Goodspeed Musical announced two-thirds of its 2012 Goodspeed Opera House season—namely Mame and Carousel—last November. This week they announced the third show, and it provides some cult-class balance to the famous crowdpleasers already on the sched.

Something’s Afoot, which runs at the East Haddam-based theater from October 5 to December 9, is a well-liked murder mystery parody done back before Rupert Holmes singlehandedly took over the form. The book, score and lyrics are by James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach, with added tunes by Ed Linderman. Not exactly names up there with Jerry Herman, Richard Rodgers or Oscar Hammerstein III (Vos and Gerlach’s other big show was Nobody Loves a Dragon; Linderman conceived a Broadway Jukebox revue in 1981).  Something Afoot’s creators were working actors who found a cool format to exploit, and found their greatest success with it outside the Great White Way. Same trajectory as Nunsense, really—comic murder crises, only this one has magnifying glasses instead of habits, and it’s a whodunnit instead of a sketch revue.

Something’s Afoot ran for a whopping two months on Broadway in 1976, but has had a hardy afterlife in the summer stock, college and community theater realms.

The Goodspeed actually had a hand in the show’s development nearly 40 years ago, giving Something’s Afoot its second production in 1973 following a premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater the previous year. It toured (with Pat Carroll) even before it made it to New York. There was a TV version in 1984 with Jean Stapleton and Andy Gibb. (How ’80s can you get?)

For this revival, the Goodspeed has enlisted Casey Hushion, whose Broadway credits include Assistant Director on In the Heights and The Drowsy Chaperone and Associate Director on the musical of Elf and Nick Whitby’s stage version of the Lubitsch film To Be or Not to Be. She was the interim artistic director of North Carolina Theatre and has been attached (again, as Associate Director) to the Broadway-bound musical Minsky’s. Interestingly, Hushion once directed a concert version of Carousel. Hushion’s been involved with the Goodspeed for a decade now in various positions, assistant-directing George M!, Brigadoon and Babes in Arms. She was appointed the Goodspeed’s “Artistic Associate/New Works Scout” in 2005.

Hushion has some dance credits on her resume (director/choreographer on Poe the Musical; dance captain for a North Shore Music Theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof), but the Goodspeed press release says that the choreographer for Something’s Afoot has yet to be announced.

Which, of course, means that nothing is afoot yet at all.

…found in recent days on the wondrous  gocomics.com.

First is Steve Melcher’s panel This Is Priceless, which attaches funny captions to famous paintings. Then Dave Whamond’s gag-a-day Reality Check, followed by Frank Cho’s exquisite (and intelligent) Liberty Meadows. Then The Lefty Bosco Picture Show by Duquette, which reminds me of Bread & Puppet Theater graphics even without the puppet-themed joke. And finally Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, with Snoopy doing Eliza Doolittle.

The Seagull
Through Jan. 28 (final performance tonight, Saturday, at 8 p.m.) at the Yale University Theatre, 222 York St., New Haven.
By Anton Chekhov. Translated by Paul Schmidt. Directed by Alexandru Mihail. Scenic Designer: Kristen Robinson. Costume Designer: Maria Hooper. Lighting Designer: Masha Tsimring. Sound Designer and Original Music: Keri Klick. Projection Designer: Paul Lieber. Production Dramaturg: Elliot B. Quick. Stage Manager: Alyssa K. Howard. Performed by: Seamus Mulcahy (Treplev), Jillian Taylor (Nina), Brenda Meaney (Arkadina), Chris Henry (Trigorin), Carmen Zilles (Masha), Will Cobbs (Sorin), Charles Margossian (Yakov), Max Roll (Dorn), Winston Duke (Shamrayev), Sheria Irving (Paulina) and Jen Mulrow (The Cook).

