I absolutely love musicals, and I’m not even gay. Go figure!
Modern musicals are closely related to earlier forms of musical theater. Opera is a play where the whole story is sung, both dialog (recitative) and the songs themselves (aria). Operettas are operas where the recitative is spoken, not sung, but the arias still remain. The modern musical is a contemporary form of operetta, with an added emphasis on dance and contemporary style of music.
Continue reading Musicals: Let’s Start at the Very Beginning
I’m a bit of a grammar nazi. If you type “alot” instead of “a lot,” I despise you. If you type “prolly” instead of “probably,” I want to order up a short school bus for you to go to school in. And if you say “for John and I” instead of “for John and me,” I want to pull my hair out. After all, if you take out the “John,” would you say “for I” or “for me”?
Everyone seems to be talking about how crappy 2019 was. I know I had some pretty unpleasant things happen to me. But surely some good things happened too.
Looking at Christopher Bigelow today, a normally dressed, well-groomed, married Mormon man with matured children who lives in Provo, Utah, one of the most conservative, Mormony cities in conservative, Mormony Utah, and the home of Brigham Young University, you’d never guess what his origins are.
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, 2019, and that makes it okay for me to turn my sights to Christmas, because letting Christmas intrude on Thanksgiving is evil.
As a young French composer in his mid-twenties, Joseph Maurice Ravel joined with a number of other artists, musicians, poets, and assorted friends in Paris to form a group called “The Hooligans” ( Les Apaches in French, which makes you wonder about how a certain Native American tribe got its name). This was at the turn of the century—the 19th to 20th century, that is. Imagining the antics of twenty-something creative souls getting together makes the name they chose somehow appropriate. Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky were also members at one time or another.
by Guest Blogger Doug Gibson
Doug Gibson is a colleague of mine who has written published stories, is a retired editor of a city newspaper, and maintains his blog 
In 1786, Prince Charles Edward Stuart fought the Battle of Culloden to make good his claim to the throne of England and Scotland. His backers were called Jacobites. He failed in that attempt and had to flee the British armies multiple times until he finally ended up fleeing on a boat to the Island of Skye.
With George Miller’s announcement of three more Mad Max films on their way, I began to reminisce about the four films that have been released so far. Three of them star Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky and one stars Tom Hardy as Max…sort of. In reality, there was very little of Mad Max in Mad Max: Fury Road, and Hardy as Max didn’t end up doing a whole lot, considering the movie is named after him.
I make no secret of the fact that I loathe superhero movies. Christopher Reeve’s Superman was fun. Tim Burton’s two Batmans were typically and deliciously offbeat. Christopher Nolan’s Batmans were well done too. The occasional superhero movie was fun escapist cinema that I could enjoy along with everyone else.
But somewhere along the way, I got burned out by the endless stream of superhero movies. I haven’t even seen Nolan’s third Batman. It matters not to me how great the movie might be, I’m sick of the endless barrage!