With that voice, you’d think Mickey would be more gay-friendly. (Photo: Orlando Weekly)
1. PEDO PUSHERS
In the US, reactionary forces are accusing their opponents of pedophilia. The homophobia in this tactic runs deep.
Florida’s Disney World has become a battleground. The state’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which Republican governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last month, and which opponents have labeled the Don’t Say Gay bill, forbids discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida’s primary schools.
Initially, Walt Disney Company was silent, allowing the legislation to pass without its opposition, but, when it was revealed that the company had donated to every one of the legislators who supported the bill, Disney faced backlash.
The company’s workers staged walkouts (this NPR article reports that “Hundreds of employees were seen marching out of the company's headquarters in Burbank, Calif.”); Walt Disney’s great-niece, documentary filmmaker Abigail Disney, called her family’s legacy into question; and Walt’s great-nephew Roy P. Disney revealed that his stepchild Charlee Cora is trans. He also pledged $500,000 to the Human Rights Campaign.
Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek responded by announcing that the company was ceasing political donations in Florida. He also apologized to the LGBTQ+ community for his earlier silence: “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”
Fox News host Laura Ingraham reacted by accusing Disney of “pushing a sexual agenda” on children.
And, as the Washington Post reports, Republican politicians and their representatives have targeted Democratic politicians as “groomers”. In an interview she posted on Twitter, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed “The Democrats are the party of pedophiles.”
Referring to the Florida legislation, also on Twitter, DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw declared, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”
In the Michigan Senate, when GOP senator Lana Theis prayed for children who are “under attack” — presumably from those who would share information about LGBTQ+ lives and the history of slavery — Democratic senator Mallory McMorrow walked out. After the walkout, Theis named McMorrow in a fundraising email and accused her of “wanting to groom and sexualize kindergartners.”
That provoked a blistering response from McMorrow that went viral, racking up 12 million views in a single day. “I want my daughter to know that she is loved, supported, and seen for whoever she becomes,” McMorrow said. “I want every child in this state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white, and Christian … We will not let hate win.”
Senator Mallory McMorrow responds to Senator Lana Theis.
+ Last Thursday, in the most concrete escalation in the DeSantis Republicans’ attack on Disney, the Florida House of Representatives passed a bill that would revoke Walt Disney Company's self-governing authority at its Orlando-area parks. (Disney’s special tax status was negotiated as part of a development deal in the sixties.) Revocation could have huge tax implications for Disney and, according to this CNBC article, for local taxpayers, who may be forced to absorb more than $1 billion in bond debt. ...
(Illustration of Neil Simon by Joey Stocks for The Dramatist)
2. SIMON SAID
Actor Elaine Joyce, the widow of Neil Simon, who died in 2018, has donated a trove of the playwright’s archive — 7,700 letters, manuscripts, and other items — to the Library of Congress.
Among the details highlighted in the Washington Post’s coverage: - In turning down Bob Hope’s request to perform with Bing Crosby in Simon’s comedy The Sunshine Boys, the playwright wrote, “Dear Bob, If the audience would believe that Bob and Bing could portray two old Jews, then John Wayne should have been in The Boys in the Band." - In a handwritten message to pioneering Black playwright August Wilson, Simon wrote, “I have long said that you are the best living American playwright, and you probably still will be when the word ‘living’ no longer applies.” - In early drafts, Brighton Beach Memoirs was called The War of the Rosens. - The stash of unproduced manuscripts in the archives includes The Merry Widows, which Simon wrote for Bette Midler and Whoopi Goldberg. ...
Elon Musk in space (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
3. OWNING “FREE SPEECH”
In the avalanche of analysis generated by Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Anand Giridharadas’s take in The New York Times is the clearest.
“What happens,” he asks, “when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it?
“Twitter has a disinformation problem,” he says, and “Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a ‘pedo guy.’" (Musk has since walked back his claim that British diver Vern Unsworth, who helped to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave, is a pedophile.)
“Twitter has a racism problem,” Giridharadas argues, and “Tesla, the carmaker that Mr. Musk runs, has its own racism problem, with many workers complaining to the press, and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing suing the company over an allegedly pervasive problem of racialized degradation.”
