Top Ten Plays and Musicals Repeatedly Performed by High Schools in the US (2008-09)

Brought to you by the Educational Theater Association:

Musicals:

1. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, Tim Rice, and Linda Woolverton (MTI)
2. Little Shop of Horrors, by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman (MTI)
3. Thoroughly Modern Millie, by Jeanine Tesori, Dick Scanlon, and Richard Morris (MTI)
4. Grease, by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey (Samuel French)
5. (tie) Guys and Dolls, by Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, and Jo Swerling (MTI)
5. (tie) Once Upon a Mattress, by Mary Rodgers, Marshall Barer, Jay Thompson, and Dean Fuller (Rodgers and Hammerstein)
7. (tie) Seussical, by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty (MTI)
8. (tie) You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, by Clark Gesner (Tams-Witmark)
8. (tie) Into the Woods, by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine (MTI).
10. The Music Man, by Meredith Willson (MTI) 1

Plays
1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare (public domain)
2. Rumors, by Neil Simon (Samuel French)
3. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller (Dramatists Play Service)
4. (tie) You Can’t Take It with You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart (Dramatists Play Service)
4. (tie) Arsenic and Old Lace, by Joseph Kesselring (Dramatists Play Service)
4. (tie) The Curious Savage, by John Patrick (Dramatists Play Service)
7. (tie) Noises Off, by Michael Frayn (Samuel French)
7. (tie) Alice in Wonderland (various adaptations of the Lewis Carroll book)
7. (tie) Twelve Angry Men, by Reginald Rose (Dramatic Publishing Co.)
10. (tie) Harvey, by Mary Chase (Dramatists Play Service)
10. (tie) The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson (Samuel French)
10. (tie) Our Town, by Thornton Wilder (Samuel French)

Short Plays
1. Check Please, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
2. Bang, Bang, You’re Dead, by William Mastrosimone (bangbangyouredead.com)
3. Check Please: Take 2, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
4. 15 Reasons Not to Be in a Play, by Alan Haehnel (Playscripts, Inc.)
5. This Is a Test, by Stephen Gregg (Dramatic Publishing Co.)
6. (tie) The Actor’s Nightmare, by Christopher Durang (Dramatists Play Service)
6. (tie) Check Please: Take 3, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
6. (tie) Hard Candy, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)
6. (tie) The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet, by Peter Bloedel (Playscripts, Inc.)
10. (tie) Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon, by Don Zolidis (Playscripts, Inc.)
10. (tie) Dinner with the MacGuffins, by Chris Sheppard and Jeff Grove (Playscripts, Inc.)
10. (tie) The Least Offensive Play in the Whole DarnWorld, by Jonathan Rand (Playscripts, Inc.)

A lot of ties, namely because the wide variety of stuff one will usually see in high school theater means that it doesn't take too many stagings to break into the top ten.

I'm surprised to find that "Romeo and Juliet" is not the Shakespeare representative to high school theater here. I guess the mixture of crazy American teenager hormones and the play's pro teenage sex and suicide stance would be a potent mix no school administrator wants on her hands. 

Personally, what I found surprising was the mentioning of High School Musical as a top ten in a previous survey.

Irony is dead.

Any UA&P student org up for the millionth rendition of "Guys and Dolls"?

Every Academy Award-Winning Movie's Trailer

Sheer genius.



Even the damn music is the same one every one of these Oscar-bait movies use.

Why Contraceptive Sex Ed Fails In a Nutshell

Theoretically, the promotion of the use of artificial contraception is supposed to lead to a great reduction in both STD's and unwanted pregnancies. But what is on paper consistently fails to materialize in reality. AIDS in Africa did not magically disappear when the Americans carpet-bombed the continent with condoms.

I stumbled across this old news story, and I think it captures neatly a reality many of these artificial contraception advocates fail to take into their calculations. The story is on a threat by a California Congressman (a Democrat, naturally) to force by law all these California porn companies to require their performers to wear condoms while filming. Even during an AIDS outbreak, there is resistance.

