EXTRA CRITICUM

I say: "Serves 'em right... Suckers!"

OK. So, have you heard the recent scandal on the Upper East Side of Manhattan? The 92nd Street Y hosted a public conversation with Steve Martin Nov. 29th and, apparently he was so dull that they've now decided to offer a refund to all 900 audience members. (You heard me!)

Here's the deal, kids. We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, so much so that people will fork over fifty bucks just to sit and listen to anyone who's famous chat. The problem is, if you're bored enough to go for this sort of "talk-show-tainment" then you ought to be ready to suffer the consequences when the celebrity you've chosen is having a bad day. A dull day. A quiet, introspective day.

"Bring me the head of Levi Johnston!"

TV Week reports today that a Wisconsin (naturally) man got up, fetched his rifle and pumped his television full of bullets after watching Bristol Palin's performance on Dancing with the Stars this past Monday night. He then turned the gun on his wife, driving her from the house and, after she called 911, holding the police at bay for 15 hours.

Perhaps he was spending that time phoning in his vote (my guess: not Palin).

It's only November and Crazy Man in a Small Town Season has only begun. Usually we have to wait for February and cabin fever to set in before this kind of thing happens. It's sort of like Ground Hog Day - you can tell how much longer the crazy will last if they see (and shoot) their shadow.

Banksy and the not-so-subversive Simpsons sequence

By now, you may have heard about slave-labor opening sequence created by graffiti artist Banksy for Sunday's episode of The Simpsons, but since few of us in the coastal elites actually watch the show anymore, here it is:

ABC News Considers Midday News Show

 
The other day over at The Observer, Felix Gillette wrote that ABC is considering creating a midday news and lifestyle program. You can read the article here but seriously, here is what you need to know without a single click: ABC wants to kill their daytime dramas because it takes too much effort and too much money from their bottom line to produce. They would rather put on cheap news shows instead.

As I've written before, the net has been trying to kill the genre for years but, God love 'em, soaps fans will not go quietly. Unfortunately for soap fans the petitions and crabbing on Television Without Pity is falling on deaf ears as far as the network is concerned... but I don't really understand why advertisers are on board with this. Isn't it less desirable to be a sponsor for a show that no one watches (coughjaylenocough for example) than a show that a small but loyal fanbase watches? I guess the bottom line - effort vs return on investment is at play here - it's easier to make a cheap talk show and get a few viewers than have to employ a couple hundred people to put on a daytime drama (which, you know, is wooorrrrk!)

A Rose by Any Other Name [or: Catherine Zeta-Jones, A Class Act]

March 9, 2010. Curtain call at A Little Night Music at the Walter Kerr.

An eager Angela Lansbury fan races to the edge of the stage with an enormous bouquet of red roses—at least two dozen, maybe three. As Angela enters to take her bow, he can be seen desperately signalling to her, trying to catch her eye, thrusting his roses out over the footlights. But he is House Right and she Stage Right. Even if she had seen him, to cross to accept his roses would throw her straight into the path of her co-star, Ms. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is about to enter for her own bow.

"Late Night" Thermometer

With Conan's last Tonight Show now a memory, I thought I'd do a quick run down of the winners and losers in the latest edition of the late night wars.

A Paranoid Conspiracy Theory of 21st C. PR: Could the Jackman cell phone video have been manufactured?

So most loyal readers of this blog know that it was here where the September 13, 2009 incident involving Hugh Jackman and a rude and oblivious Broadway ticket-holder first broke. So, I can tell you here that this really happened and I witnessed it and thought it worthy of sharing with y'all. [see: Hugh Jackman Talks to Woman in Row P]

That said... I couldn't help but wonder about the odds of something quite similar happening again not two weeks later at the same Broadway show but this time well within the sightlines of a hand-held videocamera so that within hours the video had gone completely viral.

It Happened Again: Jackman Goes off on Audience

The O'Neill Center Achieves New Heights of Chutzpah

In a dazzling display of what can only be called unmitigated gall, the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center has sent out this year's appeal to playwrights to submit. And let me tell you folks, when they use the word "submit" they mean it in every way imaginable. (full disclosure: I've been a finalist twice)

It is an open secret in the theatre world that of the dozen or so slots available each Summer to new plays at the O'Neill, all but 2 or 3 are pre-determined in backroom deal-making worthy of Tammany Hall. As if this weren't bad enough, the O'Neill is one of the few playwriting competitions that still asks its "submitters" to fork over a hefty $35 fee for the privilege of landing in the slush pile. So given this context, it is hard to believe that the team that works there had the nerve to put this language in their latest appeal sent out to playwrights all over the world via email:

Hugh Jackman Talks to Woman in Row P

About 15 min. into yesterday afternoon’s performance of Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain, a latecomer in the back of the right orchestra started asking the usher when she was going to be seated. She didn’t whisper. Nor did she limit herself to one simple question. Instead, she felt it necessary to launch into an explanation of how she was physically incapable of standing during the whole show, how she hoped she’d be seated soon, and how much she had been looking forward to seeing the play.  

She stopped just short of sharing with us the menu of her pre-show brunch.  

Obama's NEA Calls on Artists to "Motivate Change." Say, what?!

So, under the Obama administration's lead, the National Endowment for the Arts recently hosted a conference call with 75 arts leaders from across the nation, during which artists were called upon to "make work that will support the efforts underway in this administration's agenda."

You heard me. Here's just one chilling excerpt:

The theater critic as death panel

Ouch! I would hate to have anything to do with a performance that causes a critic to break down and confess, in print, that he's abandoned his longtime policy of not walking out on a show before the end:

In the past few years, I have softened my stance on this issue because I have come to believe that there is a point of no return, when hope of a recovery is lost. When the patient dies, it’s not unreasonable for the rest of us, especially those who had to listen to the yammering fool, to try to move on.

A huge loss for theater criticism in Boston

Dan Kennedy reports that the Boston Phoenix has fired longtime theater editor Carolyn Clay as part of the downsizing at just about every publication in the US on newsprint.

I wrote for Clay for several years as a freelance theater critic, and she was a fabulous editor, able to improve my writing without taking anything away from my voice. Her knowledge of theater and the Boston theater scene helped me to look smarter than I really was.

She was also a principled critic with a cheeky sense of humor, as this recent Letters to the Editor exchange shows.

This is obviously a blow for the theater community in Boston, already suffering from cutbacks in coverage at the Boston Globe and the near extinction of coverage on TV.

The Great Drew Barrymore Debate...

...can continue today! She is on Fresh Air at 3 o'clock. She will be talking about the HBO movie of Grey Gardens. We can add our voices to the din!

Hardcore fans?  Sell out movie? Let's get this thing going again! Work is really boring today...

Does It Matter if Adam Lambert Is Gay?

If you have a pulse, you probably already are aware of the tremendously bizarre conversation (see the New York Times link above) that the blogosphere is having about the sexual orientation of American Idol contestant Adam Lambert. Why, I’ve even participated in this in a few posts myself from the past few weeks because, well, although I’m not a die-hard fan, it’s hard not to notice the show, hard not to notice Lambert (‘guyliner” does seem to be the number one 2009 trend – after hating the new Facebook redesign) and hard not to see that he is far and away the best singer and best performer that the show has right now. And perhaps ever. I maintain (much to the guffawing of friends) that his renditions of "Mad World" (sublimely tortured and appropriately haunting), "Ring of Fire" (an interpretation that blew my mind away in it's beauty) and the Michael Jackson "Black or White" (fresh, clean and energetic) were comparable with or in the case of "Mad World" succeeded the artistic success of the original recordings.

This is no idle (or is that Idol?) statement.