The photo above is likely a not unusual bookshelf among my contemporaries. I periodically pull a book from one of many such shelves and read a random passage. This morning it is Umberto Eco’s, “The Name of the Rose,” first published in Italian in 1980 and in the U.S. in English in 1983.
The year is 1327, the speaker a Franciscan monk, Brother William:
“Wondrous machines are now made, of which I shall speak to you one day, with which the course of nature can truly be predicted. But woe if they should fall into the hands of men who would use them to extend their earthly power and satisfy their craving for possession. I am told that in Cathay a sage has compounded a powder that, on contact with fire, can produce a great rumble and a great flame, destroying everything for many yards around. A wondrous device, it it were used to shift the beds of streams or shatter rock when ground is being broken for cultivation. But if someone were to use it to bring harm to his personal enemies?”
This is why having physical books staring at you is important.
“Family Affair” was a #1 single for Sly & The Family Stone in 1971. Yet “musical families” take different forms, as illustrated by two recent concerts.
In December, there were the Wainwright/McGarrigle family holiday concerts (one at Town Hall NYC, and one I saw at Brooklyn’s Murmrr; there had been others in Canada). A flow chart or family tree would be helpful if you don’t know the players, what with almost everyone on stage being related. When Loudon Wainwright III came out to open the shows, he swept his arm across to indicate the other performers seated on benches along the rear and sides of the stage, and said, “If it weren’t for me, none of you would be here.”
OK, Emmy Lou Harris is an honorary member of the family and she was part of the show. Yet with Wainwright siblings Rufus and Martha Wainwright leading the festivities honoring their late mother/Loudon’s first wife Kate McGarrigle, it was reminiscent of the annual holiday shows where sisters Kate and Anna brought out their kids to sing. I remember Rufus and Martha on those shows as pre-teens and teens. Now it’s their kids they bring out. Then there is Suzzy Roche, whose daughter (by Loudon), is Lucy Wainwright Roche, with both Suzzy and Lucy participating. Then there was Loudon’s sister Sloan Wainwright, and, well a host of others. The concert, as in the past, was enchantingly bedraggled and professional all at once.
Early February’s “musical family” was of a different sort. The Jim Kweskin Extravaganza, as it was billed at the Regent Theatre in Arlington, MA, brought together an array of musicians who’ve performed with Kweskin over the years, notably Geoff Muldaur and Maria Muldaur, who were part of the original Jim Kweskin Jug Band and who participated in a jug band segment to close the show (each had also performed duets with Jim earlier in the program). Jim and Geoff started performing together in 1963, with Maria joining not too much later.
The “direct” family on stage for the Extravaganza were two of Kweskin’s three children (the third was in the audience), his granddaughter, who sang “What Does the Deep Sea Say?” which her grandmother — Jim’s first wife, also in the audience — wrote.
The “extended family” was the Fort Hill community in Roxbury, MA founded by the late Mel Lyman, who played banjo and harmonica in the original Jug Band. Kweskin was a charter member of Fort Hill, which you and I might think of as a commune (it’s MUCH more complicated than that; see below) in 1967. Kweskin still lives in one of the community’s homes there.
Kweskin projected a picture of the kids he used to teach songs to in Fort Hill in the 1960s and ‘70s — and then brought 16 of them on stage to sing a few of those numbers with him. Those “kids,” of course, are now mostly north of 50. One of the songs Kweskin taught them way back, which they sang with a wink and a nod on this afternoon: “I Am My Own Grandpa.” Some of those people also performed duets with him, as did others who may or may not have been part of Fort Hill growing up (ditto for some of the 15 band members).
If you don’t know Kweskin, he’s a polymath in his musical tastes and he offered a generous three-plus hour sampling: Irving Berlin, New Orleans jazz, classic blues, Woody Guthrie, Bing Crosby (by way of Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke), straight-ahead jazz and, of course, jug band.
Kweskin was in good voice — sounding more and more like Willie Nelson except that while Kweskin is seven years younger than Nelson, Kweskin was performing as a singer for about 10 years before Nelson (Nelson was already a well-established songwriter when he embarked on his performing career).
