'Tis the season to stage "A Christmas Carol" -- again, and again, and again

From The Tennessean.com: No matter how ingenious the adaptation -- and playwright-actor Tom Mula has found a pretty good twist in Jacob Marley's Christmas Carol -- we can't quite agree with him that "We need this story every year." Seems to us there have been enough stage adaptations of this once-beloved, now distinctly shopworn tale to last us for, oh, say, a century. The only solution may be for playwrights to refuse to write them anymore. Really, just say no. The next time an artistic director pipes up with, "You know what the world really needs? A new stage version of A Christmas Carol!", tell him, No, what the world really needs are artistic directors with more imagination. You hear us, Marley? Stay the frig away!

 

Stoppard reconsidered

From Slate: With The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard's latest, very large, and very long intellectual cavort playing at Lincoln Center in New York, Slate reprints this contrarian and rather crabby assessment of the playwright.