The air was electric at Kennedy Center Saturday night with the promise of a great fight mounted as opera on stage, and I had what amounted to ringside seats. Champion clearly had some heavy hitters, headed up with a score by the great jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard and a libretto by award winning […]
Archives for March 6, 2017
Stories of Scalia, Simone and Lyndon Johnson in Arena Stages next season
Arena Stage will bookend its next season with two plays by John Strand: a reprise of his play about the late Antonin Scalia, The Originalist, and a new musical about a couple struggling to save their marriage in the Alaskan frontier, with a book by Strand.
What Cristofer’s Champion leaves out from Emile Griffith’s deadly seven seconds in the ring
On the 24th of March, 1962, welterweight champion Benny Paret called former champ Emile Griffith a maricón at their weigh-in. The closest contemporary American-English equivalent to this word is faggot, but maricón means more, and worse. Griffith understood what it meant. He climbed into the ring with Paret that night, fought him, and killed him.