Mrs. Warren's Profession

July 29, 2011 TT: Much like new
In present-day Wall Street Journal drama column I report on two more Shakespeare & Company productions, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Is it possible for a play to be so well known that there's no longer anything new to do with it or say about it? If so, then "Romeo and Juliet" would fill the bill with room to spare. No Shakespeare play is more widely performed or frequently adapted. It's been filmed, parodied and turned into operas and ballets. Semi-literate people can reel off its best-known lines without thinking twice. Factor in "West Side Story" and you've got a recipe for saturation-level cultural omnipresence, the kind that can set a drama critic's eyeballs to rolling.

All true--and all blessedly irrelevant to Shakespeare & Company's "Romeo and Juliet," a production so unhackneyed and emotionally immediate that you'll feel as though you're seeing that most ubiquitous of masterpieces through a first-timer's eyes. What's a lot more, Daniela Varon has brought off this miracle without ladling the rancid sauce of cleverness over Shakespeare's text. Instead she's given us a trick-free "R & J" devoid of the slightest hint of directorial manipulation, staged with passionate simplicity and performed by a cast whose youthful spark makes it possible to take the familiar plight of the star-crossed lovers at face value....

It's by no means an original idea to stage "Romeo and Juliet" with exceptionally young-looking players, but Ms. Varon has gone the whole hog: Susannah Millonzi, her Juliet, is tween-slight and sullenly tomboyish, while David Gelles looks as though he'd taken time off from starring in a high-school romcom to play Romeo. Once again, though, there's nothing tricky about this approach, especially in the case of Ms. Millonzi, who burns at both ends with an intensity hot enough to make you sweat....

A production as good as this one is by definition hard to follow, and even much more so when you're following it with another play that's almost as familiar. But no apologies need be made for Tony Simotes' "As You Like It," a light and lovely romp charged with festive midsummer energy. Mr. Simotes, the company's artistic director, has chosen to set Shakespeare's great comedy of mistaken identity and romantic reconciliation in Paris in the Twenties, and Arthur Oliver, the costume designer, takes the ball and gallops down the field, dressing the cast in a riotously colorful medley of outfits that make you wish you could put on one of your own and join in the fun....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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TT: Almanac
"Compassion is something individual and voluntary. You cannot compel somebody to be compassionate; nor can you be vicariously compassionate by compelling somebody else. The Good Samaritan would have lost all merit if a Roman soldier were standing by the road with a drawn sword, telling him to get on with it and look after the injured stranger."

Enoch Powell, Still to Decide

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July 28, 2011 TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For far more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Master Class (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, extended through Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet ######, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, off-Broadway remounting of Broadway production, original run reviewed here)
IN LENOX, MASS:
• The Memory of Water (serious comedy, PG-13, some adult subject matter, closes Sept. 4 Pandora Jewelry Sale, reviewed here)
IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G, remounting of 2010 production, suitable for children, closes Oct. 2 Pandora Necklaces, original run reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON OFF BROADWAY:
• As You Like It (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Aug. 14, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:
• The Understudy (comedy, PG-13, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY IN PETERBOROUGH, N.H.:
• Ancestral Voices (drama, G, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."

Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain

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July 27, 2011 TT: Snapshot
Flanders & Swann sing "A Song of Patriotic Prejudice," from At the Drop of Another Hat, as performed on Broadway in 1967:


(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

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TT: Almanac
No--through th'extended globe his feelings run

As broad and general as th'unbounded sun!

No narrow bigot he;--his reason'd view

Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!

France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh,

But heaves for Turkey's woes the impartial sigh;

A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country--but his own.

George Canning, "New Morality"
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July 26, 2011 TT: So you want to get reviewed
Now that I'm starting to plan my fall travels in earnest, it's time for a newly revised repeat performance of this perennial posting. If you've seen it before and aren't interested, my apologies!

