John Lahr

6 days ago | airmail.news | John Lahr

Raoul Moat was a 37-year-old steroid-stuffed northern English bodybuilder. At six feet three and nearly 240 pounds, he had all the prerequisites, including a terrible temper, for his job as a Newcastle nightclub bouncer. On July 1, 2010, after serving 18 months in Durham Prison for assaulting a nine-year-old family relative, Moat was released.

Dec 2, 2024 | bobmorris.biz | John Lahr

The last time I watched “The Wizard of Oz” from start to finish was in 1962, at home, with my family. My father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, was sixty-seven. I was twenty-one; my sister, Jane, was nineteen. My mother, Mildred, who never disclosed her age, was permanently thirty-nine.

Nov 8, 2024 | airmail.news | John Lahr

“With a scowl and a frown / we’ll keep our peckers down,” Noël Coward teased British doomsayers in his song “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.” That was 1952. Since then, the furnace of the world has gotten hotter and closer. Our TV screens, our phones, even our watches broadcast carnage from every corner of the universe. We can’t hide from chaos. We are irradiated by it. We’re living it. Our ozone is terror, and terror kills thought.

Oct 4, 2024 | airmail.news | John Lahr

When the curtain comes up on Mark Rosenblatt’s superb debut play, Giant (commandingly directed by Nicholas Hytner at London’s Royal Court Theatre), Roald Dahl, the six-foot-six giant in question, is hunched approvingly over the galleys of his latest children’s book, The Witches, working on changes to Quentin Blake’s drawings. “Much nastier. Blistering scalps, clawed fingers, good. And her in the middle.

May 6, 2024 | portside.org | John Lahr

Where’s the Barbed Wire? Published May 5, 2024 August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan. Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8August Wilson​ wrote standing up at an accountant’s desk on which he had pinned the mottos ‘Take it to the moon’ and ‘Don’t be afraid, just play the music.’ His Century cycle, whose ten plays bear witness to African American experience in the 20th century, decade by decade, turned historical catastrophe into imaginative triumph.