Words and Music

From the Theater Vault Dept .: Talk about a fairy-tale world. For a few seasons over thirty years ago, the Cohoes Music Hall was home to Her...

WITH ALL DUE RESPECT to the late James Brown, I believe that the hardest-working man in show business is Bridge Street Theatre’s Steven Patt...

Guest Blogger Dept. : We welcome back Booth Tarkington, whose 1916 novel Seventeen was, like most of the author’s books at the time, a best-...

 ADAM ALEXANDER, whose curiosity prompted travel all over the world collecting endangered vegetable seeds to grow and share, writes that “Cr...

From the Food Vault Dept .: It delights me to discover that a restaurant I enjoyed visiting decades ago continues to thrive. Here’s one of t...

From the Food Vault Dept. : We look back twenty years to a Schenectady neighborhood (and a bit beyond) where the city’s Italian heritage was...

From the Concert Vault Dept. : 81-year-old Jordi Savall is still going strong, still exploring corners of the musical world typically neglec...

NINE CONCERTS; 31 jazz legends; 86 different songs; twelve hours of music on ten CDs. The statistics are staggering. These are the long-negl...

From the Food Vault Dept. : Against all odds, this unique little restaurant endures. It’s a world unto itself, offering creative vegan and v...

From the Opera Vault Dept. : The Berkshire Opera, in its earliest years, aspired to a Glyndebourne feel. And there were some eight summers o...

From the Theatrical Vault Dept .: Here’s another orphan piece, orphaned insofar that I can’t find any indication that it ever ran in any of ...

From the CD Vault Dept. : Here’s a trio of CD reviews from 23006 that I found languishing in a single file (computer, that is, not physical)...

From the Musical Vault Dept.: Keith Jarrett was a little grumpy when I got him on the phone. This was in 1985, and I called to interview hi...

From the Theater Vault Dept. : The madcap excesses of the “Barber of Seville” we discussed last week reminded me of a very different, very f...

From the Vocal Vault Dept .: We’re traveling back to 1985, when I was still finding my feet as a music critic, and a brief review I wrote of...

AS A LIFE-LONG INSOMNIAC, I grew up dependent on overnight radio listening to ease the struggle to get to sleep. But you know me. I sought c...

THAT BRIGHT PINK FISH became a centerpiece of our diet, its health benefits aggressively promoted, its resultant appeal so great that it eve...

I BEGAN MY cabaret-style performing in duet with Tom Savoy, a brilliant singer-composer-pianist whom I met in 1980. We discovered a shared l...

From the Food Vault Dept.: Metroland magazine published a “Best of” issue at the end of every year – or the beginning of the subsequent one...

 We're back on stage! Malcolm Kogut and I will tread the boards at Steamer No. 10 Theatre (500 Western Avenue, Albany, NY) at 7 PM on Ne...