The Extravaganza — the term being a little tongue-in-cheek, but only a little — was live-streamed, and Kewskin said they’d “figure out how to make it available.” In the meantime, there’s a new Kweskin album, “Never Too Late: Duets With My Friends.” Bought a copy (along with Maria’s latest), so haven’t heard it yet but most of the songs were included in the concert with the same duet partners. And an updated Kweskin/Maria Muldaur “Sheik of Araby”…well, who wouldn’t want that in their collection? It’s all in the family, after all.
[If you’re not familiar with Lyman’s story it’s not as gruesome as Charles Manson’s cult of a couple of years prior, but it was strange and cult-like as well — essentially an anti-hippie commune but with very traditional male/female roles, plenty of disciplinary action, and all activity focused on providing for Lyman’s personal sexual and other needs in order to facilitate his music-making, writing, and filmmaking. Lyman’s death in 1978 is still shrouded in mystery and wasn’t revealed by the Fort Hill community for six years. To learn more, start with the Wikipedia entry; it offers links to additional resources including David Felton’s Rolling Stone Fort Hill expose from 1971 and other material from an archive devoted to Lyman.]
P.S. If you’re reading this, Mike and Catherine — sorry the others you bought tickets for couldn’t make it, but thanks for selling them to Riva and me minutes before showtime. Delighted to be your seatmates!
Belle Harbor-ites, Rockaway-ites, anyone living in a beach community, take note!
Fascinating that it got made at all — a labor of love, no question, for documentary filmmaker Robert Sarnoff — “The Block” on Amazon Prime is an of-the-moment portrait of the block in Belle Harbor, NY he lives on. At the western end of the Rockaway peninsula, near Jacob Riis Park, the block in question is Beach 138 St. At that point the peninsula is all of four blocks wide; the film focuses exclusively on the residents of a single beach block.
Sarnoff and his wife Lynda must have been (and I hope still are!) beloved by their neighbors because they elicited often surprisingly frank comments along with the expected hosannas about what wonderful neighbors everyone is. How much of the humor is intentional and how much not is part of the fun in watching, particularly the first half of the hour-long film. It’s a heck of an editing job by Michael Belmont juxtaposing the comments.
The fact is many on the peninsula have been tested on their neighborliness repeatedly, demonstrating deep friendship and resilience in the face of many storms and other catastrophes. Two are at the heart of the second half: The crash of American Airlines flight 587 a few blocks away just weeks after 9/11, and Hurricane Sandy, when many of the houses closest to the shore were carried out to sea and literally every house and business in the area suffered major damage.
Proud full disclosure: I grew up one block across and one block over between B. 136 and B. 137. And my close friend Gerry Cohen, who I’ve known since we were 13 and marked our bar mitzvahs one week apart, grew up on that now infamous B. 138 St. beach block. Gerry makes a brief appearance (though his name is misspelled in the credits), recorded on a day he happened to have headed to his old stomping grounds from Westchester and his long-ago neighbor Bob Sarnoff spotted him riding his bicycle down the block from Riis Park to visit.
For my part, I particularly related to the segment on shared driveways. And while my mother still lived in Belle Harbor when that American flight went down and my sister and I frantically tryied to reach her for hours until a neighbor called us on her cellphone (“Mom said, why should I call them? I’m fine.”), I lived through Sandy in Brooklyn. However, one vivid childhood memory is when the ocean and the bay met on my parents’ front porch during Hurricane Donna in 1960. Here’s a short video of that storm.
Two other documentaries about the Rockaways, both by Jennifer Callahan (I haven’t watched these yet; the second was broadcast on PBS):
If you haven’t seen Harmony, the Barry Manilow/Bruce Sussman musical about the Comedian Harmonists — a Weimar-into-Nazi era comic singing group that was a rage throughout Europe and appeared once at Carnegie Hall — take advantage of wide discount offers (see below).
Given this is the slow time of year for Broadway, and Harmony was already having a tough time filling seats, go while you can, and support what isn’t a perfect show (the first act especially needs more space for story- and character-development) but it is an important one. For a show in the works literally for decades, Harmony has a strong relevant contemporary message and a particularly heart-wrenching (and oft-times comic) performance by Chip Zien.
When we saw Harmony the other night we ran into our friend Christine Lavin, who has attended multiple times both when Harmony had its initial NYC run at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and since its transition to Broadway. We bemoaned the number of empty seats and batted around ideas about how Manilow might be able to boost sales by appearing for a week or two. Conductor? (Seen only briefly from the back, but that could be adjusted.) Join the curtain call and sing with the
cast? Take the role of the pianist, leaving the existing pianist to sing for those performances? Talkbacks/Q&A sessions at the end? There is ample precedent for such booster efforts – think Carole King and Beautiful — where the celebrity doesn’t have to overshadow the existing cast but can add an extra enticement for ticket-buying fence-sitters.
