Words and Music

WE HAVE NEVER crossed an ocean before. We have never even taken a shore-hugging cruise. With airplane travel growing ever more hellish, our ...

ONE OF THE ANNOYING FEATURES of the 1976 Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor movie “Silver Streak” was the amount of time the various characters spent...

AMY ENGELHARDT IS A VERY FUNNY PERSON. I hesitate to label her a comedian, although comedy seems to bubble from the soul of her being. But ...

THE WORLD OF SHAKESPEARE’S “Midsummer Night’s Dream” begins and ends in a nobleman’s home, taking us into the woods only after the plot has ...

WHENEVER I LAMENT the lack of cultural awareness across the U.S., I point to the support given to the arts in Europe, where it’s generally u...

I DISLIKE speaking with strangers. In fact, I resist speaking with almost anyone, but circumstances rarely allow such silence. Pandemic isol...

THE WORLD OF OPERA taught us that when a couple falls into a duet, they are in some way bonding. Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s hate. It’...

THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide” has changed in recent years. I’ve seen a variety of productions – that variety aided ...

EVERYTHING THAT MAKES Puccini’s 1896 La bohème one of the opera-loving world’s all-time favorites is on display in the current Glimmerglass...

MUSIC GIVES A SOUL TO A PARTY. Not recorded music; that’s a cop-out which has become all too normalized because we’ve gotten so far away fro...

From the Vault of the High Cs Dept .: Thirty years ago I reviewed a pair of NYC Opera performances at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a...

THERE’S A RECEIVED NOTION that American food is exemplified by the blandest of processed inventions, those rubbery slabs of “American” chees...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Here’s the restaurant review I wrote 30 years ago, offered now just to make me feel all the older. I had moved t...

MY MOTHER WANTED ME to move back in with the family. It was 1974. I was eighteen and already had been living on my own for two years as I fi...

From the Jazz Vault Dept. : As noted elsewhere in these pages, I’ve been a Scott Hamilton fan since I discovered him at Eddie Condon’s on We...

Obsession with Heifetz Dept .: Here’s the Preface to Listening to Heifetz: A Biographical Survey of His Recorded Legacy , in which I very su...

SOME BRAVE SOULS at the New York State Library have been rummaging through its cookbook holdings to discover how our attitudes towards have ...

BETWEEN 1940 AND 1948, Preston Sturges had an unprecedented Hollywood run of (mostly) successes with ten films he wrote and directed. Only C...

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...