Category Archives: Uncategorized

At a 1956 Met Rosenkavaliar, Musical America’s Raymond Ericson pondered the way that Marschallin Lisa Della Casa’s “youth and beauty really posed a problem for Octavian, torn between her and the equally ravishing Hilde Güden in the role of Sophie.” … Continue reading →

Bette Midler responds to the SOTU, tweeting her rejoinder to Trump’s boast that “America filled the world with art and music….” “and then ended,” Midler reminds us, “nearly every art and music program in public schools in the USA.”

is what our Aspiring-Dictator-in-Chief dug himself into last night–applauded vociferously by a Majority party that’s gone rogue, gone traitorous, gone Fascist.

FBI head Wry and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein’s visit Monday to the White House–yesterday, as in the day that FBI Deputy Director McCabe was shoved out–needs to be investigated.

There’s a time for explicitness, and the 1960s was an essential liberation: the performing arts needed it as much as society. But– Rather than become voyeurs, can we spectators sometimes use our imagination?  Let our brains, our senses, as well … Continue reading →

Koch-junkie Scott Pruitt goes to the Senate today to be grilled over his evisceration of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Senator Whitehouse has already prepared the welcome mat with a speech flaying the way that Pruitt has put the EPA into … Continue reading →

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos provides an overview of the way that Andrew McCabe was purged from the FBI. Where does FBI-head Christopher Wray fit in? We are now deep into a constitutional crisis.

This should be emblazoned, like in skywriting. A bellwether speech from Arnold Bennett’s 1908 play What the Public Wants, which deconstructs a media mogul and those who appease or challenge him. “No really new thing ever yet succeeded but what … Continue reading →

Jackie’s charming little speech in Spanish when she and JFK dropped in unexpectedly to the League of United Latin American Citizens’ fiesta in Houston, the night before Dallas? Some people sure comported themselves better than some other people do now.

Was Tallulah a racist? As a Southern woman born in 1902, she had no compunction about dressing up as a Mammy to entertain Stephan Cole, strictly at home in the 1940s. And yet she was enormously active in the integration … Continue reading →