In addition to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre box office (243 W. 47th St.), as this is written, TDF has seats for tomorrow 1/6 and most performances 1/13-1/20; it’s been consistently available at the TKTS booths; and there are $18 day-of rush tickets.
There is no more joyous party to be found in New York City right now than the one that instantly engulfs you at the Atlantic Theater’s Buena Vista Social Club.
The show is based, with dramatic license, on the story behind the Ry Cooder-produced album of the same name that was recorded with a band of Cuban musicians in Havana in 1996, and released on Nonesuch the following year. (Exactly how it is that neither Cooder nor the album are referenced in the credits for the show is a mystery I haven’t pursued.) The personal histories of the musicians are the core of the dramatic arc, running from roughly the 1940s through the 1956 Cuban revolution and the mid-’90s.
The band and dancers will blow you out of your seats. And while the songs are in Spanish, the book sets context throughout, leaving the actor/singers to convey the underlying emotions, which they do for each of the powerhouse 15 songs.
The Atlantic Theater Company has sent a number of shows to Broadway — most recently Kimberly Akimbo and The Band’s Visit. Those were really intimate musicals just perfect for the 199-seat Linda Gross Theater where they, like Buena Vista, debuted. From the first number, this show just about bounds out the doors of this small room on W. 20th Street and right up Eighth Ave. If only Roseland were still around…what an ideal venue that would have been for the show, followed by dancing for all!
Magical realism makes coincidental back-to-back appearances at Lincoln Center, where the Metropolitan Opera presents Florencia en el Amazonas and the Mitzi Newhouse theater next door offers the music theater piece Gardens of Anuncia. I’m sure it’s coincidental — I can’t imagine the Met and Lincoln Center Theater could possibly be so coordinated as to have sat down together a few years ago to plot having two offerings where magical realism is a component. Still, it was striking seeing the two just a couple of nights apart.
Everything about opera composer Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas is just beautiful. The lush, romantic La Boheme-ish music composed roughly 30 years ago (yes, you’ll wonder what took the Met so long to bring it here from the Houston Grand Opera, where it premiered in 1996); the multi-purpose imaginative costumes which at times double as scenery (you’ll understand when you see it); the Chinese-lantern-ish fish and Gepetto-inspired puppets; and the delightfully eerie sets — the production is, well, beautiful on every level.
The opera is wonderfully sung and well acted. The story, as Riva pointed out, is no more absurd than most operas. Suffice it to say it takes place in the Amazon rainforest in the early 1900s with all of the action on a steamboat. A diva traveling incognito is en route to perform but more importantly to pursue her lover who previously disappeared in the jungle. There are a shipwreck, a dead passenger who returns to life, a manuscript that fell in the water that rains down from the sky, and a mystical character who appears in multiple guises as both human and animal. There you go. You’ve got it.
Sadly, for the Met there were many empty seats on Monday night. Happily for you, ththere are plenty of seats at the upcoming four performances; you may even be able to score $25 Met orchestra rush tickets, which are available starting at noon the day of performance. If you enjoy romantic opera you should go; and if you’ve never gone, as was the case for four young folks we met on the way out, this is a delightful introduction.
Michael John LaChiusa’s Gardens of Anuncia is a charming evening of musical theater, tender and sweet. The action split between Buenos Aires and the U.S. in the 1940s and ‘50s. “Charming” could be a backhanded compliment, and it’s not intended that way at all.
The redoubtable Priscilla Lopez (the original Diana Morales in A Chorus Line, who had a substantive career prior to that landmark role and continues to be active) plays Anuncia, a ballerina-turned-choreographer with a host of Broadway hits to her name. Based on the real-life story of Graciela Daniele, in the play Anuncia is about to collect a Lifetime Achievement award though she is heavy with grief over the loss of one of the key women who raised her, whose ashes are in a box she must bury in order to move forward.
There’s a talking deer and its brother, a magical-looking forest and a younger version of Anuncia played by Kalyn West who is sometimes with her in “real time.” Musically the final 20 minutes are the most directly Sondheim-esque (specifically Sunday In the Park With George). This is hardly blockbuster material, but the show works and makes for a wonderful night in the theater.
