Mormons for Truth

-- By Tom Phillips

"We Are Africa!" 

Well, we finally did it. After years of my staring at the stratospheric ticket prices for "The Book of Mormon" on Broadway, the cost came down a bit, so in these latter days I splurged $300 on two tickets for our 40th wedding anniversary.

I'll refrain from a review,  because it's already been endlessly reported that this is a great show, a hilarious send-up of the Mormon religion with dazzling song and dance numbers, a tribute to the young performers from everywhere who keep Broadway bursting with theatrical talent. My favorite song was "We Are Africa!" performed by an all-white, clean-cut corps of Mormon missionaries in a fictional version of Uganda.

Still, what I really loved about the show is that it aims its sharpest satire not at religion but at the real enemy of the truth -- the evil empire of Walt Disney. Many people are not aware of the extent to which Disney has taken over Broadway theater, turning it into a kind of Disney World in Gotham. Disney's corporate creative department churns out plastic productions and formulaic sequels for the tourist trade -- reducing classics like "Mary Poppins" or "Beauty and the Beast" to the tritest of thoughts and the most obvious emotions. If this is what people are taking home, theater has lost its function of renewing the mind.

Rolling Thunder

-- By Tom Phillips

If you've ever wondered about the mysterious reverence people born in the 1940s and 50s have for their contemporary Bob Dylan, you owe it to yourself to see Martin Scorsese's Bob Dylan Story -- "The Rolling Thunder Revue." This is Dylan and his crew at their  most intense and powerful -- calling out the changes in America and actually making them happen. To see Bobby drop everything in mid-tour, visit the falsely convicted boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in prison,  pound out the story of the Hurricane, convince CBS Records executives to put it out, and then sing it in closeup with his teeth clenched, eyes flashing, face masked in white, trading lines with the sphinx-like fiddler Scarlet Rivera, locked in to a song of howling protest -- ashamed/ to live in a land where justice is a game! --and then to see the delight on Rubin Carter's face, his amazed satisfaction with this eloquent new not-guilty plea, is to see what art in America is capable of.