user: IN: Tweet with activities for children to have ‘fun’ at gun range is removed
Published: Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:44 AM

Updated: Thursday, August 28, 2014, 12:44 AM

Less than 72 hours after a 9-year-old girl killed her shooting instructor with an Uzi, the NRA Women tweeted ways for kids to have “fun” at a gun range.

“7 Ways Children Can Have Fun at the Shooting Range,” NRA Women tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

The tweet included a link to an Aug. 20 article published on the website of Women’s Outdoor News, suggesting colorful targets to engage children, including zombie targets.

The tweet was stripped from the NRA Women Twitter account soon after it was posted.

On Monday, a 9-year-old girl at killed a 39-year-old instructor who was trying to show her how to fire a fully-automatic Uzi at a White Hills, Ariz., gun range.
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OUT: Less than 72 hours after a 9-year-old girl killed her shooting instructor with an Uzi, the NRA Women tweeted ways for kids to have “fun” at a gun range.


IN: Book Review: 'The Value of the Humanities' by Helen Small
For centuries—at least since Philip Sidney's "Apology for Poetry" (1579)—poets and literary critics have felt the need to defend the study of imaginative writing against those who dismiss it as vain and useless. Sidney defended poetry's utility against Plato's criticisms in "The Republic"; Matthew Arnold defended the value of "culture" against those who considered it no more than "a smattering of Greek and Latin"; and F.R. Leavis attacked C.P. Snow for (as Leavis thought) demeaning the...
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OUT: Barton Swaim reviews "The Value of the Humanities," by Helen Small.


IN: 'Cinderella': No Talking, Please
Laura Osnes and Santino Fontana

Broadway Theatre, 1681 Broadway ($45-$137), 212-239-6200/800-432-7250

The new Broadway production of "Rodgers + Hammerstein's Cinderella" (to give the show its freshly minted, officially sanctioned title) could have been wonderful. The show itself is a gem, a compact operetta with a radiant score, and virtually every aspect of this production is right on target, starting with Laura Osnes, the star, who looks like she stepped out of a storybook and sings like she stepped out of a dream.

So what went wrong? Douglas Carter Beane.

Mr. Beane, who wrote the books for "Lysistrata Jones" and "Xanadu," two of the worst musicals to have been mounted on Broadway in the past decade, was hired by the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate to supply a modernized libretto for "Cinderella." In so doing, he smeared cheap, jeering "Family Guy"-style sarcasm and faux-irony ("If you can't afford a nice dress, you don't have any business marrying a prince") all over the show, thereby wrecking it beyond any possibility of repair. It doesn't help that Mark Brokaw, the director, seems to have told everyone in the cast but Ms. Osnes to camp it up.

Why Mr. Beane's services were deemed necessary is less than obvious, since Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the original book himself. Yes, "Cinderella" was written to fit a 90-minute television slot on CBS in 1957, which explains why it has never before been done on Broadway, where most musicals run for 2½ hours. But Hammerstein's version, which is just the right length for children, has since been performed onstage many times with only minor modifications. Had it been done that way this time around, it would have been easy for contemporary audiences to revel in the results. Ms. Osnes, a fine singer and a very good dancer, makes the most of Josh Rhodes's well-wrought choreography and looks great in William Ivey Long's fancy costumes—but, then, so does everyone else, especially Victoria Clark and Harriet Harris. Stir in Anna Louizos' elaborate sets and you've got a musical that's resplendent whenever the members of the cast are singing and repellent whenever they stop singing and start talking.

Vanessa Redgrave and Jesse Eisenberg

Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce St. ($85), 866-811-4111,

Jesse Eisenberg, who got an Oscar nomination for his role in "The Social Network," has now written a three-person play called "The Revisionist," in which he shares the stage with none other than Vanessa Redgrave. He plays an immature young novelist who has traveled to Poland to visit his septuagenarian cousin (Ms. Redgrave), a Holocaust survivor who treats him with oppressive solicitude and who has—you guessed it—a Deep Secret. Nothing very surprising happens in "The Revisionist," which is a young man's play, loosely structured, full of off-the-rack situations (except for the ending, which is tough and unexpected) and stronger on personality than plot. But Ms. Redgrave digs deep into Mr. Eisenberg's standard-issue Jewish-mother character, and it's nice to see her up close in the intimate setting of the Cherry Lane Theatre, getting more out of a script than the author put there.

It's not clear to me whether Mr. Eisenberg can act, since he's playing the same kind of person that he played in "The Social Network," a yappy, uptight, self-involved millennial. He does, however, manage to hold his own against Ms. Redgrave, and Daniel Oreskes is excellent in a superfluous but funny cameo as a Polish-speaking taxi driver. John McDermott, the set designer, has come up with a convincing-looking Central European apartment, cramped and dingy but somehow cozy, and Kip Fagan, the director, uses the space as resourcefully as he does the cast.

Lincoln Center Theater, 150 W. 65th St.

It may well be that the life of the late Ann Richards, a one-term Texas governor who is mainly known outside her home state for having said that George H.W. Bush was "born with a silver foot in his mouth," is worthy of commemoration with a sharp, knowing one-woman play. "Ann," written by and starring Holland Taylor, isn't it. The subtitle, "An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards," gives the game away. Ms. Taylor, lately of "Two and a Half Men," goes to enormous trouble not to question, even in passing, the received wisdom about Ms. Richards, which is that she was a great wit and a greater stateswoman. The problem is that neither of these traits is evident from "Ann," which is static, self-congratulatory and full of po-faced lines like "Life is not fair, but government should be." Perhaps the real woman was less predictable than that, but Ms. Taylor's Ann Richards is a wisecracking stick figure who never does anything that isn't virtuous and never doubts herself for more than a split second at most. That's an infallible recipe for first-degree boredom.

A version of this article appeared March 8, 2013, on page D9 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: No Talking, Please.
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OUT:

assistant: The show itself is a gem, with virtually every aspect of this production right on target. There's just one thing that has ruined Cinderella beyond repair. Also reviewed, The 'Revisionist' and 'Ann.' Theater Review by Terry Teachout.