Words and Music

WHAT “THE MERRY WIDOW” DEMANDS, first and foremost, is a hushed, haunting “Vilia” at the top of Act Two, in which the titular widow evokes t...

Glen, NY, 23 May 2008 Photo by B. A. Nilsson

Guest Blogger Dept .: Another poem by Wodehouse, you cry? My pleasure. The English writer P.G. Wodehouse not only was a master of light vers...

From the Food Vault Dept. : How much do restaurant review matter? At one time, they were on the order of sacred pronouncements issuing from ...

SPRING – PLANTING SEASON – isn’t a good time to read David R. Montgomery’s Growing a Revolution. Not when you live, as I do, in farming cou...

JUST WHEN YOU THINK you’ve heard everything, the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh starts to sound in a chamber-ensemble arrangement, and...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We’re revisiting To Think of Tea! by Agnes Repplier, one of America’s finest essayists. As I wrote earlier , her keen...

IMMERSIVE THEATER has become the rage, which angers a theater-going friend. “I go to plays to be entertained,” he grouses. “Why can’t they d...

MY INTEREST IN MOVIES as an art form was sparked by a TV viewing of “The Maltese Falcon” one afternoon. Although the film was cut to fit a n...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Who better to celebrate Decoration Day with than Mark Twain? Here’s a selection from Albert Bigelow Paine’s massive fo...

BACK IN 1968, when I was a slip of a boy, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which affixed Memorial Day to the last Monday in M...

WE’RE TALKING ABOUT the most poised, the most elegant of jazz pianists. It’s no surprise that Teddy Wilson trained in classical music at fir...

Guest Blogger Dept. : Oh, my stars and garters! We haven’t heard from George Ade in a while. S.J. Perelman regarded Ade as the greatest Amer...

From the Vault Dept. : There was a time when major orchestras visited the Capital Region with alarming frequency. True, they didn’t draw muc...

From the Projection Booth Dept. : The Bobs have officially disbanded – they stopped by Caffe Lena, a longtime local performance venue for th...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : This was a show I missed during its development and eventual success in NYC, so I was glad to see it when the...

Twenty-five years ago, I drew the above to celebrate Susan's and my recent acquisition of a Montgomery County, NY, farm. Our friend L...

From the Food Vault : I wrote this review in 2011, but when you’re dealing with a place that has been successfully operating, with little ch...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : As the father of a theater major, I’m no longer easily persuaded to avail myself of child-centered entertainm...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We call once more upon the redoubtable Mark Twain to enlighten us, this time with reflections upon his vacation reside...