Good, Clean Brain-Eating Comedy Gold

One of my best friends, Doug Davis, took second prize for this Dawkins-inspired cartoon in the Center for Inquiry's Free Expression Cartoon Contest. Guess I'll have to congratulate him and pray for him.

Thoroughly Modern Musical

My preview of Green Day and Michael Mayer's American Idiot musical/opera/whatever is here. Shorter version: It comes as close, closer even than Tommy, as any Broadway musical has ever come to delivering on the long-unfulfilled promise of a true rock 'n' roll musical, one that both solidly rocks and makes a satisfying evening of theater; the Off-Broadway cabaret Hedwig and the Angry Inch is its only competitor. For what it's worth, I went into this story indifferent to Green Day and came out something of a fan; and while there are a few things to quibble with in Mayer's "libretto" and some of his bolder staging choices, I can report, based on a very early not-for-review performance, that this Idiot looks like a bull's-eye cast-wise, music-wise (great rockestrations by N2N's Tom Kitt), design-wise, and emotion-wise. It won't be for everyone, but it's one for the history books--a milestone for musical theater, and almost certainly a hit. UPDATE: Speaking of Hedwig...

Bulking Up, Not Paring Down

An excellent NPR piece about Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Money quote (emphasis mine):

A bump in donations, and record-high sales at the box office, meant that in the end OSF finished in the black; in fiscal year 2009, the company spent just a little less than the $26.6 million it had originally budgeted, employing more than 100 actors and 400 designers, crew and staff in the process.

That's the kind of outlay it takes to put on multiple plays, simultaneously, almost year-round, says Paul Nicholson, the theater's executive director for 30 years.

"This year we've got Pride and Prejudice, which has a cast with 19 or 20," Nicholson says. "We've got Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and that's got a cast of 13 or 14. We'll do a Shakespeare, typically, with 18 to 25 people — but we'll do four, sometimes five Shakespeares. And then beyond that you've got the other classics."

But scaling back, he says, is not an option for the OSF.

"Most theaters are having to pare down, and most are paring down on the work on stage," Nicholson says. "That's not the way to go."

The Theater of Protest

In his remarkably astute take on the way conservative Tea Party protesters have made themselves such easy targets, Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to the discipline and media-consciousness of the civil rights movement of the '60s:

These guys were the masters of protest as propaganda. The Montgomery bus boycott was a strategy and Rosa Parks was not some witless old lady, but a civil rights worker who'd been trained to accord herself a certain way. When Martin Luther King would be arrested he dressed a certain way, he seemed to try to convey to the cameras a kind of solemn restraint. The marches themselves were choreographed, and the strategy of nonviolence was drilled into anyone who'd protest.

It reminded me immediately of a short news piece I did for the November issue of American Theatre, about how director George C. Wolfe has been hired as Chief Creative Officer of Atlanta's Center for Civil & Human Rights, where the creator of The Colored Museum and former Public Theater impresario plans to bring a sense of immediacy and theatricality to the exhibits. As he said to me then,

I was impressed by how immaculately dressed everyone would be when they would go to a protest. It was about using the weaponry of fashion: The gloves and shoes matched when you went to sit at a lunch counter while hooligans squirted mustard on you.

When You Bend It, You Can't Mend It

I need to check the news more or something--I'm so mortified and ashamed that I didn't even learn that Kate McGarrigle had died (in January!) until I picked up a recent New Yorker and read about how her son Rufus Wainwright is grieving.

I don't have any great Kate McGarrigle stories--I did have the good fortune a few years back to see her join Rufus and Martha at Radio City Music Hall on her song "Talk To Me of Mendocino," and if memory serves, she and her sister Anna also joined Rufus and his opening act, Sean Lennon, on "Across the Universe," a multi-generational prayer if I ever heard one. I don't know a lot of the McGarrigle sisters' music, but what I know of it I love; I think Rufus' ode to his mother's "Beauty Mark" is the best child's song for a parent that I know of; and the brilliant, unsentimental song "Heart Like a Wheel," though in fact penned by her sister Anna, belongs forever to them both. Below, my favorite rendition of the song, by Billy Bragg (a tip of the hat to playwright Justin Tanner for introducing this version to me), following by McGarrigles' gorgeous rendition (Kate's at the piano).

Heart Like A Wheel - Billy Bra...

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Shorter Hilton Als

Suzan-Lori Parks should only write about black women.