Sorry to be late in reviewing The Seagull; I booked late and the only seat they had was for the Saturday matinee. The run was sold out, largely due to the production’s design lessening the number of seats.
This year, every single one of the three Yale school if drama thesis projects was done with the audience in bleachers on the university theater stage. Any designer who still thinks this is a quirky choice, there you are. Perhaps some brave student someday will make the daring decision to let the audience sit in the actual auditorium, where there are many more seats. I’m sure the theater management students would applaud such a choice.
Limiting the size of the audience has a greater effect when the script is a popular or notorious one, and this year’s slated of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Cymbeline and The Seagull all qualify. In the case of The Seagull, director Alexandru Mihail already has a rabbits fan club due to his Yale Cabaret productions of Chekhov’s The Wedding Party and Bergman’s Persona.
The Seagull’s a particular favorite of the School of Drama, spanning several regimes. The school’s preeminent directing instructor of the late 20th century, Earl Gister, was a brilliant interpreter of Chekhov. Paul Schmidt, whose translation is being used in this production, was another steady champion of the playwright. I recall a vivid, pastel-pretty production directed by then- student Mahayana Landowne in late 1990s. It turns up regularly in scenework and student workshops.
The reason for the frequency is obvious. It’s a play about theater types having trouble relating top the real world, and vice versa. Within the artistic subset of this summer- home- and- surrounding- village ensemble, there are arguments about tradition versus progress, much like those in Chekhov’ s The Cherry Orchard
except regarding creative works rather than urban planning.
Mihail’s production of The wedding Reception, though modem and experimental in all sorts of exciting interactive and improvisational ways, was nonetheless period- set and traditional in terms of seeing and context and costumes. His Seagull, On the other hand, has a pre- show score of new wave pop music and a closing burst of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division. There are ongoing projections on the walls of the sitting-room setting which make the otherwise naturalistic scenic design into a fishbowl in an art gallery. We see raindrops, snow, a foraging deer, gigantic images of boiling water which look like static on a TV screen…
There are such abstractions aplenty throughout the show. The title fowl (deceased) is sketched on the floor in chalk. The tree around which frustrated symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev builds his makeshift outdoor stage descends right into that central sitting room from the heavens.
Most stridently, the embittered Konstantin remains onstage for the entire performance, reacting to scenes he is not on and overhearing confidences he is not, in the script as written, privy to. This bold concept, similar to the one used last year in Gordon Edelstein’s production of The Glass Menagerie at Long Wharf, works surprisingly well. Only a few times did I think to myself “Shouldn’t Constantine be off burning a manuscript somewhere?”
This is a balanced, centered and clearly spoken production, which are the easy stuff to take care of when doing Chekhov. Mihail does the tough stuff too, though. He makes things lively—when people fall ill or fall in love, they smack together. Walking sticks rattle on the ground. Chairs tumble over. The stage is messy, as befits such a scattered group of jealous and love-starved malcontents.

Oh, and that overused idea of using the stage as the auditorium? Best use of that format I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen DOZENS of shows while seated on the UT stage. The first image you have of The Seagull is of that auditorium, as the backdrop for a show which comments constantly on the different needs and priorities of art and life. When Nina (Jillian Taylor) rushes off to follow her dream of being a big-city actress, you see her fleeing in the distance down the aisles of the University Theatre, among all those velvety red chairs. When the theater itself isn’t needed as an image, the many projections take over. The show is eerie, supernatural in how it changes forms to fit the conflicting consciousnesses of its key characters.

But the technology does not overwhelm. The best jabs at conventional theater (and there are many, making this a most modern-seeming century-old melodrama) are the most human ones: Brenda Meaney perpetually poised and “on” as the aging actress Arkadina, The fiery agitprop attitude of Konstantin.

