Just a reminder - I got tickets to tomorrow night’s Dorothy Chandler Pavillion performance of THE FLY, an opera based on the Jeff Goldblum horror movie from the eighties. I will see it and then review on Monday.
I’m uniquely unqualified to be writing about this too. I know little about opera and less about modern [...]

So I post my blog entry, go out to the Karaoke bar for a glass of merlot at a Rick Astley song, and when I get back, Richard Cheese has responded.
As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.
i [...]

If you’re near the Agoura Hills area of Los Angeles, there are only three more chances this weekend to catch me in NO SEX PLEASE WE’RE BRITISH, and most likely two of them are sold out. Friday only! Come to the Stage Door Theatre (818) 889-5209, enjoy free white wine and side-splittin’ comedy as only [...]

This weekend George Carlin died at the age of 71, which is reasonable. What’s unreasonable is that he was performing edgy, hip standup at that age. I mean what the hell! At that age you generally take a part in a family sitcom as the lead character’s eccentric dad; you do NOT somehow shock people [...]

A few months back I mentioned I finished a feature-length screenplay. This is not really news per se: I’m sure yours is coming along nicely. But if ya ask me it’s what you do with the finished manuscript that’s important.
Last fall John (the co-writer of the thing) and I took a free half-hour of advice [...]

We’re all excited here at Box Office Weekly over the propinquity (look it up!) of Sonoma’s Annual World’s Ugliest Dog contest. It’s a kind of evil twin to the Westminster Dog show, in which dogs are judged solely on their disturbing countenances. No prancing, no heeling, just “OMFG, what the hell IS that?!” It’s a little more [...]

The Met– The New York Metropolitan Opera– has been offering selections from their current season in selected movie theatres as live HD transmissions. Saturday morning, my wife and I attended the latest one: Puccini’s La Bohème, Produced for the Met by Franco Zeffirelli.
It was something we had intended to do for a while. On New [...]

Item #1: The 19-day-old stagehand strike of Broadway theaters is more or less over as the stagehands and producers have agreed to a tentative deal. Some shows are going on right now as I write this, others may take a day or two to get up to speed again. Says the Hollywood Reporter:

The new contract [...]

Milton Berle, you know, was nicknamed “The Thief of Bad Gags” due to his predeliction for stealing other peoples jokes. It’s not a new phenomenon. And yet today’s LA Times goes all in-depth on the newest wrinkles in stand-up joke stealing, such as the recent onstage shouting match between Carlos Mencia and Joe Rogan which was [...]

Just around the turn of this shiny new century, in a city called London, promoters build a gleaming white structure called the Millenium Dome. Meant to celebrate the coming 1000 years, it is known for two things: James Bond fell off of it in TOMORROW NEVER DIES, and it lost vast amounts of money before [...]