Liars and Saints

 Over the weekend, Shaina Taub named Lynn Ahrens as "our greatest living Broadway lyricist." This is wrong. Here are better choices: Lisa Kron, Lin-Manuel Miranda, David Lindsay-Abaire, Tony Kushner, Steven Sater. Lynn Ahrens is clearly competent, but great lyrics should be surprising, grounded in character, poetic (without turning purple), and showing evidence of a sense of humor. Ahrens's characters tend to sound as if they were declaiming from a series of Hallmark cards, and this is not a compliment. By contrast, I think one of the smartest Broadway songs in recent history is "My Junk," by Steven Sater. Here, several teens sing about masturbating. You'll have to excuse me-- I know it's so off... I love when you do stuff That's rude and so wrong... I go up to my room, turn the stereo on... Shoot up some you--and the you is some song. Sater brings people to life in very few syllables. A teen tries to address her crush, and she seems to be speaking f

  My former teacher, Amy Bloom, described her particular childhood; she disliked "feminine" clothing, and she often chose to stay home, reading memoirs by prostitutes. (Her favorite was "A House Is Not a Home," by Polly Adler.) She also read abridged versions of Shakespeare stories, and she would wander around, refashioning herself as Henry V. ("I curse thee, knave!") Imagine my sense of thrill when my daughter announced that she wanted to be a tropical bird for Halloween. At last, a break from the tyranny of the princess narrative. Susie found an outfit that she liked--and I liked it, too. With its odd, semi-abstract headpiece, it made me think of something a flapper would wear, in the Roaring Twenties. Susie's costume kicked ass. Fast forward to 3pm. At the end of the day, Susie was no longer a bird, but a princess. She had persuaded her teacher to trash the bird costume and dig out a pink gown. Attached to this utterly unremarkable gown were two sma

  The highlight of "Ragtime" is a tiny moment in the song "Gliding." In this song, a man wants his little daughter to close her eyes and daydream. He orders her literally four times to close her eyes. Four times! I always assumed this was lazy writing, but Brandon Uranowitz (at long last) makes the line work. The fourth time Uranowitz (a gay man) says the line, he puts a startling kind of sassy topspin on the command: "Girl?  Close your friggin' eyes ."  Uranowitz is Tateh, an overwhelmed dad. Life hands him many shitty days. The gospel of musical theater writing says that your protagonist should have earth-shaking ambitions, and certainly, Tateh has these ambitions. He is penniless, mourning the loss of his wife, fighting off Lower East Side strangers who want to purchase his little girl for sex. Tateh wants to attain "a normal life," but also he wants to make use of his artistic talent (between the various street brawls that arise, the alte

  I have an idea that gay men write extraordinary villains; maybe it's about sympathy for the outsider. The obvious example is Howard Ashman. Ashman's villains have so much charisma, they threaten to take over the stories they appear in. In "Little Shop of Horrors," the evil dentist, Orin Scrivello, literally stops the show. If you're choosing any role in "Little Mermaid," you of course choose to play Ursula. And Gaston, with his scheming and his lengthy (lengthy!) solo number, is quite a bit more compelling than Terrence Mann's Prince-Turned-Beast. James Marshall wrote many immortal picture books, but there was only one time in his career (only one!) when he earned a Caldecott citation. This was also the only time he put an antihero front and center; I'm referring to his brilliant retelling of "Goldilocks." In Marshall's account, Goldilocks is obnoxious, self-centered, rapacious. A villager remarks that G looks like a "nice li

 "Conclave" follows the template of a murder mystery; crimes occurred in the past, and it's one man's job to uncover the crimes. As he does his investigative work, new threats arise, in the present, and we may sometimes wonder if our detective might soon lose his own head. Like "Murder on the Orient Express," "Conclave" gives several hammy actors an opportunity to chew scenery. This is delightful. We may not "believe" everything we see on screen, but if Reverend Mother Isabella Rossellini gets a chance to "sass" Ralph Fiennes, who will object? If the script asks John Lithgow to have a high-stakes, public tantrum, are we going to worry about the details? No. We are going to enjoy the tantrum. The other obvious treat here is the "Vatican imagery." I don't think this film deserves the Oscars it seems to be courting, but I had a good time.

 I saw my twin at a Halloween party. She looked uncomfortable and slightly sad. "I'm a spirit of Mordor," she explained. She had hand-stitched a simple costume; her older daughter, she said, had recently discovered an obsessive interest in Middle-Earth. My twin added that her younger daughter was ill--the younger daughter is pretty much always ill--and that her spouse was on "sickbed duty." The spouse is a quirky professor of physics. It's evident that my twin admires her spouse--and, also, that she has to tie his shoes for him. "Clearly, I'm a pumpkin," I declared. Then, a confession: "I had a daydream about becoming a pencil sharpener, but I just didn't move fast enough." This is all a prelude. What we want to discuss is picture books. We get there--finally--and it's like we have attained precious oxygen supplements at the top of Mount Everest. "EXTRA YARN is outstanding. And then when you see what Jon Klassen does on h