“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
In the last twelve years alone, I’ve written close to a thousand columns for The Wall Street Journal and more than eleven thousand postings in this space, not to mention my monthly essays for Commentary and fugitive writings for sundry other magazines and newspapers. What’s surprising isn’t that I forgot having written about Mel Powell, but that I can still remember—usually—what I wrote about last week.
Audie Murphy appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? This episode was originally telecast live by CBS on July 3, 1955. Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, later became a movie star. The panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Q. Lewis and the host is John Daly:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Major Michelle A. Rakers and the United States Marine Band perform “Horkstow Grange,” a movement from Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, in concert at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, in 2015:
Lincolnshire Posy is a six-movement suite for concert band composed by Grainger in 1937. The thematic material is drawn from English folk songs that were collected by Grainger in the field early in the twentieth century. He learned this folk song in July of 1905 from the singing of George Gouldthorpe, a lime-burner who was born sometime around 1840.
To read Grainger’s program note for Lincolnshire Posy, which contains a detailed account of how he collected “Horkstow Grange” from Gouldthorpe, go here.
To hear the actual wax cylinders on which Grainger made his original field recordings of the songs used in Lincolnshire Posy, including Gouldthorpe’s 1905 performance of “Horkstow Grange,” go here.
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(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy. Here’s an excerpt.
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As America’s pandemic-shuttered drama companies prepare to reopen, many of them are still webcasting plays to divert frustrated theater lovers who haven’t seen a show in person for nearly 14 months. Most are newly staged, but some are either archival videos (usually of good technical quality) made by the companies in question or performances that were previously taped for television. Some of the TV outlets that aired those performances have since posted them on their own websites. The WNET Group, for instance, has posted several plays that were originally seen on “Theater Close-Up,” a public TV series that sporadically telecast off-Broadway productions.
One of the “Theater Close-Up” webcasts that I’m just getting around to watching is “Incident at Vichy,” one of Arthur Miller’s lesser-known plays, which had its premiere in 1964 and was revived by New York’s Signature Theater 51 years later and telecast in 2016. Like so many of Miller’s plays, it is sounder in conception than in execution, but it gains in concentration from being viewed at home, and this production, directed by Michael Wilson, works even better as a webcast than it did when I saw it in the theater in 2015….
“Incident at Vichy” is set in “a place of detention” somewhere in Vichy France in 1942. The action takes place in the grubby waiting room of an office where Nazi detectives are interrogating a group consisting mainly of Frenchmen. They appear to have little else in common, though, and it turns out that what we have here is a “Grand Hotel”-like tale in which a cross-section of humanity is brought together, wound up, and set in dramatic motion….
This is a superbly promising idea for a play, but the trouble with “Incident at Vichy” is that Miller doesn’t infuse it with much stage action. Instead, his characters give speeches, lots and lots of speeches, all of them in the well-known Miller manner, at once preachy and prosy…