While most people in the sex industry appear to agree in principle with the idea of consistent condom use, it has long been believed here that condoms are not sexy.

''In any sexual interaction where condoms are used, consumers tend to drift from that,'' said Graham Travis, head of production at Elegant Angel Video, a production company that turns out as many as eight new releases a month. ''What the consumers want to see is performers without condoms, something that's as real and intimate as possible.''

Forcing condom use, he said, would mean that ''a lot of people would go out of business.'' In any event, Mr. Travis said, ''I don't think the will is there from the performers.''

Condoms are not sexy. Another way to put it is that human sexuality is designed to revel in the contact between two people. There is no way the human mind can wrap itself around the notion of sex mitigated by an artificial barrier. People don't want to have sex feeling rubber. If people did, then the fake rubber vagina would have replaced all women.

Outside one of the foundation's two clinics in the San Fernando Valley on Monday, an actress who calls herself Nautica Thorn said the idea of all male performers wearing condoms was ''great,'' but impractical.

I think it always has been, and it has nothing to do with people liking the "high risk" stuff. Sex and intimacy go hand in hand. Sex without the intimacy cannot even foster the illusion that sex means "love". There is a reason why no guy would want to kiss his girlfriend through a piece of Saran wrap.

Look Who's Late to the Party

Now that Obama is in power, I suppose Newsweek decided its high time to jump on the bandwagon that is news only if you're stuck in 2008.

Yeah, real scoop there, Newsweek. I guess they owe Bushitler an apology.

Alice in Wonderland

Rating:	★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

Tim Burton Farts a Fail *Spoiler Warning*

The one thing I liked about this movie was how it made me miss the old animated Alice in Wonderland. It's quite sad for a director who built his reputation on charming quirks to be out-charmed and out-quirked by a 50's animation feature.

The only thing worth writing home about are the visual effects, but the ones employed by the movie contribute little to the unity of the experience. I almost fell asleep during heavily CGI-infested final battle scene. If your central visual piece causes yawns, its time to rethink the strategy. See: Matrix Reloaded.

The acting is dull. Johnny Depp is badly restrained. The lead actress is about as charming as an English goldfish. Anne Hathaway acted like she was lost in a high school production of Cinderella. Helena Bonham-Carter was the only one who looked comfortable in her role.

Worst of all is the screenplay. They tried to shoe-horn in Lewis Carroll's wierd poem "Jabberwocky" into the Alice storyline, apparently forgetting that the poem's hero was male. (Which is why Depp's Mad Hatter keeps calling Alice "he" for no explained reason.) The result is a battle sequence between a talking winged chameleon and a girl wielding a sword that has to be made of paper for someone of her stature to lift it. (They even ripped off the dragon kill animation from Dragon Age: Origins.) By the end of it all, not only did the cheap grrl power individualistic sentimentality leave a bad impression on me, my suspension of disbelief also lay murdered on the cinema floor.

All these could be hand-waved with the usual "it's a kiddie movie" excuse (watch "Up", you lazy bastards!), but the decision to cast a young adult pretty much puts that excuse in the trash bin. By the end, I was quite hoping for a sequel, where Alice catches Malaria in some swamp-infested jungle near Rangoon and ends up eaten by a tiger. I'd pay to watch that. Unlike Alice, I tend to think of the very, very possible.*

*Alice keeps saying that she believes in the impossible. Blech.

Population Control: Alienating Mothers from Their Children

I got wind of a book review concerning the work of a woman going under the name of "Xinran", who used her media experience to scour the Chinese adoption system that produce so many Chinese girls for the Angelina Jolie wannabes of the West.

The book is called "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Lessons About Loss and Love". And judging from the book review, the book is a heart-wrencher. It is a book about life under the most extensive population control regime in the world, with its attendant brutal one-child policy.



What struck me most was how this policy corrupted one of the most intimate relationships ever known to man; that bond between mother and child. And because these families tend to benefit more with a boy around (he gets more labor done, and won't disappear into another family after marrying, giving his parents a de facto pension policy), most of these children sundered from their mothers' affections are girls.

