New York's Public Theater does Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" with a Trump lookalike playing JC and getting stabbed to death on stage.

"Criticism of the play reached a fever pitch on Sunday when Fox News reported that it 'appears to depict President Trump being brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities.'" And now sponsors are withdrawing, the NYT reports:

“No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of ‘Julius Caesar’ at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values,”* the company said in a statement on Sunday night.

“Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste,” the company said. “We have notified them of our decision to end our sponsorship as the official airline of the Public Theater effective immediately.”

Bank of America followed hours later, saying it would withdraw financial support from the production of “Julius Caesar” but would not end its financial relationship with the theater, which a spokeswoman, Susan Atran, said had lasted for 11 years.

The NYT itself is a sponsor of the play, and the article reports pressure on the Times to withdraw. Its position, however, is: "As an institution that believes in free speech for the arts as well as the media, we support the right of the Public Theater to stage the production as they chose."

This conception of the play pre-dated the Kathy Griffin incident:

Performances at Central Park's Delacorte Theater began in late May, just days before comedian Kathy Griffin was widely condemned for posing for a photograph in which she gripped a bloodied rendering of Trump's head.

If the producers had had a chance to see how Kathy's tribulations unfurled, they'd probably have done the show another way. But they committed to their idea back when it was harder to see through the shell of the bubble. And now they're losing money over it.

The show runs until June 18th, and the show must go on. What else can they do? Change the makeup, wig, and costume of the lead actor? Send some weasel out to do a faux Shakespearean we-mean-no-harm prologue, some sort of "If we shadows have offended/Think but this, and all is mended" bullshit...



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* "United couldn't have said that" (says rhhardin in the comments.)

"So good night unto you all..."

Good night to Mickey Rooney, who has died at the age of 93.

"She wasn’t pretty, didn’t wear the right clothes, couldn’t find dates; and she had no intention of becoming a debutante..."

"... which was the dream of Mrs. Harris’s life. As a defense, Julie escaped into acting. As an actress she could be anyone she wanted to and her mother couldn’t stop her."

From the long NYT obituary for Julie Harris, who died yesterday at the age of 87. Her mother was a socialite (in Grosse Pointe, Michigan). Her father "was an investment banker who was also an expert on squirrels and a curator of mammals at the museum of zoology of the University of Michigan."

For decades, Ms. Harris worked almost constantly.... Her film credits include “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962), a boxing melodrama with Anthony Quinn, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Gleason, in which she played a sympathetic but manipulative social worker; “The Haunting” (1963), as a spinster beset by evil spirits; “Harper,” a detective story starring Paul Newman, in which she played a nightclub entertainer and addict...

 

... “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967), an adaptation of a McCullers novel set on an army base in which she played the sickly wife of an officer, played by Brian Keith, who was cheating on her with another officer’s wife (Elizabeth Taylor); “The Bell Jar” (1979), an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s novel, in which she played the mother of a suicidal young woman; “Gorillas in the Mist” (1984) in which [she] played Roz Carr, a friend to the murdered zoologist Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver), and “HouseSitter” (1992) a romantic comedy with Goldie Hawn and Steve Martin — she played his mother.

I loved Julie Harris, an actress from back in the days before all the plastic surgery, collagen, and botox, when it was so much more interesting to watch the faces in the movies. Harris was always the one who was not too pretty, though she was pleasant enough to look at. She seemed fragile and wan. I've never seen "Reflections in a Golden Eye," but that's the type-casting they did: She's the sickly wife, and the other woman is Elizabeth Taylor (who was incredibly beautiful, back in the days when great beauty was natural and rare). By the way, when I was in high school, we did the play version of "The Haunting" — which was called "The Haunting of Hill House" (which was based on the Shirley Jackson novel and should not be confused with the very amusing, campy Vincent Price film "House on Haunted Hill"). I got the role Julie Harris played in that movie. I'd also played Laura in "The Glass Menagerie" the year before, so our theater teacher must have seen me as the fragile, wan type. That's a hell of a self-image to inflict on a young girl, but who notices when it seems so exotic and satisfying to get up on the stage?

"Rosie O'Donnell Show On Rush's Hu Mocking: Why Can't Chinese Accents Be Imitated?"

Rosie basically defends Rush. If what Rush did was so bad, how can we tolerate the Swedish Chef?



Here's Rush defending himself, bringing up Sid Caesar and Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

Back in the old days, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn't speak. But today the left says that was racism; it was bigotry; it was insulting. And it wasn't....

Have you ever seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's?... Then somebody needs to call Mickey Rooney and say, "Pal, that movie is very popular. You don't know how much of Chinese, Japanese culture you destroyed." They had Mickey Rooney playing, I forget whether it was a Japanese or Chinese character, complete with the buckteeth and the fake phony accent. I mean it's one of the greatest movies reputed of all time, Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, any number of people in that movie.

But do you really want to use Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as part of your self-defense?



ADDED: I must say, I never found the Swedish Chef funny. It's just about laughing at the sound of a foreign language. Pretty low humor. I think the criticisms of the humor are overdone and obviously politically motivated.

AND: In case you didn't listen to the Rosie clip, Rosie's defense of Rush is interesting because she herself was savaged for imitating Chinese speech. That was back in 2006. Here's Michelle Malkin attacking her — mainly for hypocrisy. Malkin's point is: Don't ever go PC on conservatives, now, because you yourself were not PC.

"Hurry, please! He ripped her face off... He's eating her...."

The Daily News has the 13-minute 911 call in the chimpanzee incident. You can hear the 911 operator repeatedly refer to "the monkey" and then 5 minutes into it get the picture: "200 pounds?!" Not for the faint of heart.

When cops arrived, Travis tore off a police cruiser's side mirror and opened the door, prompting a cornered cop to open fire on the burly ape.

The bleeding chimp staggered back into the house and died.

"I don't blame the cop for what he did," [chimp owner Sandy] Herold said. "It's a tragedy on both sides."

Sooooo.... she's mourning the chimp.

The attack stunned Herold's friends and neighbors - and even left actress Morgan Fairchild, who once appeared alongside Travis in an Old Navy ad, devastated.

"This is not at all the personality I worked with," Fairchild told the Daily News. "It was like having a very bright child on the set that wanted to be a part of everything. He was just an amiable little guy, friendly and just loved to be the center of attention."

Oh! Morgan Fairchild is devastated. He was just an amiable little guy, friendly and just loved to be the center of attention. Well, then, he sure got what he loved.

Here's a news clip about the attack that reveals that Herold's chimpanzee-keeping was not illegal in Connecticut. While the laws had been tightened up, Herold's chimpanzee, having grown up in Stamford, was grandfathered in.

IN THE COMMENTS: Michael H wrote:

He was just an amiable little guy, friendly and just loved to be the center of attention.

It was a 200 pound wild animal, you dunce, not Mickey Rooney.

AND: HelenParr said:

"This is not at all the personality I worked with,"

OMG! Morgan Fairchild channels Barack Obama in his patented under-the-bus maneuver.