Lobenthal.com

In the summer of 1968, Diana Sands was singing and dancing and politicizing and loving.

As we recount:

“Sexual jealousy was as good a gauge of Diana’s affections as much as any lover’s. During the Hallelujah, Baby! tour, she demonstrated a possessiveness toward Poussaint that suggests she took their relationship very seriously. Not infrequently she would complain to him that women in the cast were flirting with him. In Poussaint’s recollection, he didn’t quite understand.  What made her think that? She would tell him what in no uncertain terms: again, it came down to performance. Call them ruses: body language—she’d demonstrate what she meant—how to be beguilingly ‘on’ – she knew all about it.

“The purported attentions paid Poussaint by a blonde in the cast led to Diana issuing her in his presence a swear-laced rebuke.  It was not pleasant. ‘You didn’t like to see her angry,’ he said. “She looked like she might hit you up alongside the head.’ The blonde seemed surprised, and backed off; Diana was, after all, the star of the show. Such an outburst, however, was rare. Diana was customarily cheerful, but nevertheless, ‘I think there were a lot of things, retrospectively, that she probably didn’t talk about because they were painful. She just wanted to let them be. Do her thing.'”

The insanely specious and myopic reliance on GDP as an unqestioned metric of well being is skewered by David Korten at Yes! Magazine

“as a measure of economic activity, GDP is what it says it is: a gross number. It doesn’t measure how money and wealth circulates through a system, what use it is put to, how the rewards of its use are distributed. It just counts how much comes out of the spigot at the end of the pipe. This completely avoids taking into account what may be the most important indicator of economic health: equality.”

Personally, poverty bothers me perhaps above all because the misery it engenders is so unnecessary. I am OK with accepting that some people have more money and some less except when it gets grotesquely imbalanced into extreme disparities of have and -have-not. I believed growing up that situation principally existed in what we used to call third-world societies, the ranks of which our nation has now joined. I mean, my parents always used to send some money OVER THERE, via one of those long-distance adoption charities. Of course I was then naive.

My parents’ generation was the first to grow up amid the true middle class. Their parents had seen life become so much more economically just that they, as well as their kids, as well as their grandchildren, i.e. me, didn’t realize how thoroughly economic justice here could be reversed.

the way a performer can change his or her appearance as much via thought as make-up.

When Tallulah at thirty-six played Elizabeth in Maugham’s The Circle, a woman in her early twenties, she was able, friend and stage manager Stephan Cole recalled, to give the part its full value as a young romantic lead. “It was an ingenue part and she played it as an ingenue. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen from her, she looked so young and innocent.”

Lisa and I had one epigraph for People’s Artist that we thought was good.

But there was a quote from The Brothers Karamazov that was in the back of my mind.

Finally I suggested we exchange it.  Lisa read it in Russian and English and suggested we take a slightly larger chunk of text.  Then she made her own English translation.

And now we feel we have the perfect epigraph.

I mean, this 1967 show is worth it just for the song “Talking to Yourself.”

But it has so much more. It’s high-concept and just plain historic.

Diana Sands took it on tour in 1968-69 and Steve and I have been writing about it.

It’s being presented with the revised libretto Arthur Laurents wrote early in the 00s by the York Theater Company at St. Peter’s Church Jan. 27-Feb. 4.

Whoever’s writing Minority Leader Pelosi’s stuff right now is good!

The Pentagon wants to be able to drop nukes in response to non-nuke attacks.

Makes sense, right?

Trump, of course is all in.

He’s not only determined to overturn democracy here, but incinerate the world as well.

On Democracy Now! Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh talk to David Cay Johnston about Trump’s desperation for more war.

“And of course we’re going to use nukes.” Trump said that.

purchase Valentin Baranovsky’s new Divertissement, and you’ll really want to after seeing it previewed in the just-published Winter 2017-18 Ballet Review.

I asked Laura Jacobs if she still remembered those Leaves Are Fadings she’d seen in Boston.

She saw Kirkland dance it twice in that run–“I was speechless,” she said.

However, she wrote about it for the Boston Phoenix so eloquently that Kirkland quotes from her review in Dancing on My Grave!

But Laura said it was the kind of experience you can try to put words to–and yet there’s almost no way to describe the sensation of experiencing it.

Ryan Grimm at the Intercept talks about how they plan to get away with it.