In this article in The Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty agrees. He describes the oligarch as “the king of trolls” and refers to Musk’s tweet of a “photo of Bill Gates, zeroing in on the 66-year-old’s modest paunch and placing it next to a cartoon of a pregnant man. To that ensemble, Musk added this sentence of supreme wit: ‘in case u need to lose a boner fast.’”
Twitter runs on outrage and provocation and, as Chakrabortty points out, that model works to Musk’s economic benefit: “Constant tweeting to more than 85 million followers is what allows the Tesla boss to spend next to nothing on advertising, while Toyota spends well over $1bn a year in advertising in the US alone.” Musk’s post about Gates was retweeted more than 130,000 times.
Musk has declared himself a free speech absolutist, but, citing philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Giridharadas distinguishes between positive and negative free speech. He argues that, in Musk’s misapprehension, “the freedom to speak without restraint by powerful authorities, is the only freedom of speech. And so freeing Nazis to Nazi, misogynists to bully and … even former president Donald Trump to possibly get his Twitter account back — this cutting of restraints becomes the whole of the project.” Giridharadas identifies this as negative freedom of speech.
“But there is also what we may call positive freedom of speech,” he writes, “affirmative steps to create conditions that allow all people to feel and be free to say what they think.”
He makes a point that he says is lost on many Americans: “Government — or large centralized authority — is one threat to liberty but not the only one. When it comes to speech, what has often kept a great many people from speaking isn’t censorship but the lack of a platform. Social media, including Twitter, came along and promised to change that. But when it became a cesspit of hate and harassment for women and people of color in particular, it began to offer a miserable bargain: You can be free to say what you wish, but your life can be made unrelentingly painful if you so dare.”
And that, he argues, is what makes Musk’s purchase of Twitter so dangerous: “In a moment of proto-fascism on the political right, his priority seems to be to undam the flood of bile and bigotry and bullying and disinformation.”
+ From The Guardian: Donald Trump, who has been permanently banned from Twitter, “said on Monday he has no intention of rejoining Twitter and is sticking with his rival TRUTH Social network, but Musk may give him an opportunity to recover his more than 88 million followers” — in time for the 2024 election.
+ On Facebook, American intellectual Rebecca Solnit has posted that Twitter “is now apparently owned by an idiot who is also an asshole.” She also argues that the site has been an important gathering place for activists and she has reposted a tweet by climate journalist Eric Holthaus: “The next 3-5 years are going to be enormously important for organizing on climate and all the urgent justice issues we face. Communities exist on Twitter that have taken years to form. We don't have time to move to a different platform.” ...
Speaking of playing Usher in A Strange Loop, Jaquel Spivey says,“It’s a monster of a role — it’s a monster of a show.” (Photo: Flo Ngala for The New York Times)
4. JUST THE TIP
Folks sometimes ask me what shows they should see in New York, London, or Toronto, so here’s this week’s tip: if I were in New York, I’d be checking out the musical A Strange Loop.
It’s about Usher, a fat, Black, queer man who’s struggling with his inner demons while trying to write a musical about a character named Usher, a fat, Black, queer man who’s struggling with his inner demons while trying to write a musical … You get the idea: the plot, if you can call it that, is a Möbius strip. The inner voices, each embodied by a different performer, include Daily Self-Loathing, Sexual Ambivalence, and Financial Faggotry.
Michael R. Jackson wrote the book, music, and lyrics for A Strange Loop — and won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts in 2020, when the show was Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. On Tuesday night, it opened on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the LA Times, Charles McNulty writes, “For much of this triumphant, emotionally lacerating show … I sat with my mouth agape, astonished and grateful that something so brutally honest and rigorously constructed had finally broken through to a Broadway stage.”
Jaquel Spivey, who’s just 23 years old — he graduated last May from Point Park University in Pittsburgh — is playing Usher, and, McNulty says, “the performance just happens to be one of the most sensational of the Broadway season.”
Speaking to Elizabeth Vincentelli in The New York Times, Spivey remembers A Strange Loop’s first Broadway preview. He’d been unsure that he was up to the demands of the role, but he said he had an epiphany during one of the last songs: “It almost felt like my moment of realization that I’m worthy to perform for a Broadway audience. It just hit me like a ton of bricks: I deserve to be an actor — I deserve to be a leading actor. I deserve to be here.”
