Playing around with serious things

We’re just back from a very, very strong performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Hale Centre Theatre in West Valley City.  Conlon Bonner was a superb Joseph, and Angie Griffiths Call was an excellent Narrator.  The entire cast — ours was the MWF group — was extraordinarily good.  And the choreography was complex, energetic, and — my wife and I both thought, given the nature and dimensions of the stage — adventurous if not downright risky.

There’s nothing especially deep in this play, which we’ve seen many times, but Tim Rice’s lyrics are really clever and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music is infectious and fun.  Each time I go, I think to myself that this is a play without many serious ideas in it (if indeed there are any at all), but, each time, I’m glad I’ve gone.

We had a great time.

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In other important news, here’s something from The Onion:

“Keith Richards’ Housekeeper Has Braced Herself For Finding Dead Body Every Morning Since 1976”

Here are some relevant comments from others:

“New Rule: Airplane black boxes must now be made out of Keith Richards. The man, who has taken more drugs than Whitney Houston, Rush Limbaugh and Robert Downey, Jr., combined, recently fell out of a tree, and then crashed a jet ski. And yet, somehow, that cigarette never fell out of his mouth. What is this guy still running on? I’ve got to know. Because I’m beginning to think the future of medicine isn’t injecting stem cells, it’s injecting heroin.”  (Real Time with Bill Maher, May 12, 2006 [Season 7, Episode 9])

“Keith Richards is shooting heroin into his eyeballs and still touring all right! I’m getting mixed signals! I picture nuclear war and two things surviving: Keith and cockroaches! (does Keith Richards impression) “Where did everybody go-o? I saw a bright light and thought we were on . . . .”  (Bill Hicks, “Dangerous” audio, 1990)

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And now for something more or less seriously political:

“From Ritual to Bromance”

Did anybody catch the reference to Jessie Weston’s 1920 book From Ritual to Romance?  It’s cited by T. S. Eliot in his notes to The Wasteland as a major influence on that work, although it’s unclear how much of an impact it really had.  (He downplayed that impact, later on.)

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And another pair of political articles, about Arizona’s Latter-day Saint junior Senator:

“Jeff Flake delivers the most courageous conservative rebuttal of Trumpism yet”

“The single biggest act of political bravery of the Trump era”

Senator Flake’s Mormonism actually plays a role in the second article.