cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
My review of PRISCILLA Queen of the Desert, the Musical was posted the other day on CultureVulture.net. Check it out and let me know what you think.
The gist of it: “It’s like a Vegas floor-show, a somewhat racy but ultimately inoffensive homo/bi/transgender sing-along musical for the whole family. Every queen who’s already seen Mamma Mia three times now has a new show to bring Aunt Minnie from Cincinnati to.”
See the whole piece online here.
The crunchiest, good-for-you feature in the magazine this week is a long slog — a meticulously reported piece by Raffi Khatchadourian (who wrote the now-famous profile of Julian Assange for the New Yorker) about the clean-up effort after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The takeaway is quite surprising: what sounded like the most heinous and irreparable environmental disaster ever perpetrated by humans has actually been dispersed with remarkably little lasting harm, or much less than anyone feared. This is partly because everyone involved, especially Louisiana residents riding herd on British Petroleum with President Obama weighing in and kicking ass, threw every resource available into the cleanup. But the other hidden bit of information is that ocean has remarkable properties for absorbing and disarming toxic wastes. I keep forgetting that the earth is an organism that has its own quite powerful immune system.
Other than that, I appreciated John Lahr’s reviews of That Championship Season and Good People, which confirmed my suspicions. He especially voices my sentiments about David Lindsay-Abaire as a playwright of the Paint-by-Numbers school.
And the single most delightful story is a second helping from Tina Fey’s forthcoming book Bossypants, “Lessons from Late Night,” which includes my favorite footnote since Mary Roach’s book Bonk. In the section where she says “the staff of Saturday Night Live has always been a blend of hyper-intelligent Harvard boys…and gifted visceral, fun performers,” she notes, “I say Harvard ‘boys’ because they are almost always male, and because they are usually under twenty-five and have never done physical labor with their arms or legs. I love them very much.”
THEATER
It was on April 16, 1787, that “the first American play” opened, at the John Street Theater in New York City. It was written by 29-year-old Royall Tyler. Tyler went to Harvard, studied law, and joined the Continental Army. He was appointed the aide to General Benjamin Lincoln to help suppress Shay’s Rebellion. After Shay left Massachusetts for New York, Tyler was sent to New York City to negotiate for Shay’s capture. And there Tyler did something that he had never done: went to see a play.
Theater was slow to take off in America. There are known performances of Shakespeare in Williamsburg in the early 1700s, and in general the Southern colonies — more open to all British customs — were happier to embrace the theater. In the North, it was looked on as a sinful form of entertainment. Massachusetts passed a law in 1750 that outlawed theater performances, and by 1760 there were similar laws in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, although performances occasionally snuck through the laws with the special permission of authorities.
In any case, Royall Tyler from Massachusetts had never been to the theater before. So on March 12, 1787, he saw a production of Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal (1777),and he was so inspired that in just three weeks he wrote his own play, The Contrast. Just barely a month later, The Contrast became the first play by an American writer to be professionally produced.
The Contrast was a success. It was performed four times that month in New York, which was very unusual. Then it moved on to Baltimore and Philadelphia, where George Washington went to see it. The Contrast was a comedy of manners, poking fun at Americans with European pretensions, and the main character, Jonathan, was the first “Yankee” stock character, a backwoods man who spoke in a distinctive American voice and mannerisms.
— The Writer’s Almanac
I have a couple of people in my life who keep me abreast of the political discourse that goes on in middle America that never gets airtime here in midtown Manhattan. A lot of it is outrageous and appalling…and a kind of sickening reality check. See these bumper stickers, possibly all cooked up by a lone maniac and circulated by e-mail, but definitely playing to a receptive audience somewhere. Check out the note at the end, too.
The e-mail that carried these images concludes:
“Warning…Do NOT put these on your cars…however tempting it is…Or a “Brother” will use a bat on your headlights… It happened to a family member and the bumper sticker was mild compared to these…Freedom of speech is only for them now… We must change that in November 2010 and 2012…”
The situation looks grim, and even getting medical aid and emergency supplies into Port-au-Prince and distributed effectively will be difficult and compromised by inevitable human conditions. Nevertheless, I can’t look on and do nothing. I’ve made donations to two organizations with a lot of experience on the ground in these circumstances:
Consider making donations today. Both these websites make it quick, easy, and safe.
another eye opens 