One of the testimonies here is by Na, a young woman engineer, now a US citizen. She had seduced one of her Shanghai university lecturers because she was curious about sex. After a week of passion the relationship ended, but she was pregnant. Na’s parents, both university teachers, entreated her to get rid of her baby, either by abortion or adoption. Her mother said:

If our only child lives as a single mother, how can your father and I go home to Shanghai? Never mind about passing our last years in peace and comfort, we simply couldn’t face our friends and family …We haven’t got longer to live, please give us a peaceful old age.

The mother added that if the baby went to America, some day Na might find her. Na agreed, learning only after she had moved to America that there were already 30,000 adopted Chinese children there. She had sent her baby to the orphanage with some keepsakes, so that some day ‘we’d always have this means of identifying each other’. Many mothers did this, and in every case the orphanage got rid of the pathetic clothes and objects.

It's not just the poor peasantry. This violation of the sacred occurs even in the middle class. The corruption touches on all of Chinese society, and Chinese society is all the more beggared than if they just decided to wing it. For there can be no greater loss than the loss of a people's soul.

After Robin Munro and others made public what they had seen and filmed in orphanages (some of them rightly termed ‘dying houses’), Beijing cracked down on those who had allowed such shameful practices to be discovered by foreigners. A furious official burst out to Xinran:

All these foreigners think about is making a ‘historical record’. They never consider Chinese people’s feelings. If I were a girl adopted abroad, I wouldn’t want people to know I had been picked up from some shambolic, godforsaken mountain village. It would be so humiliating.

The young woman, a university graduate, wasn’t finished:

Mother love is supposed to be such a great thing, but so many babies are abandoned, and it’s their mothers who do it. They’re ignorant. They feel differently about emotions from the way you do. Where I come from, people talk about smothering a baby girl or just throwing it[!]into a stream … to be eaten by dogs, as if it were a joke. How much do you think these women loved their babies?

So dark is the rot that what is punished is not the maltreatment of children, but the allowing of foreigners to glimpse their everlasting shame. This woman cannot even believe in a mother's love anymore. Quite hard when the most common thing you hear about mothers is how they feed their unwanted girls to dogs.

This is what population control does. So, next time some two-bit moron running out of political ideas (like Noynoy Aquino, or that king of myopic stupidity Edsel Lagman) like imposing a "two-child policy", think not about the short term, short time economic "benefit", but the sheer cost of a country's soul. You bargain with the devil, you give him everything, and he gives you nothing. Any attempt to force families to "design" themselves results in the destruction of everything that makes a family. (If the ideal is one girl and one boy, what happens to the excess girl or boy?) I do not want to live in a society where being born a second child (or a third) becomes an epithet. Or worse, a death sentence. 

Hurt Locker Pisses Off Real Soldiers

While I do want someone to topple that walking bloated ego James Cameron at the Oscars, I personally do not want "Hurt Locker" to be the giant slayer. (Which is kinda stupid, Mrs. Goliath beating Goliath instead of David...)

As it turns out, I'm not the only one. The problem with this "most accurate Iraq War movie to date" is that it is most manifestly inaccurate.

So says a bunch of guys who were there. And you know its pretty bad when its the anti-war Washington Post breaking the story.

Many in the military say "Hurt Locker" is plagued by unforgivable inaccuracies that make the most critically acclaimed Iraq war film to date more a Hollywood fantasy than the searingly realistic rendition that civilians take it for.

To which you might say: It's just a movie and an action flick at that. It's Tinseltown fiction -- an interpretation of war such as "Full Metal Jacket" or "Apocalypse Now." It's supposed to entertain. It's not a documentary, not real life.

But to those who were there, Iraq is real life. And they're very sensitive -- some would say overly so -- when their war is portrayed via a central character who is a reckless rogue.