The cast has the usual college-production Chekhov concern of having to portray three generations of townsfolks when all the performers are in the 20s. They overcome this by punching up the familiarity which they have developed as classmates. Indeed, several of the most infatuated characters, the ones with the most repressions and unrequitednesses, are portrayed by the very same people who were so uninhibited and brazenly sexual in the “camp” sequence of the purposely provocative Yale Cabaret production of Wallace Shawn’s A Though in Three Parts last semester. Yes, this demonstrates the actors’ range, but it also made me think of Shawn’s work as a present-day reaction to the withheld emotions of Chekhov. Fascinating to see the same cast in both. Carmen Zilles, Masha in Seagull and a similarly mistreated lustful character in A Thought in Three Parts, is conveys all kinds of romance while wrapped in the drabbest peasant clothes.

“What we need is new forms of theater!,” Konstantin says early on the play. Later, there’s talk of “a chaos of images and dreams” (You know, Paul Schmidt’s translation really is brilliant.) These things are actually achieved in Alexandru Mihail’s production of The Seagull, and it soars above the problematic staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Yale Rep just a few months ago. Faced with some of the same desires to let the script play out clearly and naturally yet allow for modern-day theatrical technology, Three Sisters kept the audience at a distance. The Seagull draws the crowd in and dazzles.

It’s like a bonus Yale Cabaret show over at Rudy’s Bar & Grill tonight (Saturday, Jan. 28; 1227 Chapel Street, at the corner of Howe.)
As an actor at the Cabaret, Laura Gragtmans, was in Persona and Church last semester. As a singer-songwriter, she opened the Holcombe Waller concert at the Cabaret earlier this month.
Tonight, Gragtsmans plays an opening set at the new Rudy’s, where the headliners are also seasoned Cabaret veterans.
The highly theatrical pop-rock trio Simple Pleasure was plucked out of the New Haven band scene in 2007 to be the house band for Snehal Desai’s club-atmospheric production of Brecht’s Baal. During that time, Simple Pleasure had a memorable late-night concert at the Yale Cabaret, with an added string section and staged comedy bits. A year later, Simple Pleasure leader Chad Raines was admitted to the Yale School of Drama sound design program, where he starred in Hedwig and the Angry Inch for the Yale Summer Cabaret and presented his own rock musical, Missed Connections, for Valentine’s weekend in 2010. Raines graduated last spring and spent the fall touring with Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls (alongside another Yale School of Drama grad, Michael McQuilken).
Simple Pleasure always had a strong following among both Yalies and townies. It should be the quite the mix at Rudy’s tonight, since Simple Pleasure shows are a lot less frequent now. Plus there’s the pleasure of seeing Laura Gragtmans in a new venue off campus.

Brainsongs, or the Play About the Dinosaur Farm

Through Jan. 28 at the Yale Cabaret. http://yalecabaret.org/

Created and performed by Gabe Levey. “Made in collaboration with” Kate Atwell, Molly Bernard and Cole Lewis. Set: Meredith Ries. Lights: Yi Zhao. Costumes: Nikki Delhomme. “Technical Directions”: Kenny Thompson. “Stage Managements”: Brandon Curtis.

The comic archetype of the innocent man-child didn’t begin with Pee Wee Herman—or Pinkie Lee, or Ed Wynn, or any number of other wide-eyed wonderers with cool stuff to show off. Gabe Levey’s Brainsongs or The Play About the Dinosaur Farm has areas in common with Andy Kaufman (a variation on the classic Mighty Mouse lipsynch), The Little Rascals (the tincan footlights which line the stage) and Steven Wright (whose lanky physique he shares). Yet Levey doesn’t truck in one-liners or elaborate comic set-ups or . His forte is the silent reaction to the world around him. He is a master of the fine art of the quivering lower lip.

In his 45-minute solo set, Levey operates the way a stand-up comic might. He has formal routines, but he’ll acknowledge how each particular audience is dealing with them. He also had a running gag where he singles out someone in the front row with which to silently share confusion, exasperation and annoyance strictly through eye contact. (At the late Saturday performance, that lucky person was me.)

