I felt that if I couldn’t listen to the first movement of Charles Ives’ Third Symphony right away, I would be reduced to abject despair. Therein lies the supreme spiritual utility of the digital technology that has brought about what is without question the most radical transformation of daily life to take place in my lifetime: I screwed in my earbuds and clicked a few keys on my MacBook, and all at once my head was full of Ives.
Why, though, was it this particular piece that I craved? I’m sure it was because I’d spent an hour talking to my brother on the phone on Tuesday night…
A promotional short for The Last of Sheila, a 1973 mystery movie written by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, directed by Herbert Ross, and starrng Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, James Coburn, and James Mason:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Shop fascinated her, because she knew that most men were interesting only when they were talking it. As long as one hadn’t heard it all that one fatal time too often.”
In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast from Philadelphia of Coriolanus. Here’s an excerpt.
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“Coriolanus,” Shakespeare’s most explicitly political play, has largely failed to hold the American stage. It has been mounted on Broadway only once, by the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project in 1938, and I’ve reviewed just three productions in the past 18 years, most recently in Central Park in 2019. At first glance, this makes no sense. “ Coriolanus ” is a truly great work of theatrical art, one that T.S. Eliot thought better than “Hamlet,” and the plot, which pits the title character, an unabashedly proud patrician, against the common folk, easily lends itself to updating. Why, then, is it not done more often? Could it be because modern, democratically minded audiences are ill at ease with casting such a man as a hero and placing him at the heart of the action?
Whatever the reason, “Coriolanus” is a masterpiece all the same. Hence it is a delight to report that Philadelphia’s Lantern Theater Company is webcasting a broadcast-quality archival video of a live performance of a small-scale 12-actor 2017 production—one that is, like the similarly scaled Lantern staging of “The Tempest” that I reviewed in this space last month, outstanding in every way….
