The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood. Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main …
The third scene of the new Broadway production of “Eureka Day” could be titled The Way We Discourse Now. As written by the playwright Jonathan Spector, the scene reliably has audiences laughing so loudly that the actors are drowned out. The situation is this: It is 2018. The principal of …
The music producer David Mansfield flew down to Austin in May 2023 to record with Kinky Friedman, the satirical country singer, mystery novelist and twice-failed candidate for Texas governor. “I don’t think he ever said this was going to be his swan song,” said Mansfield, a fiddler and guitarist who …
