Eventually Cirque du Soleil will create a show about each of us, but until then it is Elvis that is up next. 
Starting next month in Vegas at the MGM Mirage’s City Center. The show is being directed by Vincent Paterson best known as a choreographer. It will most likely be as spectacular as the 100 Elvis sky divers, just not as dangerous to people on the ground 😎 .
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Baghdad’s theater re-opens with a night time performance of “To enjoy the sweetness you must taste the bitterness” a play directed
Photo: AFP
and performed by Iraqis. The impact of war or any kind of violence is devastating to any community regardless of its size. What may go unnoticed amongst all the destruction is the difficulties in creating, sharing and viewing of art. Being unable to renew ourselves with what art brings to our “souls” and “culture” is a great loss, but some how people are able to overcome. The title of the play is ironic and true, but was it really necessary to have to swallow so much bitterness?
** Post header – Oil painting by Wasima Al-Agha **
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The filmed version of the play, “Passing Strange”, is clever, funny, with great music. Spike Lee documented the last 3 days of the musical’s Broadway run (it won the 2008 Tony for Best Book) and it has now come to a theater near you.
I saw the play last year and loved it. The terrific band, whose members, along with the few actors, tell the story of a black young man, “Stew”, trying to look for the “real” by moving from middle class L.A, where he feels he doesn’t fit in and everything is a fraud, to Amsterdam and Germany.
In Europe, he is more “American”, than he was in California. To gain friends and acceptance in the avant garde scene, his new girl friend is only impressed with the oppressed, he “passes” as the stereotype of a ghetto youth and writes songs about the “struggle”. After doing this for a few years, he wonders what if the only thing real is your “art” and “reality” is phoney?
He eventually returns to America to pursue his art and just be himself. He is amazed that the direction of his life was decided by the decisions he made as a teenager.
Serious questions, but told with humor and music. Hard to describe, a different type of musical, but, very entertaining.
Book and lyrics by Stew
Music by Stew and Heidi Roderwald
Directed by Spike Lee
“Jazz Icons” are 8 and 9 DVD box sets. They contain a fabulous group of Jazz artists that have been captured on film. Some pieces are from television shows done in the 50’s and 60’s. Others are film clips from old jazz festivals, etc.
I don’t know if Jazz is considered “in” or “out” today? Perhaps it depends on who is writing about this lasting art form, but, regardless – if you like this music or are just curious, seeing/hearing these musicians in their glory days is priceless and fun:
John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Art Blakey, Dexter Gordon, Dave Brubeck and more.
Just a quarter of a century ago, in the neighborhoods you were told to stay clear of , the theory was that the new “Cosby Show” was not reality. The show was funny, responsible and smart, but some people thought it was a fairy tale.
The Huxtables
The focus on this one fictional Black Family mirrored the lives of many Africans American families whose existence had been overlooked by the general media as well as those who needed and deserved a different kind of role model.
How important is the media!
Last year when then candidate Obama was running for the Presidency it was said (often) that people where now open to this possibility having seen movies and a TV show with an African in American as commander and chief.
The Cosby show first aired at a time when MTV, a breeding ground exclusively for white recording artists, was under pressure to include more colorful acts. At that time, the thought of an African American quarterback leading a team to a Superbowl win was seen as a bigger fantasy then a Black doctor with a stable home life.
I don’t think there is a show on the air now that represents the promise of the kind of change in cultural understanding that the Cosby Show offered. Maybe there is one, but I’ve not seen it yet.
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Great references, some very obvious, others not so. There is the bible, there is South African apartheid and most powerfully, although not by design, is the paranoia in this country on the ascendancy of Barack Obama, as in “If They Are In Control, Will They Take Their Revenge”. There has to be sequel, don’t you think?
Good Story – Good Movie, A Very entertaining Horror Movie
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