* * *

If you read the Friday Wall Street Journal or this blog with any regularity, you probably know that I'm the only drama critic in America who routinely covers theatrical productions from coast to coast. Don't take my word for it, though. Ask Howard Sherman Pandora Beads, formerly of the American Theatre Wing, who blogged as follows earlier this year:

To get a regional show to Broadway, one must find a producer who wants to champion the show and take it on as a major commitment. Unfortunately, producers aren't flying to theatres around the country constantly checking out every possible new play and revival for their next Broadway success. And unless you're in a major city and you have a preponderance of positive reviews by long established critics (whose numbers are in decline), your own entreaties aren't likely to cause anyone to jump on a plane unless you already have a relationship with them.

As for "national press" discovering your work and bringing it to the attention of New York bound producers, your only real option is luring The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout to see your show (and Terry regularly publishes his guidelines for what he's likely to be interested in). While The New York Times ventures out of town on occasion (though most frequently to the Berkshires, Chicago or London, it seems), it's rare even for the country's largest newspaper, USA Today, to see work outside of New York; attention from television and radio is even rarer.

So what if you run a company I haven't visited? How might you lure me to come see you for the first time? Now's the time to start asking that question, because I'm hard at work on my reviewing calendar for the first half of the 2011-12 season. Here, then, are the guidelines that I use for deciding which out-of-town shows to see, along with some suggestions for improving the ways in which you reach out to the press:

• Get your schedule to me as soon as possible. That means well in advance of the public announcement. I'll keep it to myself.

• Basic requirements. I only review professional companies. I don't review dinner theater, and it's very unusual for me to visit children's theaters. (Sorry, but I have to draw the line somewhere.) I'm a lot more likely to review Equity productions, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule, and I'm strongly interested in small companies.

• You must produce a minimum of three shows each season—and two of them have to be serious. I won't put you on my drop-dead list for milking the occasional cash cow, but if The Santaland Diaries is your idea of a daring new play, I won't go out of my way to come calling on you, either.

• I have no geographical prejudices. On the contrary, I love to range far afield, particularly to states that I haven't yet gotten around to visiting in my capacity as America's drama critic. Alaska and Colorado continue to loom largest, and I'm also way overdue for a repeat visit to Texas, but if you're doing something exciting in (say) Mississippi or Montana, I'd be more than happy to add you to the list as well.

• Repertory is everything. I won't visit an out-of-town company that I've never seen to review a play by an author of whom I've never heard. What I look for on a first visit is an imaginative mix of revivals of major plays—including comedies—and newer works by living playwrights and songwriters whose work I've admired. Some names on the latter list: Alan Ayckbourn, Brooke Berman, Nilo Cruz, Liz Flahive, Brian Friel, Athol Fugard, John Guare, Adam Guettel, A.R. Gurney, David Ives, Michael John LaChiusa, Kenneth Lonergan, Lisa Loomer, David Mamet, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Itamar Moses, Lynn Nottage, Peter Shaffer, Stephen Sondheim, Shelagh Stephenson, and Tom Stoppard.

I also have a select list of older shows I'd like to review that haven't been revived in New York lately (or ever). If you're doing The Beauty Part, The Entertainer, Hotel Paradiso, The Iceman Cometh, Loot, Man and Superman, No Time for Comedy, Rhinoceros, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Visit, or just about anything by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, T.S. Eliot, Horton Foote, William Inge, or Terence Rattigan, kindly drop me a line.

Finally, I'm very specifically interested in seeing large-cast plays that no longer get performed in New York for budgetary reasons.

• BTDT. I almost never cover regional productions of new or newish plays that I reviewed in New York in the past season or two—especially if I panned them. Hence the chances of my coming to see your production of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo are well below zero. (Suggestion: if you're not already reading my Journal column, you might want to start.)

