Carousel! Your kid will always hate you! Carousel!

Saw Carousel—for the first time since high school, when I watched the movie, once—Thursday night, up yonder at the Olney Theatree Center. (I have decided that the only way to deal with the ubiquitous romanticized -re plaguing the beleaguered American theater scene is to mock it à la Arlo Guthrie: Alice's Restaurant Theatree.)

(In other gag news, the subject line is sung to the tune of "Hooray for Hollywood!", courtesy of The Simpsons #212/AABF05, Season 10, Episode 9, "Mayored to the Mob". Thanks to my brother for pushing the joke into new musical theatree territory.)

OTC mounted this production to honor the 70th anniversary of Carousel's Broadway debut—the precise date was just last Sunday, April 19. OTC is an impressive facility They seem to have a fantastic donor base—which oughtn't, I suppose, come as a surprise from an unincorporated chunk of MoCo that Money magazine consistently (if cryptically) recognizes as one of the richest places in the country. The place was lousy with comfy white retirees... and, er... hopefuls.

What finally occasioned a late-rush-hour drive to Olney—from a city with rich and varied theater offerings of its own—was Henry Niepoetter. Henry's a 14-year-old theater phenom-in-training whom I met (and sang with) perhaps 5 years ago, when he was Fomo's student at University Park Elementary School and a member of the Fomo-led choral group Vocetti. At the risk of attracting the anti-NAMBLA torches and pitchforks (seriously, dears, not my style), I fell madly in love with the kid based on his portrayal of Snail in A Year with Frog and Toad (the UPES 2011 musical, under Fomo's direction).

 Yeah, I never could bring myself to eat the cookie.

Since then Henry has been very busy on D.C. area stages: He's sung with the Washington National Opera in Der Rosenkavalier and La Bohème and Le Petit Prince, taken the crucial (if not quite principal) role of Itys in The Love of the Nightingale at Constellation...

Who's this 'Joffrey' you speak of? Bring him to me with a dotted line drawn on his neck.

Henry attributes his "getting serious" about performing to his run (as "Young Scrooge" and "Turkey Boy") in A Christmas Carol at Ford's Theater in 2012. He  was in The King and I at Olney and a 2014 local indie film about RPGs called Of Dice and Men. Henry is also some kind of resident at Rockville/Glen Echo's Adventure Theater, for which he recently played "Jack" in the kid-friendly Sondheim adaptation Into the Woods Jr. (Hint: No giant breast! Jack knows precisely as many things now as he knew before, after the sky. There are censors in the sky.) For his take on Jack, Henry won a "Freddie G" award in January of this year for Excellent Individual Performance by a Male at the Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta. Suffice it to say, the kid is brilliant—keep an eye out for important work from him in future. But enough of my P.R.

In Carousel Henry played "Starkeeper 2", a split role (the book's D.P. has merely "Starkeeper") and, as is apparently done for all child performers, a split cast part: Henry and another young man alternate performances. What is really curious about this fact is that the couple seated next to Paul and me were looking through their programs, and I heard the guy directly to my right say to his date, "Yeah, he's playing Starkeeper 2." I butted in: "You mean Henry?" "No," he said, "Ian." He was in the audience because he knew the other actor playing Starkeeper 2, but wasn't aware it was an off-night for him.

Henry's Starkeeper is leftmost of the "Up there" folk.

The production and the stage decoration (nothing seemed to me to qualify as a "set") were gorgeous. The cast was mostly terrific; I would only point out that Nettie's strong, fine voice was deployed consistently behind the beat—acoustic problems hearing the orchestra?—and occasionally in so ornery a vibrato as to obviate assessment of her intonation. "Yes," you could honestly say, "she's singing on key—and next door to key and across the street from key and everywhere else in the key's zip code."

Perhaps that sounds churlish—I should own that this is a personal aversion to a particular style of singing. I am serious about the adjectives "strong" and "fine": The timbre of Delores King Williams's voice is lovely and her overall skill at putting a song across is unimpeachable.

In the end, I'm not sure I agree with or understand Time Magazine's assessment of this play (which Sondheim seems to share) as the best musical of the 20th century. Certainly, it stands out among the Rodgers and Hammerstein oeuvre as a dark and intriguing jewel, a problem play with no easy answers (well, perhaps one easy—and kinda dumb—answer about posthumous redemption). Rodgers's music is superb throughout. And of course it has a real nice clambake in it! But is it really a better musical than Die Dreigroschenoper or West Side Story (or for that matter Candide) or Cabaret or Fiddler or Sweeney Todd?