But in dramatizing adult-bodied childlike innocence, Gabe Levey brings a new element to the table. Instead of the obliviousness and garrulousness we associate with such characters, he offers awareness and calm. His images can be as challenging as they are funny—a man making out with an in inflatable dolphin, for instance. There’s a private intensity to this exploration of youthful yearnings that makes you laugh with Levey and not at him. When he mimes to the ’20s jazz standard “I Can’t Dance (I’ve Got Ants in My Pants),” in his too-short pants and bow-tie tied as a straight tie, he makes a serious show of not dancing. Later in the show, the sky opens up (in a glorious dime-store phosphorescent effect) and Levey luxuriates in the wide, open space—not frantically like Pee Wee Herman, not awkwardly like Kaufman, not squeakily like Ed Wynn or herky-jerky like Pinkie Lee. Levey’s character has bliss and zen, and you feel it.

There is a Dinosaur Farm in the show, by the way. And a host of new planets, celebrated in song on that most toy-like yet expressive instrument, the ukulele. Such are the Brainsongs, an internal travelogue of wonder and delight shared because such things really ought to be.

Macbeth 1969
Through Feb. 12 at the Long Wharf Theatre.
Directed and adapted by Eric Ting. Set design by Mimi Lien. Costume desing by Toni-Leslie James. Lighting design by Tyler Micoleau. Sound design and original music by Ryan Rumery. Fight direction by David Anzuelo. Stage Manager: Lisa Ann Chernoff. Performed by: McKinley Belcher III (Soldier [1]), Barret O’Brien (Soldier [2]/A Civilian), Socorro Santiago (Nurse [1]), Shirine Babb (Nurse [2]), Jackie Chung [Nurse [3]) and George Kulp (A Politician).

There are lots of trinities in Macbeth: The three witches, the slaughter of three male militaristic opponents, the husband/wife/child unity of the Macduffs, etc.

And so Macbeth 1969 (Hey! “69” is divisible by three!), director/adaptor Eric Ting’s arch and angular Vietnam-era reworking of Shakespeare’s tragedy, works on three levels:
• as a clear telling of Shakespeare’s story.
• as a chance to scale down the cast and thus reset the gender balance.
• as a war play fitting to its ’69 time period.

The power struggle is now set in a Midwestern VA hospital during a snowstorm, the glistening medical implements and clinical white sheets providing a decidedly unearthy but exceptionally bloody Birnam Wood. (Can we call this one the “Stat!”-ish play instead of “The Scottish Play”?)

If you’re the kind of audience member that likes to be acclimated in advance, the Long Wharf’s looking out for you. The community outreach on this show has been phenomenal. Local veterans have been consulted on the adaptation since it was in early script form. A core of Long Wharf subscribers followed the entire production process as members of the theater’s Sparks program. You can find a lengthy Macbeth 1969 synopsis in the program—each scene gets its own paragraph, or you can just scan the one-word headers: Waiting, Reunion, Lust, Honor, Celebration, Night, Suspicion, Fear, Ghost, Cure, Traitor, Blood, Haunting, Mourning.

That covers it, all right, and such meticulous yet punter-friendly dramaturgy is symptomatic of a production that dwells in details, details, details.

On one level, this is a two-hour intermissionless burst of creative problem-solving:
Q. How to make the witches witchy in a modern setting? A. Have their “prophesies” be office gossip transmitted via a desktop television.
Q: How to include the death of Macduff’s son when you’ve limited yourself to a sextet of adult performers? A: Make him a fetus.

In order that the same actor can play both Banquo and Macduff (an easy logistical call, since one character dies before the other arrives), Banquo’s head is entirely covered in bandages. This would be an impediment for most actors, but fortunately these two key rivals in Macbeth’s unhinged powerquest have been entrusted to Barret O’Brien. I can attest to O’Brien’s extraordinary powers of connecting to audiences from having seen him play such supernaturally inclined characters as Peer Gynt, Dionysus and Prospero when he at the Yale School of Drama a few years ago.

