Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Does film music really matter to the average moviegoer? A great score, after all, can't save a bad film, and a bad score - so it's said - can't sink a good one.
There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.
I learned more in the rehearsals for 'The Letter' than I have ever dreamed of know in the theater as a critic. If it doesn't make me a better critic, I'm an idiot.
If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.
No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.
A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
I believe deeply that jazz is still a very vital music that has much to say, not just to eggheads, or whatever the musical equivalent of an egghead is, but to ordinary people.
To me, an intellectual is a person who is primarily interested in ideas. What I am is an aesthete, a person who is primarily interested in beauty. That's why I write about art.
Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying.
As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
No cowboy songs, no hoedowns. It's a more serious piece. Yet every bar of 'Appalachian Spring' is clear, clean, tonal, intelligible - great music that anyone can grasp at first hearing.
I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and present them as soberly - and unstylishly - as possible.
The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics.
You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.'
(R)eality TV (is) a medium dedicated to the proposition that with the help of judicious editing, carefully chosen half-wits can hold the attention of millions of their fellow half-wits for weeks on end.
Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.
In a world without any criticism at all, although there are many actors who would think they would be delighted to see that happen, would in fact be a far more problematic world than they could ever imagine.
In 2004, the iPod was a novelty, and tablet computers were a dream. Now we take for granted that we can see whatever we want whenever and wherever we want to see it, be it 'Grand Illusion' or 'Duck Dynasty.'
Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.
The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.
All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.
Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.
Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.
Most of us remember Nat King Cole as a vocalist. His warm, grainy baritone is still so closely identified with such familiar ballads as 'Stardust' and 'The Christmas Song' that it's hard to imagine anyone else performing them.
Unlike film and TV, theater is a luxury object, but one that ordinary middle-class people can still afford. Above all, it isn't a mass medium: Live theater is a small-scale, handmade art form. Intimacy is what makes it special.
A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.
I am, as it happens, a baby boomer, but not one who feels any broad-gauge nostalgia for the '60s and '70s. My attitude resembles that of my parents, who were born in the '20s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists.
Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.
Nowadays, most educated people would just as soon stay home and watch 'Breaking Bad' as shell out a hundred bucks to see a Broadway play - assuming that there are any plays on Broadway worth seeing, which long ago ceased to be a safe bet.
The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.
I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock.
Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
It's certainly no secret that American students are taught less and less about the canonical literary masterpieces of the past, and there is no shortage of people who believe that what little they're required to learn in school is still too much.
Aesthetes have it all over intellectuals in one very important respect: You'll rarely catch us hustling anyone off to the nearest guillotine. We're too busy trying to make the world more beautiful. Our hands are stained with ink and paint, not blood.
'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.
The only thing that surprised me about 'Lincoln' is that most of the critics who reviewed the film seem not to have grasped what should have been apparent right from the start, which is that 'Lincoln' is at bottom a play with pictures, not a screenplay.
Well into the '40s, it wasn't uncommon for big-budget Hollywood movies to contain little or no underscoring, and many of today's directors, following the lead of Martin Scorsese in 'GoodFellas,' accompany their films with pop records, not original music.
No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.
You've probably never thought about it before unless you happen to write for a living, but professional writers are doomed to spend most of their waking hours sitting by themselves at a desk, staring at a blank computer screen and waiting for lightning to strike.
I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.
The digital apocalypse continues to blight the lives of television producers, music-industry executives and newspaper publishers, all of whom are scrambling to figure out how to reconfigure their business models in such a way as to allow them to make an honest buck.
Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought.
Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.
Not surprisingly, my parents' generation did everything they could to make life easier for their own children. Was that good for us? I wonder. It certainly didn't do us any good from a cultural point of view. I'm struck by how few boomers have embraced adult culture in middle age.
Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.
I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it. I mean, if you're going to compare him to somebody, it's Shakespeare in terms of centrality of the tradition, in being at the beginning of it.