Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Adam Driver sings “Being Alive” (from Stephen Sondheim’s Company) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
“Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.”
Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard
An extended version of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” interview with Stephen Sondheim. This longer version aired on CBS after Sondheim’s recent death:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“A happy love-affair will make a drama simply because it is dramatic; it depends on an ultimate yes or no. But a happy marriage is not dramatic; perhaps it would be less happy if it were.”
G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw
A new episode of Three on the Aisle, the podcast in which Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I talk about theater in America, is now available on line for listening or downloading.
Here’s American Theatre’s “official” summary of the proceedings:
To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.Once a month since September 2017, Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal; Elisabeth Vincentelli, contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker; and Peter Marks of the Washington Post have gotten together to talk about what’s going on in the American theatre.
After a wonderful four-year run, we are sad to say this is the last episode of Three on the Aisle. We hang up our hats with a discussion of Stephen Sondheim’s legacy, and a reflection on how theatre has grown and changed over the years we’ve been making the show. Thank you all for listening, and we’ll see you on the aisle.
From 2018:
Read the whole thing here.Part of the durability of [Paul Taylor’s] dances arises from the subtlety with which they dramatize the opposing polarities of man’s divided self— male/female, dark/light, primitive/civilized, innocent/knowing—and set them in motion on stage, there to collide with one another, sometimes comically and sometimes fatally. Rarely does a Taylor dance express an emotion without also hinting at its inversion. This dualism is part of what makes his work at once ambiguous and accessible…
“I trust in the hard way, for little has come to me except in the hard way.”
Bob Dole (speech, 1996, quoted in his New York Times obituary, December 5, 2021)