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 more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
• Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)
• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)
• Gypsy (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)
• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:
• Enter Laughing (musical, PG-13, closes Oct. 12, reviewed here)
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN HARTFORD, CONN.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (comedy, G, surprisingly child-friendly, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISC.:
• A Midsummer Night's Dream/Widowers' Houses (comedies, G, playing in repertory through Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:
• Around the World in 80 Days (comedy, G, closes Sept. 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING FRIDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Half a Sixpence (musical, G, reviewed here)

TT: Almanac

"Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear."

James Thurber, letter to Malcolm Cowley, March 11, 1954

OGIC: Morning coffee

After ages and ages away, I'm going to ease back into this blogging business with a few good links.

• Are you reading Patrick Kurp's literary blog Anecdotal Evidence every day? Patrick is a widely traveled and discerning reader whose posts I've begun to regard as almost a fourth daily meal: I leave them feeling not only delighted but somehow substantially fed. Here he is on the evolution of literary taste with age, on Chekhov and oysters, and on our newest poet laureate. Essential.

• An editor friend sends along Brian Doyle's Kenyon Review essay on the art of saying no--and yes--to writers. Doyle is the editor of one of the most distinctive university magazines in the country, Portland Magazine from the University of Portland. Here's a bit from Doyle's essay:

Many magazines lean on a form letter, a printed note, a card, and I study them happily. The New Yorker, under the gentle and peculiar William Shawn, sent a gentle yellow slip of paper with the magazine's logo and a couple of gentle sentences saying, gently, no. Under the brisker Robert Gottlieb, the magazine sent a similar note, this one courteously mentioning the "evident quality" of your submission even as the submission is declined. Harper's and the Atlantic lean on the traditional Thank You But; Grand Street, among other sniffy literary quarterlies, icily declines to read your submission if it has not been solicited; the SunNation thanks you for thinking of the Nation; and the Virginia Quarterly Review sends, or used to send, a lovely engraved card, which is worth the price of rejection. The only rejection notice I keep in plain view is that one, for the clean lines of its limbs and the grace with which it delivers its blow to the groin. responds some months later with a long friendly note from the editor in which he mentions that he is not accepting your piece even as he vigorously commends the writing of it; the

In addition to its tales of rejection and acceptance--experienced from both sides of the editor's desk--the essay is notable for containing this account of the author's proposal to his wife:

She did say yeah, or I thought she said yeah, the wind was really blowing, and then she slapped her forehead and went off on a long monologue about how she couldn't believe she said yeah when she wanted to say yes, her mom had always warned her that if she kept saying yeah instead of yes there would come a day when she would say yeah instead of yes and really regret it, and indeed this very day had come to pass, one of those rare moments when your mom was exactly right and prescient, which I often think my mom was when she said to me darkly many years ago I hope you have kids exactly like you, the ancient Irish curse.

TT: Snapshot

A brief silent film of Pierre-Auguste Renoir at work, shot circa 1917. For more information about the clip, go (his is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

TT: Almanac

"When a friend speaks to me, whatever he says is interesting."

Norman Lebrecht

Strange radio noises in HollandMake of this what you will:

Concertzender victim of its own success

Hello Norman,

A bizarre situation has developed in the Netherlands. Everywhere in the world, classical broadcasters are shutting down, because of dropping listening figures.


In the Netherlands however, the Concertzender, who you might
know because of its internet channels, has to shut down
because it has become too popular...

Dutch Public radio hosts the Concertzender, and working with 150
volunteers and a handful of paid staff members, they operate on a basis of 500.000 euro a year. Cable companies in the Netherlands are now opting to broadcast the concertzender, instead of the non-classical Radio 6. Instead of looking for a good solution, the co-ordinator of radio 6 just wants to pull the plug from the Concertzender...

To make things even weirder, a message explaining the situation with a call for support had to be removed from the homepage. A small flood of support letters came in, prompting the board of management of the Dutch public radio to postpone their decision. Because the Concertzender has also a large
international following, could you please write a mail to:


http://www.concertzender.eu/?language=en


I hope I can count on your support!!
http://www.adsvv.com/contactus.html
---------
--

Franco tells all
An afternoon with Zeffirelli in the garden of his Roman villa, a stone's throw from the Cinecitta studios, brought back memories of a bygone age when directors flitted easily from opera to film and back.

Franco was brought into the business by his lover Luchino Visconti but soon cut a dash in his own right. He talks to me uninhibitedly about growing up a bastard, fighting with the partisans, seeing Mussolini hung in the piazza and making his mark on showbiz with Maria Callas, Jesus of Nazareth, Silvio Berlusconi and a cast of thousands.

Hear him on The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 next Monday, and streamed all week on-line, here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/lebrechtinterview/


If you're quick about, you can still catch last week's rare and unbuttoned chat with Christoph von Dohnanyi.

In a critical condition (5)
When the versatile writer Alan Brien died in May this year, obituarists reminded us that he was the first person to be hired in 1960 by the new-founded Sunday Telegraph, in the post of drama critic. 'On this we can build,' the editor is supposed to have declared as, around Brien, he formed a team of witty, incisive and never-too-sententious Sunday writers.

Couldn't happen now, I hear you say. No paper would ever construct itself around an arts critic, and no critic could ever be held to personify a newspaper in the way that Brien did, or Neville Cardus on the Manchester Guardian, Marcel Reich-Ranicki on the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Pauline Kael on the New Yorker, and others of a golden age.

Or could it? We keep hearing media executives talk of innovation when they mean sackings - the latest to use this euphemism is the boss of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, where 550 jobs are about to go.

But innovation is not made overnight. It comes from the experience and wisdom of newspaper veterans who have seen it all before and know what works and what won't. Getting rid of good critics is a symptom of media death wish. It declares that a newspaper has no sense of its past, present or future, and no conversation with its readers.

A newspaper that cherishes and promotes its critics - as The Scotsman does, for instance, during the Edinburgh Festival - offers readers a reliable benchmark against which they can measure their own reactions and opinions to things they have seen and heard. The Scotsman deploys its critical team strategically in festival time as a way of setting itself apart from the range of free newspapers that flood the city streets.

In Salzburg, likewise, the local Nachrichten is read more closely during festival time than any of the national or international papers because its critics provide a clearer context day by day of events in the present festival against triumphs of the past. Their value cannot be measured purely in payroll terms.

True, few critics these days have the fame or clout that Brien, Cardus and Reich-Ranicki did in their pomp, but arts critics still form the thin blue line between a newspaper of value and a throwaway sheet.

They can be, in the public perception, the soul of a newspaper or at the very least its conscience. Executives who ignore that truth will follow the critics they fire very rapidly onto the nearest dole queue.