The monkey is earnest. The pig is passive-aggressive. The music makes me think of They Might Be Giants.

For one day only, Saturday March 5th, my esteemed playwright pal Trey Nichols and I are offering “The One-Day New Play Playwriting Workshop” at a theatre in Hollywood. It’s a fundraiser for Moving Arts, the theatre we’ve been associated with since… well, almost since before the dawn of the modern age of drama. (Which in our case would be the early 1990’s.) Here’s more info.

In just one day, we’ll cover a lot of ground about writing plays that scintillate, you’ll get to do plenty of loose and fun playwriting on the spot, and you’ll leave with the makings of a short play — which will be read by really good actors we’re going to personally shanghai into doing this.

Should you sign up to come do this? Hell yes. We’re serving breakfast and lunch, you’ll hear your pages read by professional actors,  we’ve got 20 years’ experience teaching playwriting, and we’ll do our best not to be boring. (And it’s for a good cause:  the event benefits a theatre donated 100% to doing new plays by emerging playwrights.) Never written a play before? Give us the day, and we’ll change that for you. Written plenty of plays, but ready for something different? We can handle that too. Just bring your laptop. And yes, Angelenos:  There is plenty of free parking. Here’s everything you need to know.

We’d love to have you, and we’ve got only 20 slots.  Here’s where to sign up.

As part of cost-cutting measures, the BBC announced last month that they would cease 172 websites — not just allowing them to go dormant, but deleting them. Now an outraged online citizen has revealed how little the BBC is saving in deleting those sites by archiving them all himself — at a cost of about $3.99.

I just heard that Christopher Lee resigned from Congress. It’s a sad day when Dracula is reduced to trolling for women on Craigslist.

You may recall that almost a year ago, I appeared on a panel where I debated some Republicans about their election prospects here in California. Hm. Let’s see how I did as Nostradamus, versus how they did. Right. Thought so.

One of my observations back then, re Meg Whitman:  “If you can’t work your own press event, how well are you going to do when Jerry Brown shows up and asks you real questions? That’s a debate I’m looking forward to watching.” I think we’ve seen how well Whitman handled all of that, and yes, the debates were thoroughly enjoyable.

This Sunday at the much-loved (and rightly so) Steve Allen Theatre:  The Club Foot Orchestra plays live accompaniment to two silent-film masterpieces:  Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” and the classic German Expressionist tale “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.”

About 15 years ago, I saw The Club Foot Orchestra perform their own score to that very same Keaton film — my favorite Keaton film, the one of which I have a framed poster facing me right this very minute — and they were fantastic. It was great, enormous fun, and I bought their CD. They also played alongside some “Felix the Cat” shorts — just as they promise to do this Sunday. I haven’t heard their score to “Caligari” — but I will on Sunday. I snapped up four tickets the moment this was announced. If you’d like to do the same, here’s the link.

If you hurry over to the Los Angeles Times homepage right now, you’ll see a link for the story   “Cynthia Nixon, Christine Marinoni welcome son.” Check out where it takes you (at least until they catch it and fix it).

The Los Angeles times provides a roundup of the critical response to the Spider-man musical. Let’s just say that the Sinister Six never presented Spidey with this much of a problem. I’d still like to see it. Maybe just so I could say that I saw it. Because I’m starting to doubt that it’s going anywhere else.

It looks like the major critics have abandoned waiting for “opening night” — whenever that will be — of  the musical “Spider-man:  Turn Off the Dark,” and are now running reviews. Their calculation, no doubt, is this:  The show is doing major box-office business, it’s big talk in theatre circles, and it’s essentially being reviewed daily on the internet by people who’ve seen it. So yet again, old media and its old way of doing business is responding too slowly to new dynamics.

So the “professional” reviews are in, and they are punishing.  The LA Times’ Charles McNulty calls it “a teetering colossus,”  a “frenetic Broadway jumble,”and “an artistic form of megalomania.” In his review for the New York Times, Ben Brantley shares his paper’s decision making process in going ahead with a review, before swooping in for the first strike:

But since this show was looking as if it might settle into being an unending work in progress — with Ms. Taymor playing Michelangelo to her notion of a Sistine Chapel on Broadway — my editors and I decided I might as well check out “Spider-Man” around Monday, the night it was supposed to have opened before its latest postponement. You are of course entitled to disagree with our decision. But from what I saw on Saturday night, “Spider-Man” is so grievously broken in every respect that it is beyond repair.

Of the many effects in the show, he adds:  “But they never connect into a comprehensible story with any momentum. Often you feel as if you were watching the installation of Christmas windows at a fancy department store.”

To me, two things are worth noting from these reviews:

1. What he and McNulty are describing is spectacle. Whether or not one subscribes to Aristotle, it’s good to bear in mind that he ranked spectacle low on the level of artistic achievement. Story is important for a reason. Even the elementally simple “Waiting for Godot” has  a story — and a good one. And I can personally testify that Spider-Man has featured prominently in any number of good stories for the past 50 years.
2. The character on the right in the photo above is Hammerhead. Hammerhead is bar none the lamest Spider-Man villain, even lamer than Stiltman (who, really, is a Daredevil villain). Stiltman is just a guy on, well, stilts. Hammerhead is just a guy with a steel plate in his head. I once met a guy with a steel plate in his head; it didn’t give him superhuman abilities, it just protected what was left of his brain. He was almost as dumb as Hammerhead. I didn’t realize that Hammerhead was in the Spider-Man musical; seeing him there alerts me to just how misbegotten this show must be, and makes me wonder how much better the show might have been had they hired any one of the writers who’ve written all those solid comic-book stories to at least consult on this.

Remember back here I was lauding the fine soup and beer I had while in the Eugene, Oregon? I was just filing my receipts and realized I left out the key element:  the charge for the home-made soup, and the  beer (a Boddingtons), cost a grand total of $6. I can say with authority that in LA, that would have cost more like $13. (Eight bucks for the Boddingtons. Five bucks for the soup.) And then we would’ve added state sales tax, to the tune of 9.75%, for a whopping $14.75. In Oregon, The Bier Stein did add tax, by the way:  a nickel. I think that was to cover the can.

Above you can find another drink I had while in Oregon. This is a locally brewed “Organic Free Range Red” — i.e., a beer — that I consumed in the airport in Portland. The branding isn’t right for me, but the taste fit perfectly.