Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Diane and I recently drove to Worcester to see a performance of RAGTIME, the musical based on the E.L. Doctorow novel of the same name. The novel, published in 1975, became a movie in 1981 and a Broadway musical in 1998. It was nominated for just about every Tony Award during its Broadway run, and it won  four of those Tonys, including Best Book for a Musical, and Best Original Score. It was revived on Broadway in 2009, and that revival won several more Tonys. The play begins with a lot of exposition. Each of the central characters sings a brief song describing him/herself in the third person. This would normally seem flat-footed, but the story from Doctorow is a very complicated one, so this is arguably the line of least audience confusion. And the music is compelling enough to make this opening work. That opening describes where the main characters are in their lives in 1904. One odd feature of it is a bit of parapsychology.  Some of the main characters consist...

Composer Marvin Hamlisch passed away recently, on Auguist 7th, at 68 years. Hamlisch won just about every sign of recognition there was to win for a composer of music for Broadway and Holywood: three Oscars, four Emmys, three Golden Globes, one Tony. Even a Pulitzer (the The Chorus Line.) One of the Oscars was not for composing original music but for adapting it -- he adapted the work of ragtime great Scott Joplin for the movie The Sting . Hamlisch was also the object of a crush, dear to the heart of Lisa Loopner, the fictional nerd played brilliantly by the late Gilda Radner. And Hamlisch was due to ring in the new year 2013 with the New York Philharmonic, conducting its New Year's Eve concert. Best of luck, then, to Hamlisch in his otherworldly journey and best of luck, too, to the Philharmonic in finding someone else for that gig.