In addition, there are shows that I like but have written about more than once in the past few seasons and thus am not likely to seek out again for the next few seasons. Some cases in point: American Buffalo, Arcadia, Awake and Sing!, Biography, Blithe Spirit, Dividing the Estate, Endgame, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Glass Menagerie, Guys and Dolls, Heartbreak House, Life of Galileo, The Little Foxes, A Little Night Music, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Our Town, Private Lives Cheapest Pandora Bracelets, She Loves Me, Speed-the-Plow, Twelve Angry Men, Waiting for Godot, West Side Story, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (I am, however, going to keep on reviewing What the Butler Saw until somebody gets it right!)

• I group my shots. It isn't cost-effective for me to fly halfway across the country to review a single show. Whenever possible, I like to take in two or three different productions during a four- or five-day trip. (Bear in mind, though, that they don't all have to be in the same city.) If you're the publicist of the Upper Nowheresville Repertory Company and you want me to review your revival of Six Degrees of Separation, your best bet is to point out that TheaterNowhere also happens to be doing Lobby Hero that same weekend. Otherwise Discount Pandora Charms, I'll probably go to Chicago instead.

• I don't travel in the spring. Broadway is usually so busy in March and April that I'm not able to go anywhere else to see anything else. If you're going to put on a show that you think might catch my eye, consider doing it between September and February.

• Web sites matter. A lot. A clean-looking home page that conveys a maximum of information with a minimum of clutter tells me that you know what you're doing, thus increasing the likelihood that I'll come see you. An unprofessional-looking, illogically organized home page suggests the opposite. (If you can't spell, hire a proofreader.) This doesn't mean I won't consider reviewing you—I know appearances can be deceiving—but bad design is a needless obstacle to your being taken seriously by other online visitors.

If you want to keep traveling critics happy, make very sure that the front page of your Web site contains the following easy-to-find information and features:

(1) The title of your current production, plus its opening and closing dates.

(2) Your address and main telephone number (not the box office!).

(3) A SEASON or NOW PLAYING button that leads directly to a complete list of the rest of the current and/or upcoming season's productions. Make sure that this listing includes the press opening date of each production!

(4) A CALENDAR or SCHEDULE button that leads to a month-by-month calendar of all your performances, including curtain times.

(5) A CONTACT US button that leads to an updated directory of staff members (including individual e-mail addresses, starting with the address of your press representative).

(6) A DIRECTIONS or VISIT US button that leads to a page containing directions to your theater and a printable map of the area. Like many people, I rely on my GPS unit when driving, so it is essential that this page also include the street address of the theater where you perform. Failure to conspicuously display this address is a hanging offense. (I also suggest that you include a list of recommended restaurants and hotels that are close to the theater.)

This is an example of a good company with an attractive, well-organized Web site on which most of the above information is easy to find.

• Please omit paper. I strongly prefer to receive press releases via e-mail, and I don't want to receive routine Joe-Blow-is-now-our-assistant-stage-manager announcements via any means whatsoever.

• Write to me here. Mail sent to me at my Wall Road Journal e-mail address invariably gets lost in the flood of random press releases. As a result, I no longer recommend that anyone write to me there. I get a lot of spam at my "About Last Night" mailbox, too, but not nearly as much as I do at the Journal. Any e-mail sent to me at the Journal that contains attachments will be discarded unread.

(Really smart publicists will know how to find out my personal e-mail address, and will use it instead of writing to me here.)

Finally:

• Mention this posting. I've come to see shows solely because publicists who read my blog wrote to tell me that their companies were doing a specific show that they had good reason to think might interest me. Go thou and do likewise.
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TT: Almanac
"First comes the language of commitment and incitement, then come the corpses."

David Pryce-Jones, Treason of the Heart: From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby

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July 25, 2011 TT: And away we go!
Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, opens on September 15 in Orlando, Florida. Regular readers of this blog will recall that I directed a staged reading of the first part of Satchmo at the Waldorf in Winter Park back in February. (I blogged about the experience here and here.) This, however, is the real thing, a fully staged professional production featuring Dennis Neal, the star of February's reading.