The biggest detractor for me is my difficulty empathizing with Billy Bigelow enough to work up the necessary concern (or ambivalence) toward his marriage, his criminal enterprise, or his death. He is, I suppose, meant to be one of those roués and cads Rolf warns Liesl about a few plays later... but he's not a rebel, an independent, or a free spirit. He's a selfish, spoilt dickhead who smacks his wife around and is ready to do murder to forestall the potential hunger of his unborn child. As a result, my much greater empathy with Julie Jordan is seriously tempered with a stiff dose of "Girl, you a idiot."

The domestic violence element doesn't play well today, which may lead many to believe we've come a long way, baby; but I can't really imagine it was met with complacency or equanimity even among 1945 theater crowds. Perhaps the taboo was less dire to most people, the condemnation of abusers less vehement or universal. Alas, in the pre-To Wong Foo era, regular ol' folk like Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't know that, to defeat evil wifebeaters, merely apply drag queens. How simpler things are now we have aerosol hairsprays and Spandex! Hail progress! Benedic futurum, O homo!

 Et voilà! Your cabinet door is fixed for good!

It may be similarly shifting mores that play against the long Act I "Soliloquy" number in which Billy processes, stream-of-consciousness style, his incipient fatherhood. For example, if you're the kind of guy who boastfully insists no son of yours is going to grow up to be a sissy? I just might not want to be your best fucking friend. 

Ok, ok, you rhymed "lorgnette" and "born yet"—sigh—so I'll tolerate your company.

All that said, Tally Sessions (bound soon for a Broadway engagement) does a good job with the difficult character of Billy. And his voice! holy cow! Oh, and the fact that he captioned the above photo on Twitter with "Look at my junk while I over-emote."

Adding to the Billy problem, Jigger Craigin—a more explicitly horrible character, malice personified, really quite scary—is given a more appealing/engaging veneer: as audience you know he's bad but you see why people—including Miss Carrie Pipperidge, whose farm remembers—are attracted to his whim-wham. With Billy, by contrast, we're told up front that all the girls wanna ride his big fat co—uh, carousel all night long; and we see dear Julie Jordan falling (further?) in love with him—but where his actual guile lies we're too often left to guess. I'm not sure how much of this is R&H's fault and how much Mr. Sessions's, but I suspect it's a fault embedded in the play. I'm almost tempted to head back to the theatree for a control viewing once Cooper Grodin takes over the role next week.

Last night's movies.

I'm traveling on foot with two young Asian women, sisters, through a wooded wetland. We are on a journey or mission of some kind, and it is one we make frequently; indeed, it appears to be some sort of "Groundhog Day" type loop. I have known this for some time—all the events that happen are familiar, like unusually strong déjà vu—but my two traveling companions have not been convinced. Thus it is surprising when—just as we're clambering on tree roots up the bank of a rivulet—upon hearing a quest-disparaging or "Beware!" comment from a laconic observer, one of the women responds with, "You always say that. Shut the fuck up." (This is a direct quote from me, earlier in the script.) Her sister protests the use of vulgar language, but maybe she's just aghast that her sister has seemingly bought into the "this always happens" theory. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of this:

A late night television talk show has Carroll O'Connor playing Richard Nixon. He is giving a monolog while riding on some sort of barrow or tiny food cart. The piece is meant to be folksy-amusing, not an indictment or inveighing; Nixon's ghost's rehabilitation has apparently been complete and successful. I wonder whether they are using historical footage of Nixon with O'Connor's face CGI'd onto it. I try looking at his neck but cannot tell. In retrospect it didn't look anything like Carroll O'Connor, so maybe it was Anthony Hopkins—or perhaps Tiny Attorney from the Venture Bros—playing Carrol O'Connor playing Richard Nixon.

No matter, because now I'm on the cart, which travels autonomously and is a very gentle ride despite its apparently rolling over unpaved earth. It takes me through sprawling parkland in which thousands of hippies cavort in that particular hippie way.

[And I should know.]

It is the same area through which I have walked many times to get to Not Quite the Philly Folk Fest, with a decided aura of middle-ground between civilization and hippiedom. I am, alas, still in my business attire from earlier in the day, and I feel like an intruder (despite taking off my shoes and socks, rolling up my pant legs, and unbuttoning my shirt). Nobody pays much attention to me either way.

Finally through the hippie park, I'm trying to find Newark, Delaware, and in a misty early morning I travel northbound along a ridge which appears to overlook the town to the east. I am surprised by the clarity with which I can pick out all the major landmarks of Main Street, as if these 2- and 3-storey buildings constituted a skyline. I see the Deer Park, Old College, various Main Street businesses (including the State Theater, I will have you know).

But the view looks too pristine for a misty morning; I begin to wonder whether this is real or an illusion. Sure enough, as I get closer, I see that Daugherty Hall has been replaced with Cinderella's castle from Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. So much for reality.

