Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Rent (stage-play first preformed 1993, officially opened 1996, and later the same year had its Broadway premier, I recently saw it live in 2022)   Writer/Composer/Lyricist Jonathan Larson made history with “Rent” transforming Giacomo Puccini 's opera “ La Bohème ” (1886) into a Rock-Opera set in New York City’s East Village in the 1980s. As conscious of its time-and-place as Puccini, and explores the joys of bohemian freedom, the perils of ecstatic nihilism, the despair of marginality, the terrors of pursing morality when using art and one’s guide. It substitutes HIV/AIDS for the earlier era’s Consumption, meaning Tuberculosis, but here the archaic term Consumption applies, because like the original, class warfare and avaricistic greed are front-and-center themes.   I lived in the East Village in the twilight of the era the play describes, as did Larson (we never met). This had been a project that Larson put aside when the moment described was on-going, then...

  Beyond van Gogh: The Immersive Experience (art exhibit 2022)       Back in October I went to this show in Hartford, Connecticut. It’s moved on since, but as it’s a traveling show, you can find it elsewhere in the USA, and I suspect it will likely make it back to Connecticut again as it was hugely popular.   Van Gogh is probably the central figure in our culture’s folklore of the tortured and tragic artist. Unappreciated during his life time, his paintings now are among the most expensive sales at auctions throughout the world (“ Portrait of Dr. Gachet” sold $82.5 million in 1990, it was more recently been valued-up to $171.1 million). He came from an upper-middle-class family, but he died in poverty, selling exactly one work while living, despite his brother, a gallery owner, promoting his work . His letters to that brother reveal an exceptional deep and lucid understanding of color theory, writing worthy of inclusion in a textbook, as well as rich human compa...