by Jonathan Spira

It was 60 years ago today, April 10, 1964, that one of the 20th century’s most famous and celebrated pianists performed his final concert.
To borrow from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (himself one of the 20th century’s greatest poets), Glenn Gould gave up public performances “not with a bang but a whimper.”
That evening, the Canadian virtuoso stepped away from the keyboard at the conclusion of his concert at the …

‘Stereophonic,’ ‘Dead Outlaw,’ ‘The Connector’ Lead 2024 Outer Critics Circle Nominations

by Anna Breuer

The 2024 Outer Critics Circle award nominations were announced Tuesday, and for the first time ever, the event took place at the Museum of Broadway.
The nominees were announced by the stars of the Stephen Sondheim musical, “Merrily We Roll Along,” Daniel Radcliffe, Jonathan Groff, and Lindsay Mendez.
“Stereophonic,” a new play that  follows a fictional 1970s rock band on the cusp of superstardom as they struggle through recording their new album, …

Theater Review: ‘Five,’ The Parody Musical… Or The Five Angry Women of Donald Trump

by Blaise Buckley

King Henry VIII may have had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died, … well you know what happened), but former President Donald Trump has five angry women.
That cohort is the basis of the musical “Five,“ a show that wants to Make America Funny Again, something we can abbreviate as MAFA. Sounds catchy, no? Perhaps on red baseball caps?
The comedy musical revue puts the spotlight on five of the women in the …

Review: ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ Steinbeck’s Okies Operatically Head to the Promised Land, Presented by MasterVoices

by Jonathan Spira

John Steinbeck’s American realist novel “The Grapes of Wrath” – the story, as every high school student in the United States knows, of the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, bank foreclosures, and human suffering –  has fomented controversy since its publication on April 14, 1939 and little about that has changed.
Sixty-eight years after its publication, the story of the Joads became …

Today is English Language Day in 2024: Celebrate the Most Spoken Language in the World

by Jonathan Spira

Professor Henry Higgins, the phonetician at the center of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated work “Pygmalion” – one of the most erudite comedies in the English language – and the Broadway musical “My Fair Lady,” asks the question, “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?,” but as it happens, hundreds of millions of people seem to be successfully doing just that,  “speaking English any way they like,” as …

Tomorrow is the Start of Passover. Here’s What’s Open and What’s Closed

by Paul Riegler

Tomorrow, at sundown, marks the start of the first day of Passover, the holiday that marks the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
Passover is a joyous celebration of the Exodus, the story of how the Israelites were delivered from slavery in Egypt and left for the promised land, “a land flowing with milk and honey,” as recalled in the bible, specifically in Shemot, or Exodus, Chapter 13, Verse 5.
The commemoration of Passover …

Passover and Easter Typically Overlap, But Not in 2024

by Kurt Stolz

Since the start of the current century, the holidays of Passover and Easter have overlapped every year but four, namely in 2005, 2008, 2016, and the current year, 2024.
It’s not mere coincidence that the two holidays overlap as much as they do and they arrive together almost every spring, just like blossoming tulips, and the fact that they did not do so this year almost makes it seem as if …

Why the Floppy Disk Won’t Die: San Francisco’s Muni Metro Streetcar Lines Need Them, That’s Why

by Paul Riegler

If the term “sneakernet” means something to you, then you’re probably old enough to have used floppy disks at work and you probably assumed that they were relegated to the scrap heap of tech history ages ago and were certainly not being used to run mission-critical systems.
Of course, you’d be wrong.
[Editor’s note: A sneakernet, for the uninitiated, was an informal term for the transfer of information by bringing a floppy …