Next I am on the National Mall (which looks suspiciously like a busy boardwalk) and there is a stage set up with a huge jack-in-the-box character who is spouting scathing, politically progressive criti- and witticisms. (Don't ask me how this is done; it's played by a human male but the head coming out of the costume is way too large to be a regular human head.) I hang out for a long while listening, amazed (and heartened) that such a prominent voice of dissent is permitted to declaim in the public federal space of the nation's capital. Later the jack-in-the-box guy goes away and another performer takes over. I notice the performer names are written on a wall behind the stage. Later I ask Pat Françoise whether she's aware of the venue on the National Mall. She is, and she's similarly enthusiastic.

I am in a gift shop having a political discussion with—for all intents and purposes—Alec Guinness as Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia, while we're both looking at books and geegaws. At one point he relates a quote and says, "Your Jesus said that." Later in the discussion he quotes again, followed by "Aristotle said that." I ask, "Not 'Your Aristotle'?" He replies, in that inimitable Alec Guinness way that means, "Ha! I am amused because you don't even know you're being condescended to": "Aristotle belongs to everybody."

While speaking with Faisal, I have been looking at an oversize glossy pamphlet with photos of Katharine Hepburn in various film roles. It seems to be about the glamour of her costumes, as the emphasis is on color photos. Some of the pages of this pamphlet come loose, so I arrange all the pages as nicely as possible and put the pamphlet carefully behind the others on the display, where it won't be noticed. Meanwhile, I either hear or remember my mom (who is played by my mom, not Katharine Hepburn) discussing Alys Capet, though she pronounces it "Allay-iss" after the spelling "Alais" from "The Lion in Winter"...

...which I am suddenly in. Eleanor frets that Henry will be home soon and no one has warmed his slippers for him. Indeed, slippers, jumpers, various clothes for warmth are sitting in a pile, damp and snowy, littered with straw—a mess, really. We are in a parlor in, I assume, one of Henry's castles in Normandy—not Chinon—but it's also my Grandmom's kitchen. A fire is burning in a sort of chiminea or censer in the center of the room. One by one I put Father's clothes next to the fire, but I clearly don't have enough time to dry them out and warm them. One jumper catches on fire briefly but having put it out I can find no evidence of damage. Anyway, too late! Henry has blustered in to the entry hall with two of his other sons. As I go out to them, one (Richard?) hails me and makes small talk, while Geoffrey (I suppose) works at a kitchen counter, buck naked. His ass is ungodly beautiful. Vinnie Marino beautiful. So beautiful it makes me wake up.

Ham & Piety Pizza

I unreantiexdefriended FB acquaintance Richie Cohen the other day. He had linked to some QueerBot PizzaGate editorial—the sort of bitchy drag queen commentary that emphasized how "literally zero gay couples [plan] to serve pizza at their weddings"; I noted that it's really grating when rich New Yorkers decide to speak for All Teh Gays, even dirt-poor redneck bible-belt ones. Richie told me, not for the first time, to STFU.

Really? Nobody wants in on this here?

Listen up, 'cause I'm only going to say this one hundred thousand times:

We know homophobia is wrong. We are fully aware that queer-as-sin and queer-as-illness paradigms are antediluvian, unscientific, and plumb idiotic. We really don't need you to convene a circle jerk every time somebody makes one of those high-larious missteps the 'phobes inevitably seem to make (like the undead picking up martial arts skills).

I do understand that people need to be held accountable for their actions, regardless of the underlying basis for those actions. And I personally see zero excuse for protecting anyone's beliefs in the will of their invisible friends. When one of them succeeds in summoning their so-called "god" to speak for itself, then we can talk. Till then, I just don't see how any stupid fucking thing somebody chooses to believe should be off limits because human rights. (But that's a different argument...)

But in purely practical terms: If you respond to the owner of Memories Pizza and every other Murkin out there who has some kind of religious qualm with queer sexuality by shouting them down as haters and bigots and pricks (oh my!), you have thrown your own case. You are calling every fundamentalist not mistaken or misguided (and thus subject to argument or Damascene epiphany) but a liar—you are accusing them of consciously putting a religion mask over willful hatred. You are thereby doing to them ezzackly what they are doing to us when they insist we have chosen to be queer.

And so you are telling the world that you don't give a scrofulous ratfuck whether you overcome anyone's ignorance, religiously grounded or otherwise; it's far more important to preen your SJW headdress on FB for all to see. (In that light, a comparison to the military-industrial complex's M.O. is useful: "Continuously creating and strengthening enemies is a feature, not a bug."—Glenn Greenwald.)

Wow, and you actually made room to show you can still do the classism shuffle to belittle low-class pizza-serving faggots at the same time!

Good job, Richie & Co.!