The play will be presented at Orlando Shakespeare's Mandell Theatre. It runs Sept. 15-Oct. 2, with performances on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 7:30 and Sundays at 2:30. For information, call 407-405-8091 or e-mail SatchmoWaldorfAstoria@gmail.com.

Here's the press release. Pass it on--and watch this space for further details.

* * *

On September 15, Louis Armstrong comes back to life at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre, where Dennis Neal stars in the world premiere of Terry Teachout's Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man play about the most beloved jazzman of all time. Set at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong performed in public for the last time before his death in 1971, Satchmo at the Waldorf is a theatrical tour de force, a play in which the same actor portrays Armstrong and Joe Glaser, the trumpeter's controversial manager. Inspired by their actual words, the play takes a searching look at the complex relationship between the genius from New Orleans who turned jazz into a swinging art form and the hard-nosed, tough-talking ex-gangster from Chicago who made him an international icon.

The three men behind this powerhouse production include the playwright, Terry Teachout, drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and author of the best-selling biography, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong; the director, Rus Blackwell, one of Florida's top actor-directors; and the star, Dennis Neal, a familiar face on Orlando stage and in film and television who acts with special insight into the essence of Armstrong.

In addition to being a drama critic and biographer, Teachout has also worked as a professional jazz bassist and written the libretti for two operas. He spent the past two winters as a scholar-in-residence at Rollins College's Winter Park Institute, where he wrote the first draft of Satchmo at the Waldorf last year. Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong was praised by the New York Times as "eloquent and important" and chosen by the Washington Post as one of the ten best books of 2009. Satchmo at the Waldorf is his first play.

Teachout was the first Armstrong biographer to have access to 650 reel-to-reel tapes made by the trumpeter during the last quarter-century of his life, many of which contain astonishingly candid recordings of his private after-hours conversations. These tapes served as the inspiration for much of the dialogue in Satchmo at the Waldorf, in which the offstage Louis Armstrong--raw, frank, and uncensored--is revealed for the first time.

Rus Blackwell, one of the most sought-after actor/directors in the southeast, brings a wealth of experience and a passion for storytelling to Satchmo. Blackwell is a graduate of New York's Circle in the Square Theatre School, where he had the opportunity to study with well-known directors Michael Kahn and Nikos Psachoropolous. Most recently, he directed Sweet Bird of Youth and A Streetcar Named Desire for the Tennessee Williams Tribute in Williams' birthplace of Columbus, Miss. He is a founding member and former artistic director for Mad Cow Theatre Company and SoulFire Theatre here in Orlando and has an extensive resume as an actor in theatre, film and television. Some of his credits include last year's Shotgun for Orlando Shakespeare and such feature films as Monster, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Dolphin Tale, and Battle: Los Angeles. He will be appearing on the Starz series Magic City and in this year's God of Carnage here at the Orlando Shakespeare Theatre.

Dennis Neal, one of Orlando's most respected actors with twenty-five years' experience, is a founding member of Mad Cow Theatre and has performed in such notable productions as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Jesus Hopped the A Train, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, The Piano Lesson, and Shotgun. Theatregoers will recognize him from these and many other productions at Mad Cow Theatre, Empty Spaces, the Peoples' Theatre, and the Orlando Shakespeare Festival, as well as from film and TV in Dead Man Walking Tiffany Ring, Wild Things, Endure, Letters to God, Sunshine State, ABC's The Practice, and NBC's The West Wing. He has performed in works by August Wilson, Athol Fugard, David Mamet, and Stephen Adly Guirgis, and brings his own unique style and brilliance to Satchmo at the Waldorf.

William Elliot, the set and lighting designer, has long been a favorite for his artistic interpretation of a playwright's vision. He was a professor at the University of Central Florida and is currently professor at Stetson University teaching production and acting as the production manager and technical director for the University. Some of his notable designs include All My Sons, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

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TT: Just because
Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform "Blueberry Hill" on Australian TV in 1963:


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TT: Almanac
"A counterfactual account of history appeals especially to people who are disappointed in the real thing. Settled fact is unsatisfying; history as it occurs seems somehow a cheat."