Barret O'Brien and Socorro Santiago in Macbeth 1969 at the Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Here, O’Brien’s white cloth-covered Banquo is a ghostly cipher from the get-go. Stuck in his wheelchair, he’s practically part of the set. His ubiquity, and the lack of the usual army of supporting characters in the play, really gives you a fresh sense of the relationships among the characters, and lessens the starriness of the leads. In this scenario, Macbeth’s simply the new, intensely charismatic patient in the ward; his soliloquoies are a lot less interesting than his exchanges with the nurses and visitors. It’s like a Shakespearean One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

McKinley Belcher III in the subdued title role of Macbeth 1969 at Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The ensemble feel is consistent despite the large number of familiar solo speeches in this play. When those “Tomorrow and tomorrow”s and “dagger I see before me”s and “Damn spots!” arrive, they’re nearly all played quietly and intimately, with onstage observers quietly taking them in. Apropriately, in the script and program for Macbeth 1969, character’s names and ranks aren’t important. We have McKinley Belcher blustering, then reeling as “Soldier [1],” a marvelous portrayal of a battle-ready man gradually losing his nerve. We have the aforementioned Barret O’Brien as the bandaged, vulnerable yet chipper Soldier [2], then returning as “A Civilian” with Pacifist flair on his hippie vest. (As a lifelong pacifist myself, I could bitch about the alacrity with which Macduff disavows those beliefs and picks up a gun, but I get that this is really a statement on societal chaos and contradiction during international conflicts.) Then there are Nurses [1] (Socorro Santiago, who gets a lot of the expositional and body-discovering duties), [2] (Shirine Babb, sultry rather than sinister as Soldier [1]’s conniving lover) and [3] (Jackie Chung, sweet and funny and innocent in a variety of situations). The nurses are attuned and harmonized as finely as a ‘60s girl pop group, yet this is a realistic portrayal of work colleagues and not a chirping Greek chorus a la Little Shop of Horrors.

Such a gentle communal feel is tough to pull off with a play that ordinarily is overpopulated with screaming soldiers. But this is a Macbeth where there are as many female actors (three) as male, and where the feminine energy carries both the horror (the murder of Lady Macduff; the insanity of Lady Macbeth) and the humor (one of the nurses is the knock-knocking gravedigger.)

There are lots of cleverly staged scenes (a bloody melee amid hospital beds) and memorable deliveries (Duncan’s pronouncements made in insincere grinning politician-speak).

But none of the long list of impressive moments can match the effect that first greets your eyes when walking into the Long Wharf theatre mainstage auditorium for Macbeth 1969. Scenic designer Mimi Lien has created a set which is at once hyper-realistic and thoroughly disorienting. The hospital room curtains are at an odd angle with the auditorium, throwing you off visually at once. The sheer scrubbed whiteness of the hospital is a remarkable place on which to set forth such a bloody series of encounters, changing the atmosphere from the usual battlefields to a more inward, psychological, post-traumatic arena. My first mental image of this production will always be of that white set.

Among Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth is concept magnet. You can see movies where it’s been redone as an American gangster story (twice), a fast-food restaurant brawl and a pop-star odyssey. As for scaling down the cast, I’ve never seen it done onstage with six actors, but I have seen it done with three (Peter Sellar’s memorable blending of the drama with an urn-encased Samuel Beckett one-act, Play/Macbeth in the early 1980s). The point is not that you can lay a cool concept over Macbeth—plenty of directors have done that. The trick, and Eric Ting and his cast and creative team have mastered it, is not just retrofitting the text to that new style but actually finding new things to say within it.
Macbeth 1969 is as confrontational and sympathetic a Vietnam drama as Streamers, Medal of Honor Rag, Hair, or any play from the 1960s or ‘70s you can name. It forces you to think beyond the conventional battle plans of winning and moving forward, and makes you realize how poorly thought through Macbeth’s own plan is. Like the TV-watching witches, it uses shiny surfaces and a variety of viewpoints to show the big blockbuster finish, and the snowy static dead test pattern just beyond it.

Jackie Chung and Socorro Santiago in Macbeth 1969 at the Long Wharf Theatre. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The news: Jeanie O’Hare has just been appointed the new chair of the Playwriting Department at the Yale School of Drama.

