The Art Vs. Commerce File

You've got to hand it to Disney's Tom Schumacher: When he's unplugged, he can be very bluntly quotable, as he was in The New Yorker a few weeks back. I'm ambivalent about his and Zambello's positioning of Little Mermaid, but this juicy blurb could almost be a rejoinder to the likes of Mark Ravenhill:

“Our job is not to put misery on the stage,” he said. “Our job is not to make it uninteresting, so that it is interesting to the two per cent of the population that likes the uninteresting. Robert Patrick wrote a play called ‘Kennedy’s Children,’ and there’s an Off Broadway actor in it, and someone says to him, ‘What are you doing now?’ and he says something like ‘Oh, one of those shows where they make the audience crawl in on their knees and hit them in the face with a bag of shit.’ That is not our job.”