Word: taboos
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There's nothing Broadway loves better than a juicy backstage drama. And Taboo - the musical about '80s rock star Boy George, with music by the grownup Boy, George O?Dowd, and produced by talk-show diva Rosie O'Donnell - offered plenty of fodder. There were cancelled performances, reports of backstage fights, a star who walked out of a rehearsal, a director nearly fired. All that and a producer shuttling between the theater and a Manhattan courthouse, where she was involved in a lawsuit with the former publisher of her defunct magazine, Rosie...
...strode to the witness box, she might have hoped that her longtime musical director, John McDaniel, would bang out Everything's Comin' Up Rosie on an upright piano. She might have wanted to pass out free Taboo T shirts to the standing-room-only crowd. It might have helped if the star she called "my Tommy"--Cruise, not Selleck--were there to say what a wonderful person Rosie O'Donnell...
Tales of O'Donnell's taut temper and bossy style--later reported in rancorous rehearsals for the Broadway version she is producing of the Boy George musical Taboo, scheduled to open this week--went public, further diminishing her likability quotient. Her LQ suffered another jolt last week when Cindy Spengler, G+J's chief marketing officer, testified that O'Donnell had called her a liar and added, "Liars get cancer." (Spengler is a breast-cancer survivor; Rosie later confirmed and apologized for the slur.) By the end, G+J had to be wondering, Why didn't we just start...
Thursday night, after a hard day in court, O'Donnell was on a more congenial stage--at Broadway's Plymouth Theater, to introduce the glittery, tres gay Taboo. "I don't know if you heard," she deadpanned, "but I have this little court case ..." From a front row, Donny Osmond bounded up, hugged her and proclaimed, "We love you, we support you, and we wish you all the best." For a moment, the years and tears dissolved into a time when Rosie O'Donnell was America's favorite big sister. --Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York
...that in Germany the "AQ" (or "anti-Semitism quotient") is no higher - and perhaps even lower - than in neighboring West European countries. So, can we sleep sound and tight? No. The problem with such data is that post-Holocaust anti-Semitism is enveloped in a most powerful taboo - people hide it and surveys underreport it. But perhaps there's another way to measure it. Judging from the news out of Brussels last week, one might surmise that some anti-Israelism is a form of sublimated anti-Semitism. To hate Jews is not permissible in polite society, but to loathe Israel...