The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs an excerpt from Taylor’s Musical Offering, set to the music of Bach and accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. This performance was filmed on January 16, 2019:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“At that moment the realisation hit me—and has never left me since: true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.”
Simon Leys, “Quixotism” (in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays)
“Happy Feet,” a production number from King of Jazz, a 1930 film shot in early Technicolor, directed by John Murray Anderson, and starring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Bing Crosby and Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys are featured in the song, written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and arranged by Ferdé Grofe:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it…and you talk about listening.”
Miles Davis, quoted in Julie Coryell and Laura Friedman, Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, the Music
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast by Arkansas’s TheatreSquared of Lauren Gunderson’s The Half-Life of Marie Curie. Here’s an excerpt.
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I’ve been hearing good things about Arkansas’s TheatreSquared for some time now, and it was long my plan to see a play there after paying a visit to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is just 30 miles away and which I also have yet to see. But life kept getting in the way, and the coming of Covid-19 finished the job: I haven’t seen a play in a theater, in or out of New York, since March. So when TheatreSquared announced that it would be webcasting a production of Lauren Gunderson’s “The Half-Life of Marie Curie ” taped in an empty theater, I immediately put it on my schedule.
Ms. Gunderson’s work is rarely staged in New York, but she was the most frequently produced playwright in America (not counting Shakespeare) in 2017 and 2019, and it’s easy to see why. Not only does she specialize in feminist-angled plots whose protagonists are women, but she makes a special point of writing eminently practical plays that are carefully tailored to the specific needs of theater companies. Like all prolific artists, Ms. Gunderson’s work is uneven—she can be earnest to a fault when she has a political point to make—but at her best, she is a fine craftsman whose shows are always solidly made and on occasion inspired…..
“The Half-Life of Marie Curie,” a two-hander first performed off Broadway in 2019, falls somewhere in between the extremes of over-earnestness and inspiration. …
Nevertheless, the situation portrayed by Ms. Gunderson has the advantage of being inherently dramatic, and “The Half-Life of Marie Curie” is the kind of story that can easily take wing so long as the two actors are first-rate….
