"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain," reads the third commandment in the famous Ten! I thought of this when watching the Tony Awards last Sunday night on TV. They opened with the super neat evangelical men from "The Book of Mormon" singing the name of Jesus as the first production number from a Broadway musical. And the cast of the revival "Jesus Christ Superstar" followed shortly after, with their title song. It was exhilarating or blasphemous, depending on your point of view.
As the late Christopher Hitchens opined -- because The Ten Commandments, ostensibly given by God to Moses, were supposedly set in stone that still doesn't make all the commandments crystal clear. Hitchens claimed that there are three or four wildly different scriptural versions of the famed "Ten." Hitchens also said that these commandments should be considered a "work in progress" because they differ from Exodus 20 to Exodus 34 to Deuteronomy 5 and have "additions" and "changes" in the St. James Bible and elsewhere, just as the River Jordan comes into view. Here's Hitchens: "As with the gold plates on which Joseph Smith found the Book of Mormon in upstate New York, no traces of any of these original or conflicting tablets survive."
So to say something is or isn't "written in stone" makes the commandments suspect, at least to the writer Hitchens. Saying the name of God could be blasphemy but Hitchens maintained it was just a case of "injured vanity" on the part of the Almighty, as in "Nobody knows how to obey this commandment, or how to avoid blasphemy or profanity. I say 'God alone knows' when I mean to say 'nobody knows.' Is this ontologically dangerous? Ought not unalterable laws be plain and unambiguous?" asks Hitchens.
And then, the holy one we saw sang about at the Tony Awards was Jesus and not everybody believes that he (He?) was the son of God? Maybe it's all a sign of a general revival of interest in religion and Christianity? But Jesus got more mentions at the Tony Awards than the Shuberts or Nedlerlanders or Jujamcyns or even of producer Scott Rudin!
- Not everybody in New York sticks around all weekend in the five boroughs in order to be sure they see the Sunday New York Post. So I think I'm safe re-reporting something that has high interest if you are a Broadway baby or someone following the finances of NYC's theater which is worth almost 10 billion to the city. I'm talking of Post critic-columnist Michael Riedel's recently headlined story -- "The Man Who Saved Spidey." This usually tough-on-theater-hype writer was talking about press agent Rick Miramontez and his successful campaign to keep buyers coming for the once beleaguered "Spider-Man" musical. And reporter Riedel admits he'd been hard on the production through all of its troubles, backstage fights, accidents, and ongoing lawsuits. For a while there, nobody thought the musical could recover.
- We've spoken recently about the coming movie "Liz and Dick." Well, there is a wonderful novel, just out, using the filming of the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton movie "Cleopatra" as a partial background in the Sixties. "Beautiful Ruins" refers to a forbidding section of the Italian coast down from Genoa where a romantic guy comes in contact with a movie starlet. I don't want to tell you more, but I see that in this very mise en scene -- Petrarch invented the sonnet, Byron, James, Lawrence wrote and Boccaccio invented realism, Percy Shelley created poetry and then drowned near here and Mary Shelley dreamed upthe horror novel.