Related: the musical “Cabaret” is today well-known for its seedy, Sam Mendes-directed production starring Alan Cumming, or the Liza and Joel Grey movie musical loosely adapted from the original novel “The Berlin Stories.” But the original Broadway production featured almost no debauchery. Instead, the club was classy…

My read could be wrong, but it seemed to be a deliberate homage to “Death of a Salesman.” The past playing out visibly in flashback alongside the present, the two locations being the house and a party setting with waiters, even the suicide attempt by car.

Is he the Babadook?

That may well have been a Bowie thing. If you've read "Pushing Ahead of the Dame," Bowie has what he calls "gargoyles:" silly, cartoonish and grotesque voices, often digitally altered, that he litters his music with. It's one of his signature things, and most of them have strange and exaggerated accents. He put them…

Yes. It was a heartbreaking moment, because it totally summed up the duality of the character and her role in the franchise. If you've dug deep into Peaks, read the novels, watched the Missing Pieces and the "narrator" sequences shot for the syndicated run, Margaret emerges as the spiritual heart of the show. If…

Given that the material hosts/avatars for many of the lodge spirits inhabit Twin Peaks and frequent the Roadhouse, am I the only one who thinks the Emcee is the avatar of the Jumping Man? People of color are rare enough in Twin Peaks, and an aging, nattily dressed black man, fond of music, who has eccentric microphone…

Years later, Zane would deliver the "Darkness is the heart's true essence!" monologue in the first Kingdom Hearts game, finally giving a great Twin Peaks performance… albeit in a different franchise entirely.

Nah, he spontaneously composted!

She's probably too big a star to do a half-hour concert on a series, but I can imagine Lady Gaga Unplugged being a huge seller and a major critical success, given that so many people have always said her stripped-down, acoustic-driven solo material is better than her pop produced stuff.

I never SAW the original Undressed, but I remember the commercial. "UNDRESSED… UNDRESSED… UNDRESSED…"

Remember when Maroon 5 broke as a a John Mayer meets Red Hot Chili Peppers funky-blues-pop band? Now, THOSE guys could have played a killer Unplugged set.

Even the whole JarJar-Gate is a great idea. A hapless military hero is propped up as a populist figure, used as an unwitting mouthpiece to literally destroy democracy? That's clever!

My favorite Stephen Daldry story: during the creation of the acclaimed "Billy Elliot" stage musical, Elton John turned in a pop-oriented, bouncy demo score keeping with what his own music sounded like at the time when the story took place. Daldry, who returned to conceive and direct the musical, reportedly said "What…

The comic book reboot combines the Flintstones' traditional "cavepunk" aesthetic with a Jhonen Vasquez-inspired sense of humor and implies not-so-subtly that this is, indeed, the case. They're not an ancient stone-age family, they're a MODERN STONE AGE one.

A gay acquaintance of mine described the penis of a semi-famous tv and stage actor (with a glorious voice) as "a taggy eczema rod."

I've said it afore and I'll say it again: listen to "Time of my Life" and replace every instance of "the time of my life" with "sex with a horse." Just try it.

Worth noting: Rick and Morty is a deconstruction of many things, but Doctor Who is one of the biggest ones, and the original run of Doctor Who ended for just this reason.

But it packs it right back up. Rick is technically correct, but nothing is made better by exploration of his nihilism. People continually point out to him that absolute malicious apathy is no way to live, and he keeps counterarguing them and hurting himself and everyone else in the process.

The theme-park section made my skin crawl. The sudden tonal shift, the sentimental indie music, the stylized innocence-lost artwork, and the sound of Rick's drunken, hopeless nihilism all felt way more like a real suicide note than anything that had come before (even more than his halfhearted suicide attempt last…

Okay, this one isn't so much funny as plausible.