Too Much News: Links of the Moment

There's only so much time to post links, so here's the storys that have been getting my attention lately:

• My first major 6th grade crush turned Scientology robot Katie Holmes is headed to Broadway to star in All My Sons, in a role that awkwardly praises her legs. Sure enough, the YouTubes have already beat the future Joe Keller (John Lithgow) to it.
• Mel Brooks hams it up for an interview with the Los Angeles Times in honor of Get Smart. Best line? "You're Greek, Andreas. We don't start sentences with 'or' in America."
• While were on the topic of Mel Brooks, unless there was a Bialystock and Bloom-esque accounting scheme, those 23 year old Broadway starlets of Glory Days I blogged about have cost their producers several millions of dollars after a grand total of one performance before closing. They seem to be handling it in the manner I would: lounging about their apartments watching bad sitcom reruns
• Theater people are doing what they do best—being dramatic—over this year's Drama Desk awards. The domination of Broadway in this years awards has led to resignations, accusations, counter-accusations, and counter-counter accusations. I lost track of all the complaints by the second paragraph, but it seems the primary complaint was removing someone from an email list in a fit of anger. Leave it to theater people to see having less email clutter as a source of outrage.
• Michael Feingold at The Village Voice has an excellent article on the resurgence of the musical in recent years. No snarky remark here, just damn good commentary to be found
• Finally, The Guardian has a post up on the theatricality of Barack Obama's speechmaking, echoing W.J.T Mitchell's commentary in my Theories of Media class this winter. Sometimes I wonder if I would be supporting Obama as strongly if I hadn't seem his 2004 Democratic Convention speech live, but based on my demographics, it'd be a miracle if I wasn't an Obama supporter anyway.