Category: AJBlogs

The Wall Street Journal pays me to go see plays each week and write about them, which is my idea of a terrific way to earn a living. I have yet another reason for loving my job, though, one that might just be of even greater importance, which is that it forces me to engage each week with a brand-new set of experiences.

Philip Glass used to say he never composed opera per se, but ended up rubbing shoulders with Verdi and Wagner because opera houses had the needed theatrical apparatus. After 37 years of making the opera-house rounds, Satyagraha, is no easier to define.

Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who painstakingly restored Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, is exasperated by the questions that have been raised about the condition and attribution of the rediscovered painting that was to have been unveiled on Sept. 18 at the Louvre Abu Dhabi but has not resurfaced since it was sold at Christie’s on Nov. 15.

Ranky Tanky, whose music is grounded in the Gullah songs of the South Carolina Lowcountry, is one of those bands I had heard good things about but never seemed to catch here in NYC. But there they were at WOMEX in the Canary Islands, so I made it a point to check in on them.

There was much more to Art Carney than his much-loved impersonation of Ed Norton, the bumbling sewer worker on The Honeymooners, and the reason why you probably aren’t aware of that fact that is one of the saddest stories I know.

The book is a 20-years posthumous collection of writings from the Fluxus – and far more than Fluxus – composer, poet, printmaker, and artist.

“The listener who is fully who open to Werner’s playing is likely to also feel joy and delicious gratitude.”

How did arts institutions in LA survive the Great Recession?

Luke Syson, who in 2012 came to the Metropolitan Museum from the National Gallery, London, becoming the Met’s chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts in 2014, is now poised to join the wave of high-level departures from our country’s preeminent museum.

Randy Waldman, Superheroes (BFM Jazz)
Kate McGarry, The Subject Tonight Is Love (Binxtown Records)