference….
