No Jacket Required, Apparently: Talking Death of a Salesman, In the Heights, and The Wild Party on Around Town

You can see for yourself what a business-casual mood I was in the day Robert Aubry Davis, Jane Horwitz, and I convened at WETA to shoot a fresh batch of Around Town segments. Perhaps you are correct that I should have chosen a shirt that is not the same shade as our studio backdrop. Hey, I don’t tell you how to do your part-time job.

I reviewed Ford’s Death of a Salesman and Constellation’s The Wild Party for the Washington City Paper. For In the Heights, the musical I herein refer to as “Lin-Manuel Miranda’s THX-1138,” I didn’t write about it. I just bought four more tickets the morning after to take my folks. Anyway, because WETA posts videos in a format that WordPress can’t embed, I gotta give you the links: Death of a Salesman, In the Heights, The Wild Party.

The Ongoing Failure of the PG-13: The Movie

In perhaps the strangest milestone of my I-guess-you-could-call-it-a-career, The Dissolve has adapted an essay of mine that they published back in December into a very clever two-and-a-half-minute animated short. Keith Phipps, who edited the original essay, wrote the script.

I’m honored. The original piece is here. Please note that it cites Guardians of the Galaxy as the top-grossing picture of 2014 in the U.S., which it was at the time of publication; Guardians was subsequently out-earned by The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1 and American Sniper. Anyway, my thanks to Keith and to animators Mack Williams and Benji Williams and their team for doing such a beautiful job with this. I’ve embedded the video above, but please go watch it on The Dissolve, where it’s accompanied by a behind-the-scenes video wherein Mack Williams pulls back the curtain on how he turned a script into a cartoon.

On Around Town, talking King Hedley II, Mary Stuart, and Cherokee

On this trio of Around Town discussions, host Robert Aubry Davis, Washington Post arts writer Jane Horwitz and I dissect Arena Stage‘s powerful King Hedley II, Woolly Mammoth‘s meandering Cherokee, and Folger Theatre‘s intriguing Mary Stuart. (My Washington City Paper reviews of are here, here, and here, respectively.) I’m sorry my hair wasn’t as concise and insightful on this day as I strive at all times for it to be.