Andrew Ferguson, "What Does Newt Gingrich Know?" (New York Times Magazine, June 29, 2011)

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July 22, 2011 TT: Courtesy of Winslow Homer...
...here's the view from our hotel balcony overlooking the coast of Maine:



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TT: Three-sister act
In modern Wall Street Journal drama column I review two first-class shows that I saw on the road this past week, Shakespeare & Company's The Memory of Water in Massachusetts and the Peterborough Players' Ancestral Voices in New Hampshire. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Sometimes familiarity breeds not contempt but delight. The dramatic potential of funerals, for instance, is well known to playwrights and screenwriters, since they typically trigger the kind of razor-sharp focus on family life and its discontents that is the stuff of good theater. Yet the subject of death and its immediate aftermath, however familiar it may be, remains inexhaustibly fertile, and Shelagh Stephenson's "The Memory of Water," which had its English premiere in 1996 and was first seen Off Broadway two years later, is a prime example of a play that turns an oft-told tale into something fresh and immediate. So, too, is Shakespeare & Company's revival a wholly satisfying piece of work, a show full of bull's-eye moments that make you sit up straight in your seat and say, "I've been there--that's just how it is."

One of the reasons why "The Memory of Water" rings so true is that the three bereaved sisters who are its central characters are portrayed with such eccentric individuality that you can't help but suspect that they were drawn from life. Played to perfection by Elizabeth Aspenlieder, Corinna May and Kristin Wold, they flounder in the dark waters of sorrow, squabbling one moment and giggling together the next, each unable in her own way to come to terms with the memory of their gravely flawed mother (Annette Miller).

Like an old-time prospector, Ms. Stephenson is forever finding glittering nuggets of dialogue in her pan: "Your idea of getting somewhere was marrying a dentist in a sheepskin coat from the Rotary Club." "The funeral director's got a plastic hand." "I don't think that colonic irrigation was a very good idea. Not for Alzheimer's." But while "The Memory of Water" plays like a comedy for much of its length, many of its most impressive moments take place when the laughter dies away without warning and the characters are overwhelmed by remembered anger and present pain....

A.R. Gurney is another playwright who rarely fails to find new things to say about old subjects, and "Ancestral Voices" ranks among his strongest efforts in that line, a portrait of a family of old-money WASPs from upstate New York whose tight ranks have been cloven by the wedge of divorce. First presented by New York's Lincoln Center Theater in 1999, "Ancestral Voices" was written to be done as a staged reading by five actors who play multiple roles and remain seated throughout the show--but Gus Kaikkonen, artistic director of New Hampshire's Peterborough Players Pandora Jewellery Rings, has chosen instead to mount it as a fully staged play performed by a cast of 13. Though I can't say whether Mr. Gurney would approve, Mr. Kaikkonen has directed "Ancestral Voices" with such fluidity and attention to detail that it works at least as well in this new form.

I confess with embarrassment to having misjudged "Ancestral Voices" when I saw the original production. Back then it struck me as a white-bread rewrite of Woody Allen's "Radio Days." Now I find it extraordinarily moving, a searching look at a class of once-confident Americans who have (in the words of one of the characters) "lost our usefulness" and are seeking new ways to live, some more successfully than others....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

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TT: The snare of perfectionism
In present day Wall Road Journal "Sightings" column I reflect on the problem of perfectionism in the arts. Here's an excerpt.

* * *

Twenty-six years after his death, Orson Welles is back in the news. "Chimes at Midnight," the 1965 film version of Shakespeare's history plays that occupied him throughout his middle age, will be shown in England next month in what is being billed as a "brand-new, never-seen-before restoration." The reason why it had to be restored is that "Chimes at Midnight" was made independently and on the cheap, for by 1965 Welles had so antagonized the Hollywood establishment that no major studio would have anything to do with him. As a result, "Chimes at Midnight" was shot, edited and dubbed under sub-standard conditions, and the prints that have circulated since the film's original release are all of low quality.