The context:

Off the top of my head, here are four of the playwrights who’ve graduated from the School of Drama playwriting program in recent years include:

Tarrell Alvin McCraney, author of the epic Brother/Sister trilogy.

Amy Herzog, whose Belleville just premiered at the Rep last fall and whose After the Revolution is getting its second New York production at Lincoln Center this spring.

Rolin Jones, whose The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow was a Pulitzer-nominated Off Broadway hit, and who has become a sought-after TV writer/producer (from Weeds to the much-hyped new theater-oriented series Smash).

Kim Rosenstock, who had shows at two major regional theaters in the San Francisco Bay area this past summer: one a family drama, the other a romantic musical set during the New York black-out.

That’s quite a range right there, which might be the legacy of the playwrighting department: an extraordinary range of voices and styles, all of whom found Yale and New Haven a comfortable place in which to write and learn.

There’s still a tendency to associate the School of Drama playwriting program with two of its earliest successes, the 1970s comic writers Wendy Wasserstein and Christopher Durang. If you read Julie Salamon’s new biography of Wasserstein, the School of Drama from those days (under Dean Robert Brustein) has virtually no relation to the ones since.

Of all the departments at the Yale School of Drama, the playwriting program would appear to have had the most abrupt transitions in leadership, and in styles of leadership. Which makes a lot of sense, since theater trends tend to be led by progressive scripts, and many of the folks creating those texts are studying at Yale.

Here’s the recent history of the School of Drama playwriting program. For about a decade, from the early ‘90s until James Bundy took over as dean from Stan Wojewodski, the program was run by Mark Bly, a champion of the then still-newish academic field of theater dramaturgy. Mark Bly was into public readings as a way of testing the strength of student works.  Working with Playwrights Horizons and elsewhere, he arranged YSD playwriting thesis projects to be read by professional actors, before real audiences and with useful discussions afterwards.

He also, as Associate Artistic Director of the Yale Rep, arranged major American premieres of such important new works as David Edgar’s Pentacost. Since leaving Yale, Bly has been best known as a dramaturg, serving as Senior Dramaturg at Arena Stage and, since 2008, at the Alley Theatre in Houston.

Shortly after James Bundy took over in 2002, Mark Bly left and the playwriting program was given to an actual working playwright, Richard Nelson, whose dozens of original works include Two Shakespearean Actors, Sweet and Sad and The Hopey Changey Thing. He’s also renowned for his adaptations, of scripts by everybody from Moliere to Strindberg, (It was Nelson’s version of Miss Julie which the Yale Rep staged in 2005). Nelson took a practical approach to his teaching, preparing students for the actual work of sustaining a career as a professional playwriting by inviting agents, producers and other professionals to come and talk to them. (I was the token critic in this exercise for a few years.)

Like Bly, he has a strong background in dramaturgy and research. His sense of how best to develop a new play, however, went beyond readings. Nelson believed in full productions before appropriate audiences. He didn’t think students should instantly be rewarded with slots on the Yale Rep main season, however—a supportive environment was key—so he and James Bundy created the The Carlotta Festival of New Plays.

The Carlotta is still happening, continued by Paula Vogel after Nelson left the department a few years ago. Yale snagged Vogel, of Baltimore Waltz and A Civil War Christmas and How I Learned to Drive fame, from her longtime teaching post at Brown University. She’s the best known playwriting teacher in the country; Sarah Ruhl is just one of Vogel’s legion of students and protégés. Vogel shared Nelson’s desire for staging full-blown student projects, but also added a new element of improvisation and abrupt inspiration to the program with her famous “Bake-off” exercise and her advice that students should write constantly.

