Search

IN THE 1930s, Clark Gable was the most popular male movie star in America, a titan of the screen whose nickname, 'the King of Hollywood,' was in no way exaggerated. [...]

AFTER Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole is the best remembered of the singers who dominated American popular music between the end of the big-band era and the advent of rock [...]

Did we ever? By TERRY TEACHOUT WITH the coming of COVID, movie theaters were forced to close their doors, and their revenue streams were further devastated by the concomitant effort [...]

CARY GRANT was by common consent the greatest comic actor in the history of soundera American film. As any theatrical professional will tell you, a great comic actor is a [...]

IN 1947, at the end of the first of the countless concerts that they gave together during their 43-year association, Leonard Bernstein leaned over to Isaac Stern as the audience [...]

NO ONE 'invented' film music. It came spontaneously into being when pianists started playing along with silent movies to mask the sound of the projector and the excited chatter of [...]

Shirley Temple retired from performing at 22. Why? CHILD prodigies are endlessly fascinating, both because of their relative rarity and because so many of them come to unhappy ends. To [...]

I loved. And then I lost my beloved during a pandemic. WHEN I was growing up in a small Midwestern town in the '60s, widowhood was a status universally recognized [...]

Of Alfred Cortot, genius and collaborator WHEN THE Guardian invited a group of noted piano virtuosi to name their favorite pianist of all time, two of them, Stephen Hough and [...]

OF all the great Broadway musicals to have opened between Oklahoma! in 1943 and Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, the bookends of the genre's golden age, the one best [...]

FIFTY YEARS ago, the Broadway musical was marking time. The songwriters of the pre-rock era were all past their prime, and except for Burt Bacharach and Hal David in Promises, [...]

THE American film industry exists to make money by making movies. In the days of the Hollywood studio system, it was run along factory-like lines by men who cared only [...]

PRECIOUS little of the English poetry written in the 20th century has passed into the common stock of universally recognized literary reference. No doubt this is because so many of [...]

TERENCE Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Boms, which was given its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera when the company reopened in September, is the first opera by [...]

On film noir By TERRY TEACHOUT TERRY TEACHOUT, COMMENTARY'S critic-at-large and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, is the author of Satchmo at the Waldorf, a one-man play [...]

GOLDEN-AGE American songwriting was a man's game. Without exception, all of the major composers of popular songs who were active in the pre-rock era were men. That was pretty much [...]

NELSON Riddle, who was born 100 years ago, is the only one of the song arrangers of the postwar era who is still widely known by name--and that is because [...]

AT 83, Tom Stoppard is widely regarded as the English-speaking world's greatest living playwright. Yet his three-dozen-odd plays elude easy categorization, and it is a further puzzlement that a writer [...]

THE SHAPE of John Huston's career was significantly different from that of any other first-tier Hollywood filmmaker. Between 1941 and his death in 1987, he directed 37 feature films, most [...]

The Unquiet Englishman: A Life of Graham Greene, by Richard Greene (Norton, 608 pp., $40) Sixty years ago, Graham Greene was widely regarded as an important novelist, perhaps even a [...]

OUTSIDE OF Austria and Germany, the historic centers of Western classical music, most countries have a particular composer whose work is generally thought to be especially representative of what used [...]

IN APRIL 1944, Ballet Theatre, then America's best-known classical dance troupe, premiered a new work by one of its dancers, a 25-year-old from New Jersey named Jerome Robbins. A lively [...]

EXACTLY 100 YEARS ago, Sidney Bechet and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band visited England for the first time--and soon after, European musicians started playing jazz-inflected dance music. But from then [...]

ALL LONG-LIVED artistic partnerships come with an intriguing touch of mystery. Writing is usually such a solitary business that the very notion of a team creating viable work with a [...]

The case of Ivo van Hove OF ALL THE artists to come to prominence on Broadway in recent seasons, none has had more spectacular success than Ivo van Hove, a [...]

