Spent last night soaking up international angst a la Abba, having finally caught "Chess." Was dazzled by Nicholas Christopher, who emerges here as a true Broadway star. His rich baritone and charismatic centeredness transmute propulsive pop into something close to grand opera.

It is the birthday of the possessor of this amused, defiant, penetrating gaze, which was applied in the creation of some of the wittiest, wisest, most coruscating theater ever written. Raise a glass of rubbing alcohol (Martha: "never mix, never worry") to Edward Albee.

It is, impossibly, the 80th birthday of Liza Minnelli, the star of one of the greatest movie musicals ("Cabaret") and the most sizzling musical television revue ever ("Liza with a Z"). Celebrate by putting on a bowler, cocking a hip and throwing your leg over the back of a chair.

A gentle day closes as a prelude to spring.

A seasonal debut.

And lo and behold, as the clocks moved forward, heralding a new season, the snows that had lain on the land for many weeks dissolved into a mist that enfolded all the countryside. And there was celebration amid the mud.

n the New York Times, I ponder Jonathan Groff's evolution into a bona fide matinee idol. A very rare example of a nice guy finishing first. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/t...

At the risk of being redundant....

This evening: a spectral possum in the snow.

Good morning. Sigh.

This picture taken at twilight -- just before the next storm -- to commemorate a brief period in which there were visible patches of grass near the roots of trees.

Here it comes again. The view through my windshield this morning.

"Awe allows for a neurobiological reset." Oh, so that' why I get the shivers (or "skin orgasms") watching Malinin and company. Kelly Corrigan winningly explains the physiology of watching the Olympics and why it's good for you in stressful times. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/o...

It is the 99th birthday of the wondrous Leontyne Price. Celebrate by listening to her feasting on the pain and passion in Verdi or capturing lost time in Samuel Barber's "Knoxville: Summer of 1915." These are sounds to wrap yourself in against the cold.

Yes, I know they're unloved by many, as carriers of ticks and devourers of shrubs. But my heart still flutters when I wake up to the vision of these elegant beings in my backyard. I feel as if I've somehow slipped into Narnia.

Somewhere in this picture is a driveway. It is 5 degrees Fahrenheit at 2 p.m. in Columbia County, and the (newly fallen) snow is blowing like sand in a desert dust storm. And yet I continue to drink my coffee iced.

And this is what our corner of the world is going to look like for the foreseeable future. Remember melting?

A quiet that roars: Lesley Manville and Robert Icke took me through the creation of a monologue in Icke's "Oedipus" that elicits the most thrilling sound to be heard in a theater: that of an electrified silence. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/t...

Look closely at what appear to be giant boot prints here. They are in fact twin beds for deer -- the hollows made by creatures who sleep in the snow. I shudder -- or shiver -- to think upon it. Such delicate looking animals, but obviously very hardy.

And this is the view at twilight. The hills beyond have disappeared into all that white. With twelve more hours of snow to go.

This after a mere four hours of snowfall. With 17 more hours to go. I have put down the pen and taken up the shovel as a full-time occupation.

I bought this paperback when I was 10 years old and have reread it more often than any other novel. I somehow expected it to be the story of my life; it turned out that it kind of was. Anyway, I still use it as a moral compass. I photographed it in a dusty Havishamesque corner.

What it's like to be a prisoner of snow. The view from our living room window.

CBS News = See BS News? Go, Nikki Glaser!

Hyper-intensity in one hyper-intense closeup after another -- from the second row, no less. "Marty Supreme" was nearly sold out this afternoon so I watched it within spitting (sweating) distance of the screen. Exactly the right way to see it. As Sandler would say, "CHALAMET!"

Farewell to Tina Packer, the English-born founder of Shakespeare & Company. Visiting her theater in Lenox, Mass., was long one of my summer highlights. Her work brimmed with energy, wit and a vital command of the language that made Shakespeare make sense to anyone who listened.

I step out of the subway at nightfall, and this is the first thing I see.

This makes my heart sing. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/t...

I'm a bit late to the skate party. But I would like to thank Jacob Tierney for creating a show that a lot of us turned out to really need. I never expected to identify with, much less cry for, two hockey bros -- or that romance TV could honor its genre and still feel truthful.