Vogel left the department chair post last year, though she continues to work with Yale students in a less structured academic relationship. The current teaching staff in the playwriting program includes Vogel, Associate Chair of the department Kenneth Prestininzi (Chaste), opera and musical librettist Michael Korie (Harvey Milk, Grey Gardens), Lisa Kron (2.5 Minute Ride), Lynn Nottage (Ruined), Frank Pugliese (Aven’u Boys), Sarah Ruhl (The Clean House), Rachel Sheinkin (25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) and Deborah Stein (God Save Gertrude).

Following such a singular teacher and writer as Vogel, Jeanie O’Hare seems yet another inspired left-field choice to keep the playwriting department fresh and facing forward. O’Hare has distinguished herself not as a playwright herself but as a visionary dramaturg and literary manager. Her passion for new work added greatly to the reputation of the Royal Shakespeare Company as a place that doesn’t just present, you know, royal Shakespeare. O’Hare was instrumental is setting up the team that created one of the biggest critical and commercial successful in London’s West End this year—Matilda, the musical based on Roald Dahl’s book about a telepathic school girl.

In the video above, O’Hare talks about the range of new works introduced by the now half-century-old RSC.
You can get a greater sense of O’Hare’s passion for theater, and her opinions about the real world, from her Twitter feed.

First, there’s her charming Twitter self-description: “The RSC is a contemporary theatre company with Shakespeare at its heart. I look after the writers. These are my views.” Then there are drama-laced political tweets such as “If [British Labour Party leader] Ed Miliband was a play he’d be a 1st draft. He’s speaking the subtext rather than creating the drama itself.”

Welcome to New Haven, Jeanie O’Hare. Please look after writers here. And don’t feel you have to behave as your Playwriting predecessors did. That’s the Yale way.

“Shakespeare Acoustic,” a teenybopper love plaint sung by Miranda Cosgrove on the iCarly Soundtrack II album, is currently streaming on AOL’s “Spinner” feature.

The original “Shakespeare” song is a couple years old, and appeared on Cosgrove’s solo album Sparks Fly. This acoustic version will be appropriate for pre-show music for intimate black box shows, as distinct from all those splashy High School Musicals.

The operative lyric in the song, regardless of electric or acoustic, is

Do you like Shakespeare? Jeff Buckley?
Watching movies on Sunday?
Do you like kissing when it’s raining?
Making faces in the station?
Do you like, I need to know
What do you like? before you go, oh oh

Nice of them to give the Bard of Avon top billing over Jeff Buckley.

Mad Magazine closed off 2011 with a final,  beautifully detailed and devastating three-page comic-book style putdown of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and its (literal) growing pains.

It’s item #18 in MAD’s list of The 20 Dumbest People, Events and Things of 2011, and is subtitled “Is There a Dr. Octopus in the House?”

The jokes are dead-on, from the fake cover titled The Amazingly Dangerous Spider-Play, with its issue date crossed off multiple times a la the show’s many postponed opening nights. The first page riffs on the Marvel Comics habit of giving superiffic nicknames to its artists and writers: “Featuring ‘Boring’ Bono! ‘Excruciatin’ Edge’! ‘Jobless’ Julie Taymor! and a faceless cast of victims!

MAD has mined this turf multiple times in the past year, and the satire has been more than superficial. It has real spider bite.

Current issues of two separate Simpsons comics—Simpsons Comics #185  and Simpsons Super Spectacular #14—are stagebound this month. In the former, the usual Simpsons writers and artists interpret a challenging cover concept by legendarily marginal Mad Magazine cartoonist Sergio Aragones. Three different tales riff on the same Aragones inspiration, a large-cast tableaux of Homer  Simpson and the Springfield police chief in ballet tutus.

The Simpsons Super Spectacular satirizes the Spider-man musical with “Radioactive Man—Turn Up the Silence.” (Script by Batton Lash, pencils by Bill Galvan, inks by Mike DeCarlo.) Obvious, perhaps, but the ante is raised by the introduction of a low-rent Off Broadway revue called Crustacean, about Radioactive Man’s nemesis Dr. Crab. The smaller show, in Bat Boy fashion, becomes the bigger hit.