IN JULY 1985, Rock Hudson announced through a spokesman that he had AIDS. He died two months later. In between, People published a cover story that acknowledged for the first [...]

OF ALL THE NEW plays to open on Broadway in 2017, the one that has been taken up most frequently by theater companies elsewhere in America is Lucas Hnath's A [...]

The oldest genre is still alive and kicking IN 1903, EDISON FILMS released Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery, a 12-minute-long silent film that portrayed the robbing by bandits [...]

OSCAR LEVANT vanished into the memory hole of popular culture within a few years of his death in 1972. If he is known at all today, it is as the [...]

The case for Chopin OF THE well-known composers of the 19th century, Fry-deryk Chopin (as his name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete [...]

IN THE 2017-18 THEATER season, 63 percent of the 13.8 million tickets sold to performances of Broadway shows were bought by tourists who live outside New York City and its [...]

ON MARCH 12, 2020, Broadway's theaters closed their doors in response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Most of America's stages, opera houses, and concert halls followed suit, and with few exceptions, [...]

FROM RODGERS and Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim, virtually all of the great prerock Broadway songwriters were first- and second-generation Jews who were either born in New York or grew up [...]

MOST OF the greatest songwriters of the pre-rock era were New Yorkers of Jewish descent--Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, Frank Loesser, and Richard [...]

How great is it, really? IN 1944, the director Billy Wilder and the mystery novelist Raymond Chandler cowrote a screen version of Double Indemnity, James M. Cain's 1936 novella about [...]

FIFTY YEARS AGO, New York was home to a pair of world-famous opera companies. Respectively headquartered kitty-corner from each other in the brand-new Lincoln Center campus, the Metropolitan Opera and [...]

WHEN THE French artist Paul Delaroche saw one of the first photographs in 1839, he is said to have exclaimed, 'From today, painting is dead!' In response to the threat [...]

MARTIN McDonagh burst upon the American theater scene at the age of 28 when The Beauty Queen of Leenane, his first play, opened on Broadway in 1996 and ran there [...]

The enduring legacy of an underpraised man OF ALL the Broadway musicals written between the consolidation of the genre in the early '20s and the start of its decline in [...]

WHEN Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches opened on Broadway a quarter-century ago, it became the most talked-about theatrical event of its day. It brought Kushner a Pulitzer Prize [...]

IN All About Eve, Joseph Mankiewicz's 1950 film about life on Broadway, stage star Margo Channing gets into a spat with Bill Sampson, the director of Aged in Wood, the [...]

HAPPY ENDINGS are to Broadway musicals what murders are to mystery stories. While not compulsory, they are customary, and those musicals whose leading characters meet with disaster, like Carousel and [...]

OF ALL THE NEWS stories arising from the ongoing sexual-harassment crisis, the one involving James Levine has made the deepest impression on the world of art. This is not because [...]

An affair to remember HOLLYWOOD WAS running on fumes in the mid-1960s. The studio system had run its course, and the creative energy in filmmaking was coming not from the [...]

The darkest Shakespeare play finds its moment'TIS THE SEASON of King Lear. In September, Richard Eyre's BBC adaptation of Shakespeare's play, set in an imaginary totalitarian counterpart of contemporary London [...]

A REVIVAL of a Shakespeare tragedy did the impossible earlier this year: It made headlines. In June, New York's Public Theater performed Julius Caesar in Central Park in a modern-dress [...]

THE ART OF comedy underwent two radical transformations in the first half of the 20th century, both triggered by the emergence of new electronic technologies. With the coming in 1926 [...]

OF ALL THE once-celebrated conductors of the 20th century, the only ones whose names are still known to the public at large are Leonard Bernstein and Arturo Toscanini. Bernstein was, [...]

THE STORY OF European classical music under the Third Reich is one of the most squalid chapters in the annals of Western culture, a chronicle of collective complaisance that all [...]

SIXTY-NINE YEARS after her death and 85 years after the publication of her only completed novel, Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald is still making news. Z: The Beginning of [...]