I had a conversation with one of my regular collaborators recently. We are doing "The Little Mermaid" with the actress who played Tink in our musical "Tink!" Off-Broadway over the summer. Her performance is fantastic, but there's no hiding that "Little Mermaid" is just not a great stage show. On the other hand,…

It's a pun: her voice remains just as sure and whole as ever (as opposed to her closest analogue Julie Andrews, whose voice was tragically lost for many year) while singing her signature song, which contains the line "ever just as sure."

Now tell me about the Pit of Despair!

"T, for… Terwilliger! It was Sideshow Bob all along! Quickly, Robin, to Springfield!"

Batman's most famous enemies: The Joker, The Penguin, the state of New Jersey in its entirety, The Riddler, healthy adult sexuality.

Just a side note- "My Favorite Things" is one of the best jazz chord progressions ever written, hidden inside the most saccharine, un-jazz performance any song has ever had. There's a reason it's become a standard, and that reason has nothing to do with a singing nun.

Still tearing through Shakespeare- I'm finishing "Much Ado About Nothing" today, which I found endearing but slight. This makes it the perfect follow-up to the Henriad.

Do not think about the dog park. Or the Bye Bye Man.

There almost WAS a reboot of "Bye Bye Birdie," albeit not so much a gritty one as a queer surrealist comedy version that wasn't a musical. Tina Fey was supposedly working on a modern day reboot of "Bye Bye Birdie" in which Albert Peterson was now Alberta Peterson, talent agent to Birdie, an irascible man-child of a…

The Rundge?

I never thought I'd say this, but you can draw a pretty clear parallel between Chyna and Marilyn Monroe, can't you?

No, but who did? Kermit the Frog.
And David Cameron.

And then Pablo the Lion was fed to the Christians.

There's a play called "Altar Boyz" spoofing the end of the brief mainstreaming of Christian music and the end of the boy band era overlapping. It tells the story of a worn-out Catholic boy band near the end of a disastrous tour, armed with a machine that can show how many souls are in need of saving at their concert.…

Rule 3.16.

They play the Amy Grant Christmas songs fairly regularly on mainstream/secular Christmas radio. She pronounces it "the merscht wonderful time of the yurrrrr" like a gay guy being a very specific kind of camp.

Wait. So it's not skillet as in the kitchen implement, but skillet as in the Southern-style breakfast casserole?

I never heard that story until now! I had misinterpreted your comment as implying Jar Jar going even further round the bend, becoming a Leland Palmeresque puppet for the Sith in a case of demonic possession, and then dancing uncontrollably at a funeral.

Billie Joe Armstrong is a class of artist I think of a "Duchovny." The Duchovny will never be the best there is at any one thing, but they're generally likeable and better than most at most things. Like actor/author/musician David Duchovny, actor/author/musician Billie Joe is less concerned with becoming iconic than…

The post-Jesus episodes do have the "bacon fantasy" dream as a crucial part of the transformation from "Jewish collectivist cult" to "independent religion."