TDF members, note: As I write this, there are 18 performances in the month of December listed with tickets at $39. The Newhouse is a small theater, and there are no bad seats.
When most music artists produce boxed sets the collections are typically their own greatest hits, deeper-cut retrospectives, re-mastered reissues, alternate takes, unreleased tracks, and so on. The sets are often elaborately packaged, with book or other items.
Christine Lavin’s “The Seasons Project” reflects her career not so much as the wonderful songwriter and performer she is (see my comments on the house concert Chris did for us in February 2020) but rather as the indefatigable booster of other folk-rooted musicians. As I’ve told her over the years, she’s a great marketer — of others, too modest in some ways to promote herself as vociferously.
Example: With 80 tracks here, only three are hers. Of the 69 soloists and groups included, Chris introduced me to the music of eight of them since we met in the 1980s. I’ve never heard of 27 and while I’m not exposed to as much as I was when writing for newspapers regularly, I’m clearly not listening widely enough. This is a great corrective.
There are four albums here, one loosely themed or simply mood-appropriate for each season. Those familiar with Chris’s work over the long term will recognize “On A Winter’s Night” and “When October Goes,” compilations she curated in the 1990s. They’ve been remastered and each has at least one new track. The all-new spring set is “Coming Alive Again;” summer, also new, is collected on “Last Song For You.”
I’m still going back through and discovering memorable voices, lyrics, and melodies. In five hours of music, I haven’t come across a track that I’d skip next time. Chris’s taste is THAT good and wide-ranging.
As for the packaging, the four “albums” arrive on a handcrafted thumb drive packed in a wood box made by Ukrainian box builder Mykhailo Chaban. The book? It’s a 480-page PDF with Chris’s commentary, bios of all the musicians, lyrics, and photos, on the thumb drive.
The limited edition collection is available only on her website. I hope she has cause to manufacture more. Says Chris, “I created this collection with an eye firmly fixed on the future — expecting 50-100 years from now folklorists will find it useful.” Useful, yes, and inspiring, not just for folklorists, and not just in the future.
Attending a Bob Dylan concert is essentially placing a $200 bet against yourself. He’s not Ella Fitzgerald, who gave a masterful performance every time she stepped out on a stage. With Dylan you never know if you’re going to get an on night, an off night or simply something totally inscrutable. You’re betting on the curiosity factor, though you’re assured nothing less than interesting. Even a dreadful show at one of his extended Beacon Theater runs 15 or so years ago was interesting. His three song set in 1968, performed with The Band at Carnegie Hall as part of the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, was transcendent. Many notches above interesting.
This time wasn’t exactly a house concert, yet here was Dylan playing five blocks from our home at Brooklyn’s magnificently restored Kings Theatre. I could walk over. And did.
The quick take: Dylan’s second night at Kings was fascinating. It’s the same 17-song show he’s been performing for two years now (exception: Johnny Mercer’s “That Old Black Magic” has been substituted for “Melancholy Mood”) yet it’s clear from the outset that his supporting musicians have no clue how he’s going to attack any given song.
That’s always been true — read some of Rob Stoner’s Facebook posts about his stint as bassist and band contractor for the Rolling Thunder Revue back in the mid-‘70s and how the musicians had to watch Dylan’s fingers and mouth to get an idea where he was headed. Talk to any long-time fan about how there have been periods where you couldn’t tell what songs he played any given night because he’d twisted them so much.
Now, though, the set list never changes. This group has been playing these songs almost nightly — this was the 64th performance since this year’s leg of the tour began in April, and the tour overall started November 2, 2021 — yet the truism holds: Dylan is going to mine those songs differently every damn time. That’s another aspect of the bet. Sometimes that mining yields gold. Sometimes coal.
What Dylan and his current band delivered in Brooklyn in 2023 was in the Grateful Dead mode, with lulling improvisations for a mostly 20s-30s-early-40s audience. Many people sitting (really standing) near me were swaying in a stoned haze, making tai-chi-like hand motions — a throwback to Dead shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only these people weren’t born yet then.