Welles' long-standing difficulties with Hollywood are the stuff of legend. At bottom, though, they amount to this: He was a fanatical, impractical perfectionist who was willing to spend any amount of time and money on his films. But it was always other people's money, and the moguls who put up the money in Hollywood did so in order to make still more money. After Welles made "Citizen Kane" in 1941, it was clear that he was neither interested in making box-office smashes nor willing to tolerate the relentless assembly-line discipline of the American film industry. Hence he spent most of the rest of his life wandering in the wilderness of underfunded independent film production, unable to fully realize any of his creative dreams.

Is it fair to say that Welles' perfectionism laid him low? Every great artist, after all, strives for perfection. In fact, that's part of what makes them great: They're never entirely satisfied with anything that they do....

Alas, that kind of suffering goes with the territory. The trick, as every artist knows, is not to let it interfere with getting things done. The wisest artists are the ones who finish a new work, walk away and move on to the next project. Whenever a colleague pointed out a "mistake" in one of Dmitri Shostakovich's compositions, he invariably responded, "Oh, I'll fix that in my next piece."

The road to malignant perfectionism, by contrast, starts with chronic indecision. Jerome Robbins, whose inability to make up his mind was legendary throughout the world of dance, was known for choreographing multiple versions of a variation, then waiting until the last possible minute to decide which one to use. Beyond a certain point, this kind of perfectionism is all but impossible to distinguish from unprofessionalism, and Orson Welles reached that point early in his career....

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

Orson Welles talks about Chimes at Midnight and the character of Falstaff in a BBC interview:


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TT: Almanac
"For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world, without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the even balance."

Herman Melville, "Hawthorne and the Mosses"

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July 21, 2011 TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For much more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Anything Goes (musical, G/PG-13, mildly adult subject matter that will be unintelligible to children, closes Jan. 8, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (musical, G/PG-13, perfectly fine for children whose parents aren't actively prudish, all performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Master Class (drama, G/PG-13, not suitable for children, extended through Sept. 4, most performances sold out last week, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• As You Like It (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Aug. 14, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet ######, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)
IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G, remounting of 2010 production, suitable for children, closes Oct. 2, original run reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:
• The Understudy (comedy, PG-13, closes July 30, reviewed here)
CLOSING SATURDAY IN CAPE MAY, N.J.:
• He and She (drama, G, not suitable for small children, reviewed here)
CLOSING SUNDAY OFF BROADWAY:
• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"There should be no such profession as criticism. Musicologists, of course, are quite different, and this is a sadly neglected profession in this country--but there should definitely be no regular critics. To go through life living off other people's work clearly has too degrading an effect."

Benjamin Britten, "Variations on a Critical Theme"

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July 20, 2011 TT: Snapshot
Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten perform Schubert's "Mein," from Die schöne Müllerin:


(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

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TT: Almanac
"I think greatness happens accidentally--that sometimes one can write a little tiny piece for children or for brass band or something like that, and it may quite easily turn out to be much more important for posterity--if one can worry about posterity--than anyone's symphonies in B flat minor. I think Schoenberg himself said that you can't save the world with every Adagio."

Benjamin Britten (interview, CBC, Nov. 21, 1961)

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July 19, 2011 TT: Almanac
"Music demands a lot more from a listener than simply the possession of a tape-machine or a transistor radio. It demands some preparation, some effort, a journey to a special place, saving up for a ticket, some homework on the programme perhaps, some clarification of the ears and sharpening of the instincts. It demands as much effort on the listener's part as the other two corners of the triangle Tiffany Schmuck Shop, this holy triangle of composer, performer and listener."

Benjamin Britten, On Receiving the First Aspen Award

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