Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette on Rodgers and Hammerstein in their day—and ours.

This past summer, as I sat in a movie theater about to watch Girl Shy (1924), a nine-decade-old comedy starring Harold Lloyd, I wondered what the uninitiated audience would think. This was a silent movie, and it isn’t easy to trade spoken dialogue for pantomime. And then there was the star of the…

It is a rare book that features appearances by Albert Camus, Willa Cather, and H. L. Mencken, but—alas—an even rarer book that squanders such a captivating cast of characters. The work of the aforementioned authors, along with that of dozens of others, was released by the husband-and-wife…

Once upon a time, military life was familiar to most civilians. The arts rendered it comprehensible even to those who had never served. At midcentury, shows like Mister Roberts (1948) and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953) were all the rage on the stage, to say nothing of the rush of World War…

First, a confession. When I was a 9-year-old reader of comic strips, having recently set aside the (to my thinking) infantile pleasures of Blondie and Dennis the Menace, my eyes wandered to their considerably cooler cousin, Doonesbury. I wonder now what appeal it held for me at that age. It could…

If this absorbing, but imperfect, history of the waxing and waning of large-scale film musicals teaches us nothing else, it is that critical tastes from the 1960s bear a striking resemblance to those of today: The edgy is nearly always esteemed over the innocuous. 

In its first 20 or so years, the Kennedy Center Honors—annually allocated to performing artists of purported preeminence—there were more than enough leading lights still living to assure that the well of meritorious honorees would not quickly run dry. While there is truth to Frank Rich’s…

Like the music of Virgil Thomson and the dances of George Balanchine, the paintings of Norman Rockwell are enlivened by a conspicuously transparent species of Americana. They also had the good fortune to make their debuts before irony was turned loose on the land. There was no mocking impulse…

When balletomanes consider the dancers who stirred the creativity of George Balanchine (1904-1983), they might think of Maria Tallchief (his third wife) or Tanaquil LeClercq (his fourth) or Suzanne Farrell and Allegra Kent (his muses). One name that probably does not spring to mind is Lidia…

At the height of his career, in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock spoke of playing the audience like an organ: “I’m using their natural instincts to help them enjoy fear,” he said to an interviewer, adding, “I know exactly when to stop, to relieve them at the right moment, otherwise they’ll laugh in the wrong…

In his introduction to this new collection of essays by Janet Malcolm, Ian Frazier writes generously, if generically, that the book “brings together a wide range of pieces that display her unique skills.” By the time we have finished reading Forty-one False Starts, however, Frazier’s praise rings…