Hence a rising backlash from people in uniform, such as this response on Rieckhoff's Facebook page from a self-identified Army Airborne Ranger:

"[I]f this movie was based on a war that never existed, I would have nothing to comment about. This movie is not based on a true story, but on a true war, a war in which I have seen my friends killed, a war in which I witnessed my ranger buddy get both his legs blown off. So for Hollywood to glorify this crap is a huge slap in the face to every soldier who's been on the front line."

The guy Rieckhoff is a partisan hack who works with Matt Damon, but if even a guy whose ideological sensibilities are the ones Hollywood loves to cater to thinks the movie is over the top, then something is wrong.

Of course, the jackass who wrote the film's screenplay retreats back to the tried-and-true defense of "it's only a movie". BTW, this is the same moron responsible for "Valley of Elah".

Boal not only wanted to tell a riveting and important story, but also to raise awareness about soldiers who disarm bombs, a specialty known as explosive ordnance disposal, which he believed the general public knew little about, even though hidden bombs are the leading cause of casualties in Iraq.

Yeah, only problem is that the "awareness" he raises is that of a fictional military where all soldiers are adrenaline junkies and cruelty is a way of life. You might as well be raising awareness for Romulans.

Then, in comes the usual academic milquetoast:

Filmmakers always worry that productions that servicemembers see as spot-on might leave general audiences cold. So: Is it really important that a war movie be accurate?

No, says David McKenna, a film professor at Columbia University. "Hurt Locker," he argues, isn't as much about Iraq as it is about one soldier's addiction to war. It's a character study, an exploration of courage, bravado and leadership told through "a series of suspenseful situations. I suppose it could have just as easily been set in outer space."

Here's the problem: it cannot be "so much about Iraq as it is about one soldier blah blah blah" because it is set in Iraq. Anything set in the actual Iraq War will always bring the war and its participants to the spotlight, because its a real war. And considering how most US soldiers are not the offensive caricature this purported "character study" portrays (addicted to war?), it will come accross as highly offensive to the ones who served there. Bigelow's "character study" would've been better served if it were placed in a fictional war or in "outer space".

The leader of the EOD memorial foundation also speaks up for the movie, but its kinda hard to take him seriously when his organization got a busload of money from the studio that made the movie. Its generally good practice from a courtesy standpoint to be nice to people who give you money.

The reason I loved Mel Gibson's "We Were Soldiers" was because the movie had characters, not caricatures. It had a story, not a political point. Is that too much to ask from the slew of Iraq War bullshit (up next, "Green Zone"!) streaming from the Hollywood cesspool? The sad part is that "Hurt Locker" is probably the high point, and the least offensive one Hollywood is willing to make. Uness Mel Gibson decides to do an Iraq War movie as well.

Update:

At the bottom of this LA Times piece is this bit which shows the company's contempt for real soldiers:

At one point, "The Hurt Locker" might have been made with government cooperation. But just 12 hours before Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale was to fly to Jordan to serve as the Army's technical advisor to "The Hurt Locker," he said in an interview that he heard there might be problems. A Jordanian official told him that scenes were being shot that were not in the script that the Army had approved. Breasseale accused the producer of shooting a scene in which soldiers act violently toward detainees. (The military does not provide help to films depicting violations of the laws of war, unless their consequences are shown.) He also charged that the production had driven a Humvee into a Palestinian refugee camp in order to film angry crowd scenes.

"Nice working with you," Breasseale said he recalled telling a producer before the military decided to stop working with the production. "Kathryn has a lot of talent, but I cannot trust that your company will honor its contract to the soldiers and government of the U.S." Breasseale said the filmmakers had been solicitous of the Army's opinion, "trying to get the look and feel right," and they had been allowed to film at an Army logistics base in Kuwait. Breasseale, who is now deployed, saw "The Hurt Locker" on a laptop in Afghanistan along with a soldier from one of the Army's EOD teams. He conceded it was a great story and a "spectacular looking movie. But if you're looking for realism and how military relationships really work, I believe she missed the mark," Breasseale said of Bigelow.

Driving a Humvee into a Palestinian camp just to spark up some trooper hate for the film. WTF...