It was all quite reverential. The ovation when Dylan emerged in the shadows (I mean that literally, and in the shadows he stayed) held through the first four or five songs. After that, at least up front, there were brief segments where everyone sat down before rising again, sometimes at seemingly mysterious moments. This is no Springsteen concert, though; it’s not that the music impels you to stand and move. It’s about legend. One woman in the audience said she was from the state of Washington, cat-sitting in Greenpoint for a friend. This was her opportunity to make up for the time 15 years ago (when she was 13) when she didn’t attend a festival in her home state that Dylan was playing because she had no idea who he was…”and now he’s in his 80s. Who knows how many more rounds he’s going to go?” That theme recurred among young and older fan conversations while exiting the theater and walking home.
A man sitting next to me had flown in from Ohio that morning for business. He checked the box office when he got to LaGuardia and like me discovered that eight or 10 house seats had clearly just been released for sale; we were Row G in the center. He had seen the show two years ago in Ohio, shortly after the tour began. How did this compare? “That was more rock and roll-y. This was more jazzy. He’s Dylan.”
I figure I won my bet. So did my Ohio and cat-sitting seat-mates.
On a matinee day especially you have to wonder how many physical therapists are backstage at Broadway’s “Some Like It Hot” to tend to all those tap and swing dancers. We saw a Wednesday night performance and left giddy with delight; standing in Shubert Alley as the cast emerged after the show, they were clearly ready to hightail it home. You couldn’t blame them.
A cavalcade of non-stop 11 o’clock numbers by songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman started from the opener and never let up. Those songs were further enlivened by all those tappers and swingers (plaudits to choreographer/director Casey Nicholaw) outfitted in eye-popping costumes (Gregg Barnes). And the book has been meaningfully updated from the 1959 film by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin, paying all due homage (and copping lines as appropriate), without getting overboard serious. This is a pure fun show, after all.
One complaint: The orchestra is so over-amplified I kept wanting to turn the volume down, and in the course of that blast the singing is consistently drowned out. That said, the cast gives its all throughout.
For those who qualify, as I write this there are eight upcoming performances at TDF.org for significantly reduced price tickets, including this Saturday night. The house was probably less than two-thirds full. Go, and then you, too, will be inclined to help spread the word-of-mouth.
Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt introduced me to 38 characters I recognized instantly. Every person on stage was familiar in their talk, their thoughts, their walk, their actions.
This is Stoppard’s coming-to-terms with the discovery late in life that his mother and he were Jewish. Upon arriving in England from Vienna in the late 1930s his mother changed their names so that no one would know they were Jewish. He — and we — learn the family history and what happened to those they left behind as they escaped. No surprises here — really — but what a telling.
The writing is taut, as are the tableaux of the family in its home in Vienna, the acting, and the direction. Even the set, simple as it is, is spot on. Stunning me for a moment was the character Rosa, who had the precise posture and bearing of three German Jewish sisters (one our beloved family doctor here in NYC who delivered me and remained my doctor into my mid-20s, the others her nurse and office manager).
Go. You will hold your breath for a fleeting two hours and 10 minutes. At the end your muscles will be as taut as that writing. So rewarding.
Leopoldstadt is in previews at the Longacre Theater, formally opens next month, and is scheduled to run through January 29, 2023.
NEW YORK, NY; March 24, 2022—Shaina Taub’s passion and earnestness are brilliantly exhilarating and exhausting in the musical Suffs at the Public Theater, continuously from the opening number straight through the following 2-3/4 hours. A sung-through musical about the suffrage movement and passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, Taub is responsible for book, music, and lyrics, and stars as the voting rights activist Alice Paul. (The sold out run is in previews, with a formal opening April 6th.)
Yes, there are obvious references to our contemporary plights re voting, gender and racial equality, discrimination, and war. They are critical to Taub’s vision of the role of theater — and music generally, as those who’ve seen Taub as a cabaret artist at Joe’s Pub, as actor-singer/accordionist/composer for the Public’s Public Works Twelfth Night, or elsewhere will know.
Music is her métier and in Suffs she delivers inspiring song after inspiring song, with three or four motifs running through the entire score to provide continuity and heighten the drama of a story whose outcome everyone knows but for which the details are in long-past classroom memories. The casting under Leigh Silverman’s direction, and the scoring (music director is Andrea Grody) are excellent.
