Virgil Thomson, the great classical music critic, who was also a composer, but said that criticism was the only antidote he knew to pay publicity. Cr….

I'm especially interested in what I call practitioner criticism, which is when people who practice an art form start writing about it on blogs. I thi….

The Armstrong record that I personally like the most, is a recording of a song by Harold Arlen called, "I Got a Right to Sing the Blues" . Most of Ar….

The papers that flourish will be papers that serve a national audience. Papers that have figured out how to make the transition to the electronic pla….

And Paul Moravec, not being a theater person, would always trust me when I said things that I am like, "you're going to need another 10 seconds of mu….

If I ever see another Shakespeare production where somebody drives a Jeep on stage, I'm going to run screaming up the aisle. These tend to be matters….

I was interested in Armstrong to begin with because he is the most important figure in Jazz in the 20th Century. There's simply no question about it.….

The wonderful thing about theater is that anything, no matter how tendentious, no matter how stupid it sounds at first glance, can be made to work if….

It's actually now, more common to see conceptual productions of Shakespearian, which Hamlet is played as a Nazi, or a homosexual, or whatever concept….

The most important thing to remember is that the composer is a senior partner. You cannot force a subject on a composer if it doesn't inspire him. He….

I know that luck has a way of happening to people who shoot high, who never sell themselves short..

I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where "Klee and America" is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is no….

I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me….

Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. It's not like the conductor in the symphony orchestra performance because he's standing i….

Blogging has mostly been an opportunity to react more immediately to experiences to try out ideas that I may end up using in the print media or in so….

We are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is fi….

There will be this mix of people like me who write for major national newspapers and amateur critics, practitioner critics, whose primary way of dist….

The problem with the Jude Law "Hamlet" was simply that it wasn't unpredictable, that it was a very down-the-center modern production. You wouldn't go….

(R)eality TV (is) a medium dedicated to the proposition that with the help of judicious editing, carefully chosen half-wits can hold the attention of….

The best of Donald Westlake's pseudonymous thrillers about Parker, the toughest burglar who ever lived. . . .Out of print for years and years, Butche….

I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. One of my closest friends is a composer, Paul Moravec, and a f….