Manilow being gay? Not a shocker. Bowie allegedly being not so much gay or bi, but straight but curious? Slight shocker. Dennis De Young being completely heterosexual? Still not convinced.

The reboot basically gets as close as it can to giving him a canonical food fetish- he becomes infatuated with a girl in a burger costume but loses interest when she takes it off.

It burns my fingers to type this, but Geena needs to hook up with the Ryan Murphy production team, which seems to only exist to give actresses of late middle age and above the kind of weighty, nuanced parts they can't get in mainstream Hollywood. The fact that these roles are often in dreck notwithstanding, they get…

It's one of the most infamous cases of "the movie they wrote is not the movie they filmed." Whole scenes were left out, characters rewritten arbitrarily between scenes. If you read the evolution of the screenplay (which they should publish in a coffee table book, it's fascinating), the movie evolves from a clear dark…

Well, they finally officially announced the Beetlejuice musical, and despite my campaigning, I'm not the songwriter. That's okay. I'm just annoyed that the rumors of Tim Minchin getting the gig were also unfounded- the slot went to another relative nobody. In fact, he's an Australian musical comedian. A Tim Minchin…

Drunks and maple syrup powers
Crazy mama
Baby drama
Leonard Bernstein

It's a shame that his most famous homage/expy, Comic Book Guy, is so much more famous than the original. Almost to the point that when you read "Dunces" for the first time, your mind locks in on Comic Book Guy before it does on Ignatius.

She didn't always work, but I will always applaud the audacity of Jane Lynch as Coach Sue Sylvester. She plopped into the inconsistently satirical/realist/preachy world of GLEE as a fully-Flanderized season-12 "It's Always Sunny" character and kept growing broader and stranger from there.

If you've ever seen Monkeybone, you've seen Beetlejuice only it's Drop Dead Fred.

David Yazbek is a great jazz composer- listen to the overture to "The Full Monty." Unlike most overtures, it's a stand-alone composition that doesn't appear anywhere in the show.

It was mainstream enough that it shows up in a late Sherlock Holmes adventure, albeit a notoriously hokey one.

She can't help it, she's half fairy.

Yeah I get that he's a big part of the series, but having him spear Lorelei with his claws seemed gratuitous.

"Nyah, talking pictures are a fad, see? I've produced fifty musical comedies and I'll produce fifty more, nyah!" - James Cagney, "Footlight Parade"

Something simultaneously sharp and nasal, while deep and resonant.

I feel like with Adam getting older and not being "nerdy little kid," they've retooled the show a little bit so that the utter insanity of Barry Goldberg and his world is the show's focal point, and so the cast of characters has shifted sideways to the freaks and geeks more.

"Why do people rape?"

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the stage version of "Beauty and the Beast" is a foolproof show. The material is so good, the characters so well drawn, and the music so intuitive but pleasing, that it's almost impossible to see a bad production that cannot be enjoyed on some level.

You're kidding, but in the stage version of "Aladdin," the Genie covers a long costume change by stopping the show and singing a medley of Menken/Ashman hits from other shows, Vegas style.

Reminds me of a line I was forced to cut from one of my earlier, weirder musicals: airhead character (think Garth Algar, or Julian the Janitor) asks, a propos of nothing, "So… like, when Tarzan was King of the Apes and thought he was best monkey… do you think he had sex with a girl ape? …And if so, like, how many of…