“It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in forty years. He had just gotten tired.”

Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“Never forget that the spoken word is not twice nor three times, but five times as potent as the written word, so that what would occupy a page in a novel should take up only five lines in a play.”

Terence Rattigan (quoted in Michael Darlow, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work)

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: 

This month the critics talk to Soraya Nadia McDonald, culture critic for The Undefeated. Soraya is the 2020 winner of the George Jean Nathan prize for dramatic criticism, a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, and the runner-up for the 2019 Vernon Jarrett Medal for outstanding reporting on Black life. The critics talk about the evolving role of their work in a time of pandemic, about the multi-layered issue of theatrical and critical gatekeeping, and about the ongoing question, “What is theatre?” Critics’ picks this month include Blood Meal on Youtube from Theatre in Quarantine, Mike Nichols: A Life, a biography by Mark Harris, and Simply Sondheim from Signature Theatre.

To listen to or download this episode, read more about it, or subscribe to Three on the Aisle, go here.

In case you’ve missed any previous episodes, you’ll find them all here.

Randy Newman sings his own “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today” on the BBC in 1971:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

From 2020:

I’ll never again take another first date to Mario’s Deli, invite her to tell me all about herself, and wonder as I listen whether she might possibly be the girl of my dreams. That’s part of what it means to be sixty-four—that and the fact that you’ve learned, if you’re half as lucky as I am, that your biggest dreams have already come true….

Read the whole thing here.

“I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Mauricio Pollini, Riccardo Muti, and Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala perform the second movement from Mozart’s C Major Piano Concerto, K. 467:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)