If you’re lucky enough to have tickets for Suffs at the Public, where it follows in large Newman Theater footsteps, you’re in for a treat. If not, you’ll likely have to wait until it goes to Broadway — which I fervently hope it will. Right next to the musical she’s co-writing with Sir Elton John for the Broadway-bound Devil Wears Prada. (Taub is lyricist for Devil, which is set for a pre-Broadway Chicago run this summer while Taub will be back on stage performing in Central Park as part of a revival of Twelfth Night.)
There will be inevitable comparisons to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton. Don’t let them scare you. Suffs is not Hamilton. And most importantly, Taub is not The Next Lin-Manuel — she is original Shaina Taub.
Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster’s names spill off the marquee at the Winter Garden Theatre; you have to be across the street to see the half-block-long billboard above the marquee that announces the show Jackman and Foster are in. However, the real star of this incredibly happy-making production of “The Music Man” is The Ensemble. A 40-strong cast — and I mean STRONG — sings, dances, and struts its stuff with pizzazz.
I was too young to have seen the original 1957 Broadway production, never saw the City Center or Broadway revivals, and don’t remember the film version well enough (I’ll re-watch it soon) to know if more dance sequences were added, but the producers get their money’s worth in steps alone from every single member of this cast — and that’s before the curtain call, when Jackman and Foster break into a, well, swell tap routine. That’s not even counting the vocal strength from the very first number, “Rock Island.”
Think two and a half hours of the “Ahhhhhh”-inducing moment when the curtain rises on the second act of the Franco Zeffirelli “La Boheme” at the Metropolitan Opera — only with all this dancing added (choreographed by Warren Carlyle; directed by Jerry Zaks).
Maybe we caught a few places where Foster flubbed a spoken word (never while singing; such a glorious voice). Or when she pushed Jackman away from an embrace just a little too forcefully and he fell, responding by mugging his way up and teasing Foster lightly, she having trouble maintaining composure (just a few seconds…but exactly what makes live theater so special). Then when she got her dress caught in her heel while dancing and the dancers near her making sure she was OK. And when he broke character to pick up the stick he dropped that he was to use to pretend-conduct the non-existent band at the bridge…They’re still blocking for a February 10th formal opening.
Maybe like me, you went to the box office in January 2020 and scored two $99 seats (one behind the other) in the last and next-to-last rows in the mezzanine for October 13, 2020. Seats that were changed three times as the pandemic knocked one scheduled opening after another off the boards. And maybe those tickets still worked last night, just as ours did. I don’t often sing the praises of Telecharge, but this must have been a challenge for their programmers, let alone fielding the needs of people for whom the automatically-generated replacement dates no doubt didn’t work. (Reminds me of Miss Street, who single-handedly programmed 4000 students’ programs at Far Rockaway High School in the 1960s using index cards. OK, with some help from student volunteers — and how reliable were they?) And maybe the usher, unasked, generously checked if the woman sitting next to Riva, who was solo, would switch with me so we could sit together (she did; thank you whoever you are).
All of which is to say we, like everyone else walking up the street and into the Winter Garden, were psyched to be there. Have you seen the curtain call speech Jackman delivered to credit Kathy Voytko, the swing who appeared on several hours notice to replace Foster when Foster tested positive four nights after the first preview? What a mensch. Kind of like Prof. Harold Hill, it turns out. You go to “The Music Man” knowing that the crook is really a softy and a good guy, and that the love story is dated. Knowing all the songs. Knowing that Jackman and Foster are Stars and the drawing cards, and discovering this amazing, incredible, hard-dancing, beautiful-singing Ensemble.
If we the audience were psyched, so, clearly, was every performer on that stage, every musician in the pit. What a wonderful night on Broadway.
Reading the front page of the NYT this morning I realized that NONE of the news stories had what we were all taught would be a traditional “news lede.” They all kick off like feature stories; the news is often in a third or later paragraph, sometimes merely inferred. I went back to the Friday and Saturday front pages — one story on Friday and two on Saturday have classic news ledes — but most, again, are feature-style news reports. The WSJ uses proper ledes on the front page, except for what are legit features.
I’ve sensed this for a while at the Times, but hadn’t considered that it was a wholesale shift until this morning’s page 1. Is the Times abandoning the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How lede? I have to go back and re-examine the inside stories.
A quick Google search suggests j-schools are still defining ledes as answering those key questions, usually in the first paragraph and typically in one sentence. Just like the old days.
nightmayer 