So, apparently, does the show itself. McNulty writes, “In bearing witness to his own survival ‘in a world / that chews up and spits out / Black queers on the daily,’ as the opening number puts it, [creator Michael R.] Jackson liberates us from the homogeneity that deadens our theaters and leaves so many of us feeling alone. For those searching for reflections of themselves in culture, ‘A Strange Loop’ offers the balm of community. Broadway has never felt so expansively welcoming.”
A Strange Loop is booking at the Lyceum Theatre in New York until September 4. Here’s where to get tickets. ...
In White Noise, Columpa Bobb’s character Tse’kwi catches up on some essential reading.(Photo: Moonrider Productions)
6. SEEING THINGS
New Theatre
Taran Kootenhayoo’sWhite Noiseis a pop culture Truth and Reconciliation comedy — so that's original. When an Indigenous teenager named Windwalker sells an app he’s developed to Microsoft, he’s suddenly rich enough to move his family into a mansion in Point Grey. When the white settler family next door invites them over for dinner, Indigenous realities bump up against settler assumptions. The neighbours' daughter Jessika is an Instagram star so, with that and Windwalker’s app, there’s a major social-media lens to the evening. There’s plenty of wit in the script: Windwalker’s mom Tse’kwi is reading a book called How To Deal with White People; every chapter begins, “Don’t tell them anything.” And there’s ethical complexity: Jessika has some understanding of the crimes that have been perpetrated against Indigenous people in Canada — and, to increase her following on Insta, she livestreams the dinner party without telling Windwalker’s family. Director Renae Morriseau has cast extremely well; I particularly enjoyed Anais West as Jessika and Anita Wittenberg as Jessika’s mom Ashley. And, with its geodesic framework, flashing lights, and projection surfaces, Lauchlin Johnson’s set is a sculptural marvel. There are a couple of holes in the text — Jessika’s dad Jason goes through two huge, barely justified transitions — but the evening is a smart ride. There’s a vision here.
Produced by the Firehall Arts Centre and Savage Society, White Noise is running at the Firehall until May 1. Here’s my full review. And this is the ticket link.
Trey Anthony’s musical‘da Kink in my Hairis set in a Toronto hair salon run by a woman named Novelette. When Novelette touches a customer's hair, she magically knows the woman's secrets. In its exploration of the experiences of Black Canadian women, ‘da Kink covers a lot of ground: colourism, sexual abuse, sexual orientation … The show’s formula gets repetitive, however: in a series of monologues and/or songs, the women deliver stories of trauma, which are quickly resolved. There’s little depth: a woman named Patsy tells us about the shooting death of her son Jerome, for instance — but she gives us no context. We don’t even know who shot him, and surely that matters. Not that Jerome’s murder would ever be justified but, by keeping the circumstances generic, playwright Anthony reduces the death to a trope. This happens again and again. There’s a lot to be said for the importance of representation, of course. And there’s some significant talent on the stage.Ghislaine Doté plays a successful financier named Sherelle, who feels like she’s physically disappearing because of the pressure she’s under. Doté delivers the best-written monologue of the evening with a combination of depth and restraint that makes it moving. And Jenni Burke is charm — and confidence — personified as Miss Enid, an older woman with a tale of sexual adventure. Still — and I’m speaking as a white guy when I say all of this — ‘da Kink in My Hair feels dated. It first emerged as a Toronto Fringe play (without music) in 2001. I can understand that, in earlier incarnations of the piece, simply raising some of its issues might have been ground-breaking, but the public discussion about Black female experience has become so much more nuanced since then.
This Arts Club production is running at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage until May 15. Here’s my full review and here’s where to get tickets.
Upcoming Theatre
Tomorrow night (Friday, April 29), I’ll be seeing The Invisible: Agents of Ungentlemanly Warfare at the York. This musical from Catalyst Theatre is about seven female special operations executives in France in 1940.
My review will be up on my blog late in the afternoon on Saturday.
This trailer for The Invisible includes enticing visuals — and enthusiastic press quotes. ...
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