But first, two things to look forward to: Diana Wynne Jones has a new book coming out this year: Enchanted Glass. About what? I don’t know, but I’ll buy it and read it and pat it and love it and call it George! Second… uh, well, Andrew Lloyd Webber is…
Once, in one of my Drama classes, we got into a discussion about blackface. A lot of drama students are interested in musical theatre, and one of the ancestors of American musicals as we know them today is the minstrel show, in which white actors (and sometimes African-American ones, too)…
One thing I learned last Saturday is that playwrights Peter and Anthony Shaffer are identical twin brothers. How cool is that? (And also, how much would it suck when your professional artistic rival is the guy to whom you’ve been compared all your life? Peter Shaffer is most famous for…
OK, so I was all set to post my review of Diana Wynne Jones’ new novel House of Many Ways, which I really liked except for the inborn-evil lubbockin, which Sarah Rees Brennan talks about in a way more entertaining and lucid paragraph than I could fashion. (Actually, to be…
In his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard has one of the title characters explode at a band of travelling tragedians, who make their living by performing heart-tugging plays with endings full of corpses. “Actors!” he snaps. “The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn’t death! You scream…
Curse you, suitemates, for introducing me to iTunes movie rental service. I may never work again! On the surface, the Oscar-winning film No Country for Old Men and the Dora-nominated show Evil Dead: the Musical don’t seem to have much to do with each other, apart from lots of…
Three different media. Three similar themes. There can be only one winner. … Um, except there’s not really a contest. So, I saw this movie, went to this play, and read this book, right?
You know, I was a pretty big fan of the original American Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, back in the day. At least, I remember getting anxious about how the five regular rangers were going to defeat Tommy, the evil green ranger (hey, that episode was a two-parter!) I just watched…
Forget the movie. Go see the North American touring production of Sweeney Todd. It’s on at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto for eight more days – until December 9th. As Mrs. Lovett’s unsuspecting customers would say, “God, that’s good!”
So some news first. My short story “A Dybbuk Story” is being published in the Winter 2007 issue of The First Line, and it has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Writing it out like that makes me seem so matter-of-a-fact about it, but, truth is, I’m still slightly in…