bloggy

Goin' to Boca

We’re going to see Boca tomorrow night (Monday the 11th). Are any of my lovely readers planning on joining us? Leave a comment or send an email.

Theatre recommendations

I’ve seen two things in the last few days that I highly recommend. I’m too tired to do a good writeup on either one, but here they are:

David Drake: Son of Drakula at Dance Theater Workshop. David has amazing range, and just gets better every time I see him. This work goes from his research into the Drakula family tree (his real last name) to his visits with possible family members in post-war Yugoslavia. I was very impressed by the writing and his performance.

Landford Wilson’s “Book of Days” at Signature Theatre. Some of the reveiws were uneven, but I thought it was excellent. I can’t say for sure whether I would think so with a less stellar cast and direction, but its politics are in the right place, and as someone who grew up less than 100 miles from its setting in Missouri, it certainly felt accurate. Miriam Shor, of Hedwig fame, was amazing as a small-town Missouri girl with a love for hunting and a chance to play Joan in a local production of Shaw’s St. Joan. It was hard to believe I was seeing the same actress I saw on stage in Hedwig.

I love Jimmy Breslin

His latest column.

All these years later, I didn’t realize there was an election this week until the Sunday before. On election day, I was in neighborhoods where they should have been calling out Carl McCall’s name. There was no sound. Then I realized that this silence was right, that there was no election. McCall was the candidate, but he did not ruin the politics here. It was shameless Bill Clinton who used the Democratic Party and left it with a hyphen. Not because of his trailer camp sex, nor his lying under oath to a grand jury. Rather, he merged the Democratic Party with the Republican Party. The Democratic-Republican Party. He left the Democrats with no issues, no purpose, no aim, no desire for anything except keeping the job. Do whatever the Republicans do. They want a tax cut that can break us? Good. Vote for it. They want a war? Of course. Let’s kill.

Stage-Irish

I thought Dan and others would appreciate this quote from the obituary of Brian Behan in today’s NY Times:

His first play, “Boots for the Footless,” which played at a London theater, was picketed by Irish groups objecting to what they considered its stereotypical portrayals of Irishmen as drunk and violent and Irish women as contradictory and conniving.

He was unrepentant. “I regard being stage-Irish as something of a trade like any other,” he said. “It’s something we Irish are particularly good at. After all, we have no other natural resource that I know of.”