The news this week that Michael Jackson’s music video was on its way to Broadway
as a new musical was the Death Knell of the modern theatre as the final
nail was hammered into the coffin of imaginative new works in the
legitimate theatre.
Continue reading → Thriller Musical Means the Death of the Theatre
The $400.00USD Amazon Kindle eReader sold out in less than five hours on its debut day November 20th. The next batch sold out even quicker — I was lucky to get one delivered Friday — and the third batch of Kindles will not be available for purchase until after December 25th.
The unionized labor market is on fire and that continued rage of discontent will carry over into the next year as the Writers and Local One, the Broadway Stagehands Union, in New York are joined by the Director’s Guild and the Actors in violent and visual protest against untenable labor equity.
Are these work actions merely about money and respect or is something deeper going on here? Is there a revolt against condemning the Common Man while the rich become wealthier and crueler?
Is there such a thing as an original idea? Or have all inspirations already been had? Are all thoughts actually the result of cannibalization?
Continue reading → Nothing New Under the Sun and the Cannibalization of Ideas
How many hours of your awake time is spent either looking at a computer screen or at a television? Five hours? Six hours? 12 hours? More? In a recent article, Own Your Words, I said this in the comments:
I think those in the future who choose to study us after we are dead will be amazed at how much free time we had when the world was crumbling all around us and we did nothing to heal it in time. They will discover were only interested in peering into LCDs and CRTs to ignore the fire engulfing us on all sides. It will be a sad day of reckoning for memories when they realize on our behalf that we never really lived at all.
Is it bragging if you foretell the future with perfect success? I am pleased to announce two months and a week ago I made a prediction here about this year’s American Idol contestants and, in the end, I was right. Peering into tomorrow is a practiced knack and here’s why I was right about who won and who finished second.
TAYLOR HICKS Taylor Hicks
, as I predicted, is your new Idol but he was never a favorite of judge Simon Cowell.
That is a dangerous thing because Simon can kill a contestant he doesn’t like and for the first six weeks of the show, Simon took every opportunity he had to slay Taylor’s chances of winning it all. What Simon failed to recognize — but that the rest of us knew and loved — is that Taylor Hicks wasn’t just a great singer and musician, he was one of us. He was older. He had a bit of a gut. His chin was doubled. He was grey haired.
We loved him because he wasn’t about surface beauty or false charity. Taylor Hicks is a real talent, nobly divined and of Great Spirit. He sweats honor and compassion. He controls the stage. He sings with grit and a passion missing in today’s popular recorded music. Taylor will always be better live than on tape but that’s the beauty of the man. He transcends the faked by being human in the moment and he cannot be artificially captured.
When I was in graduate school at Columbia University fifteen years ago, I was honored to serve as the great script author Peter Stone’s Associate for the Broadway production of The Will Rogers Follies.
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