GOP takes aim at Barack and Michelle Obama's NYC trip

President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama landed in New York Saturday afternoon, and after taking a helicopter from JFK into Manhattan, drove up the West Side Highway, where the northbound lanes were shut down by police for their visit, past Ground Zero, into the Village for dinner at the Village's Blue Hill restaurant. From there, they went north to Times Square, where they went to to see a production of "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" at the Belasco Theater on West 44 Street.

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest read a statement from Obama: "I am taking my wife to New York City because I promised her during the campaign that I would take her to a Broadway show after it was all finished."

Asked about the cost of the trip, which Republicans have criticized as indulgent, coming just ahead of the expected announcement of GM's bankruptcy filing on Monday, Josh Earnest told pool reporter Dave Michaels of the Dallas Morning News, that he "didn't anticipate being able to provide a cost estimate tonight."

After the play let out at about 11:30 p.m., the presidential motorcade went down Sixth Avenue, shut down by the NYPD, and onlookers packed onto the East side of the street cheered as the presidential motorcade passed as the Obamas headed back to JFK for a return flight to Washington.

The Republican National Committee slammed the outing in an "RNC Research Piece": "As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan’s theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills. … Have a great Saturday evening – even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense. … PUTTING ON A SHOW: Obamas Wing Into The City For An Evening Out While Another Iconic American Company Prepares For Bankruptcy."

The RNC's Gail Gitcho added: "If President Obama wants to go to the theater, isn’t the Presidential box at the Kennedy Center good enough?”

The president traveled in a smaller, Gulfstream-type plane rather than the larger planes typically used as Air Force One. Two other planes carried staff and reporters. (read more)

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/23122.html

(The following article appeared in the Village Voice on May 19^th.)

Obies 2009: Saying Goodbye to Tom O'Horgan, Paul Sills, and More

To recall some great theater artists gone this year means looking at why we make theater

By Michael Feingold

They dimmed the lights of Broadway this year for Horton Foote, for Bea Arthur, even for super-agent Sam Cohn, but not for Tom O'Horgan, who once had four shows running simultaneously on that over-celebrated street. This didn't particularly surprise me: O'Horgan's fame and fortune were made on Broadway, but his glory lay elsewhere. He made the rock musical a viable form and, in so doing, permanently altered Broadway's idea of the musical theater. But I doubt that, if anyone had asked, O'Horgan would have called this his ultimate goal in life: What we achieve is never exactly what we meant to do when starting out.

They didn't dim the Broadway lights for Paul Sills, either, when he died last June, though his story-theater productions caused a great stir on Broadway in their time (he more or less invented the form), and the artists he nurtured through his decades of work with the Second City might be said to have created America's prevailing comic style. But such honors were probably not important to Sills, who, like O'Horgan, would have been startled, perhaps even annoyed, if anyone had referred to him as "a Broadway director." What both men had in common—what they shared with so many of the artists on the sadly long list of our necrology at the Obie Awards this year—was a passion for the spontaneity of theater, for the idea that we love it because it is ever-changing, always fresh, always open to surprise.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-05-20/theater/obies-2009-saying-goodbye-to-tom-o-horgan-paul-sills-and-more/

(The following blog by Robert Butler appeared in the Guardian May 22 2009)

Green shoots of climate-change theatre

Plays about the environment might sound preachy and dull, but three new eco-conscious shows in London are engaging dramas

When you work as a full-time theatre critic, you get to see more than your fair share of drama on an impossibly wide variety of subjects. And yet, during my five-year stint as the critic on the Independent on Sunday (and excepting occasional moments in Chekhov and Ibsen), I never once saw a play with a green theme.

During that period (the late 1990s), a number of reports were published by NGOs and intergovernmental bodies on deforestation, loss of biodiversity and the high probability that our climate would be altered by human activity. The contents of these reports challenged how we led our lives: if we carried on in this way, things were going to end badly. The odd thing was, despite theatre's ability to reflect and ponder on every other scenario imaginable, you didn't hear a squeak about the environment on stage.

Perhaps theatre wasn't cut out to do green issues. Plays are about human relationships. Plays are about families. "What else is there?", Sam Shepard once asked. Maybe the sort of cutting-edge subjects that compelled the attention of physicists, biologists and philosophers of the stature of James Lovelock, EO Wilson and Peter Singer simply couldn't be reimagined in theatre. Even to raise the subject prompted embarrassed looks. A play about the environment? Sounds preachy and dull.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/may/22/climate-change-theatre