Oh Cunanan… where the bucks come sweepin’ from your tills…
It’s always been frustrating to me as a theater buff and a taxpayer that the government can waste billions of dollars on new bombers while so many perfectly decent serial killers can’t even be immortalized on the musical theater stage without having to find private sponsors. Finally the National Endowment for the Arts is doing its part to remedy that by giving $35,000 of your tax dollars and mine to help produce DISPOSABLE, a riproarin’ rollickin’ sallllute to everybody’s favorite rent-boy turned serial-killin’ superdesigner slayer, Andrew Cunanan .
Read on»
Musical highlights will include (I’m guessing):
*I’m a Runway Runaway
A Houseboat For Two (Minus One)
There’s a CNN in CuNaNan*
and the big finale, when Andrew sings:
Versace, I just met a man named Versace
and suddenly I’ve found
how wonderful a style can be…
Versace, gun him down and Diana’s mourning
Shoot him up and Sir Elton is phoning
Versace, I’ll never stop saying… Versace!!!
Supposedly Mel Gibson has already expressed interest in the film rights though strangely he wants to film it in Urdu and Tumbala.
Next projects on the agenda for NEA:
**DAHMER? I DON’T EVEN KNOW HER![.B]- the show that takes dinner theater to a whole new level
MANSON GALS ON DAYPASS- it’s kind of like On The Town, but with more slaughters
TIMOTHY MCVEIGH: A MANIFESTO IN DANCE
and
TO SADDAM WITH LOVE: A WAR CRIMES MUSICAL with lyrics by Sir Paul McCartney, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with special appearances by the Kroft Puppets, Rosie O’Donnell and the late Burl Ives
Sounds like a project that should’ve been funded by the National Endowment for the Worthless Pieces of Shit. While not widely known, the NEWPS does have a strong lobby.
On this one I am with Helms. If it has merit, it’ll find private sponsors (like Sondheim’s brilliant black comedy musicals Assassins and Sweeney Todd; if it has no merit, it shouldn’t. The acts of Cunanan were absolutely vile and while I wouldn’t have a problem with a NEA grant to a researcher writing a book about the case seeing it presented as entertainment, regardless of how non-light, is a waste of public monies that are already in short supply.
Fortunately neither you nor (now thankfully ex-) Senator Helms is the sole arbiter of what does or doesn’t have artistic merit. At least Helms actually saw the art he condemned before he condemned it. Unlike you, who is blasting away without having heard a note of the production which according to your link hasn’t been completed yet.
Dude: it’s a musical. About a serial killer. Funded in part with PUBLIC MONEY. It truly isn’t the subject matter that gripes me as much as something this potentially offensive is being funded with PUBLIC MONEY that’s better spent on… well, just about anything. If they got an endowment from the Ford Foundation or the Carnegie Endowment, etc., it’s none of my business, but this is.
(OTOH, if I were a friend or relative of one of Cunanan’s 5+ victims I seriously doubt that I’d care if the musical is the next CARMINA BURANA- I’d see it as glorifying my friend/relatives killer.)
In your opinion, whereas in the opinion of the multi-level peer review of the NEA, the concept is worth expending .00013 cent per person who lives in the United States.
And until such time as you actually, say, heard a single note of the musical that opinion would be just as ill-informed as your non-relative opinion.
You may think this is another sign of modern moral corrosion, but murderers have always been topics of stories and songs. Consider Staggerlee, John Hardy, Hollis Brown, and Tom Dooley. And what about “Titus Andronicus?” Should the gummint only fund art involving unicorns and lollipops?
Besides, $35,000 is, oh, roundabout 1.64x10^-10 percent of America’s budget. Surely there is some other more glaring waste of funds we could gnash our teeth over.