High Sierra News

Fitting capper to the cycle of Warner Brothers gangster films of the 1930s , with Humphrey Bogart as a just-freed ex-convict who immediately resumes his life of crime, but in cahoots with hotheaded next-generation punks.

In today's Wall Street Journal I review two new Broadway shows that are already drawing large audiences, Jude Law's Hamlet and the Manhattan Theatre Club's revival of The Royal Family .

"A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason; and indeed all the sweets of life." Joseph Addison, The Spectator , Dec.

I'm sick while my cobloggers are both traveling, but here's a little something to tide you over.

I'm reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show right now. It's about an Englishwoman who runs away to Paris and falls in love with her husband's mistress.

Erich Kunzel, the conductor of the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, conducted his last concert on August 1, exactly a month before he died.

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong has received yet another pre-publication rave, this one in the August issue of Booklist , the magazine of the American Library Association.

Speaking of lists , I wrote about film regularly between 1998 and 2005, and at the end of that time I drew up a double-barreled list of the movies I'd reviewed that I liked best.

In honor of the release of its new DVD edition of The Last Days of Disco , the folks at the Criterion Collection invited Whit Stillman to submit a top-ten list of his favorite Criterion releases.

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to Spring Green, Wisconsin, where I saw American Players Theatre perform Henry V and The Winter's Tale .

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong , out December 2, just received a starred pre-publication rave from Kirkus Reviews : A comprehensive, affectionate biography of arguably the single most important figure in the history of jazz.

Hi there, I'm just back from a largely internet-free vacation and am pretty busy catching up on everything, including my blog reading.

Maud directs the way to this essay by Anne Carson about the "metaphysical silences" of translations -- places where the text falls silent, not because it's incomplete, but because in some larger sense there are no words.

Mrs. T and I hit the road today. Our final destination is Spring Green, Wisconsin, where we'll be seeing American Players Theatre perform two plays by Shakespeare, one by George Bernard Shaw, and one by Eugene O'Neill. That's a lot of theater to consume in a single weekend, and it also entails a lot of driving--we'll be flying into Chicago this ...

In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on a recent visit to the Los Angeles area, where I saw the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum 's production of a modernized adaptation of The Cherry Orchard , which is currently being performed in repertory in the company's woodsy outdoor amphitheater.

Lupino was in fact an actress, writer, and director in her forty-seven year career span.

"To be able to sit home and put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job.

The other day, for instance, I discovered that it is now possible to view the first hour and a half of CBS' live coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy--uncut. The first thing you see is the opening segment of As the World Turns , TV's longest-running soap opera, complete with the original commercials.

The fall lineup for the Buffalo Film Seminars ranges from a 1972 Russian science fiction movie that brings into question the nature of reality to a 1955 French heist film that includes a near-silent, half-hour scene portraying the burglary of a jewelry shop in such incredible detail that the movie was reportedly banned briefly by French ...

Here's my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly.