(Roughly) Daily

It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Santino Fontana and David Furr, stars of the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest, reading transcripts from The Jersey Shore.

[via Playbill; TotH to Stephen Fry]

* “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying (1889)

As we remember that to lose one parent “may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Hair ( book by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, music by Galt MacDermot) premiered on Broadway.  Though it had done well with audiences in an earlier six-week run at the Public Theater, Hair was considered a long-shot on the Great White Way, and opened to mixed reviews.  But it charmed audiences (and spawned a million-selling original cast recording and a #1 song, “Aquarius,” for the Fifth Dimension).  Looking back forty years later, critic Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times, “For darker, knottier and more richly textured sonic experiences of the times, you turn to the Doors or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin. Or all of them. For an escapist dose of the sweet sound of youth brimming with hope that the world is going to change tomorrow, you listen to Hair and let the sunshine in.”

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