The first moon of 2026. It looks like it's burning, doesn't it? On the ground, all is cold -- really, really cold.

Farewell to Jacqueline de Ribes, the French countess who became a fashion designer and a swan-necked emblem of a rarefied, vanishing elegance. I knew her a bit in Paris in the 80s, and her rigor of style was set off by a schoolgirl's joie de vivre. She giggled (elegantly).

Farewell to 2025, a year of many horrors and an inkling of hope. May that balance shift, please, in 2026.

Farewell, my comrades. The snow is falling fast and thickly.

There comes a moment for me every December, when family ghosts hover insistently, when floodgates open into a rush of tears. Today, that catharsis was triggered by Bess Wohl's wonderful "Liberation," which exults in the power of theater to imagine and connect with the past lives that shaped our own.

An energizing double header off-Broadway yesterday: a sweet, cozy "Baker's Wife" (my first) with Ariana DeBose soaring through "Meadowlark"; and a fast, flashy "Richard II," with Michael Urie, who speaks the speech with athletic brio, as a hedonist king who loses his right to party.

Something solid and bright shines through the stage fog of O'Neill's "Anna Christie" at St. Ann's Warehouse: Michelle Williams. She endows the title role of a lost woman among loutish men with sensitivity, complexity and a dawning proto-feminist conviction; she earns her rebirth.

I got to hang out with my new favorite couple. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/t...

The New York Times' Year in Pictures portfolio for 2025 is harrowing. As you scroll through, what unfolds is a tapestry of ever-darkening destruction and inhumanity. A portrait of a world on fire. Or in ashes. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Someone has planted a Swiftian chip, or perhaps a virus, in my brain. I was driving along with the radio on, when somehow I found myself doing the hand gestures to "The Fate of Ophelia" and drifting off the road. I didn't even know I knew those gestures.

This morning, emerging from the forsythia....

We won't be going anywhere today.

"Wake Up Dead Man" is the most likable of Rian Johnson's "Knives Out" series, partly because Josh O'Connor gives it an affecting emotional core. Despite the gore, it's great winter comfort food, with its gathering of familiar faces, like a deluxe episode of "Murder, She Wrote."

Just finished Ian McEwan's "What We Can Know." I might have admired it more if I hadn't recently been revisiting Tom Stoppard, whose journeys between past, present and future are more passionate and profound. But it's juicy, full of rueful cleverness in its nostalgia for today.

I give you some fairly photogenic falling snow.

"La Boheme" is like "Casablanca" for me, in that whenever I come across it, I can't turn away. Just now I sat in my driveway for seven minutes, so Mimi could breathe her last on the wings of violins in the (sumptuous) Met live broadcast. Sigh.

I'd forgotten the thrill of hearing a single actor subdue a Broadway audience into a silence so intense it vibrates. That's what Lesley Manville achieved tonight during a monologue in Robert Icke's "Oedipus," the sense that we didn't dare to breathe for as long as she spoke.

Like crocuses in snow, theater erupts, giddy and bright, in harsh places in Anne Washburn's work. Now, in the great tradition of the "Simpsons" operetta in the post-apocalyptic, "Mr. Burns," comes blazing fairytale theater from rustic communards in her new "Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire."

Back from "Little Bear Ridge Road" and astonished again by how fully yet subtly Laurie Metcalf physically inhabits a character. Her stiff-legged, restless walk in Samuel D. Hunter's quietly heartbreaking play is in itself a marvel -- a determined locomotive battle against gravity and loss.

It's the birthday of Julie Harris, who had a knife-edged delicacy and an undimming ardor. This made her an almost sacred presence on stage. Of course she was Joan of Arc and Frankie Addams, martyrs to a passion, tough and fragile. She was the embodiment of theater as religion.

It is World Aids Day. I worked as a volunteer for Gay Men's Health Crisis for six years, late 80s on, as an all-purpose dogsbody for people who were sick. You became close to your clients very fast and then, all too often, you lost them almost as quickly. A truly tragic time. No, we cannot forget.